Musings

The Babe-lical Worldview

(My message for Christmas Eve at United Church of Christ, Simi Valley, 12/24/23)

It was a Christmas road trip – Nazareth to Bethlehem – for a couple of peasants, a woman and her husband.  She was close to giving birth to her first child.  But It had to be done – the census was the law of the land.   You have to go to the town of the husband’s birth  to register - no exceptions for hardship.  And sure enough, when they got to town, she went into labor.  No provision for that situation, either.  For lack of any other lodging, they ended up in a barn. 

Tonight the star of the show isn’t the star in the East.  Tonight the star of the show tonight isn’t Mary, either – though surely she was the star of Advent.  Tonight the star of the Christmas play, the person who matters most, is an infant.  For one night, we’re baby-centric.  For one night, we have a babe-lical worldview. 

Some Christians like to claim that they have a biblical worldview, and have made that the basis of their way of life.  It isn’t real, of course, because these aren’t Bible times, and for a hundred practical and even moral reasons it would be disastrous to try to think and live like that today.  Women and children, like oxen and sheep, were the possessions of males.  The despotic, ruthless rule over the land by King Herod was normal pretty much everywhere.  There was no science, no meaningful medical care, no fact-based journalism.  And certainly no public protections for babies outside the often precarious circumstances of their families.  And of course there is a notorious Bible passage in the Psalms 137 celebrating infanticide.  Such was the worldview of the people described in the Bible – what they accepted as everyday reality.  The story of Jesus’ birth is gospel – it is good news – precisely because it points to a way out of the biblical worldview!

The biblical worldview is ancient history, worth knowing about, but certainly unworthy of repeating.  Instead, tonight, it is worth considering:  what would our society be like if it we had a babe-lical worldview not just at Christmas, but all the time?  If we put babies, and their well-being, as the focus of our spirituality, and as the highest priorities of our economic and political systems?

Because what’s good for babies, ultimately, is really good for us all. 

If we were serious about adopting a babe-lical worldview, we’d have quality universal health care for them – and for everyone else, so that babies would have healthy families to take care of them.  With a babe-lical worldview, we’d make sure there were no babies living in barns – or cars, or tents, or cardboard huts, either.  We’d do what it takes to end houselessness.  If the well-being of babies was the top priority for us, then we wouldn’t be upset when immigrant mothers, whether here legally or not, got the care and support they needed in our society.  If babies mattered to us, we’d be calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Middle East, and pressing vigorously and continuously for a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Because babies belong to the world, to everyone, to all of humankind, not just one sect or nation or race.  Babies aren’t progressives or conservatives, they aren’t good guys or bad guys, they have no clue about any of the stuff that animates the right-wing culture warriors in America today.    

For the sake of the baby Jesus – for the sake of all babies everywhere – let us set aside our differences, our disagreements, our divisions, and just sit and be present.  Amazing, is it not, to be in the presence of a sleeping baby – and notice how all our preoccupations and worries and obsessions melt away into awe and wonder, into the pure attentiveness that is love – the unconditional love that is God.  After all the grand entrances of angels and shepherds and wise men, I like to think that everyone settled down and said nothing, and did nothing, but just look at the baby for a good long time together. 

In the manger, Jesus was a baby.  Just a baby.  Not a rabbi, not a riveting public figure, not a fixer or a healer, not a big shot.  Just a baby.  Like any other baby that’s ever been born, before and after Bible times.  Being the presence of that baby, or any other baby, and paying deep attention to the baby, is salvation for the soul.  It’s as good as life gets.  Sitting next to a baby in silence gets our priorities straight.  It brings us back to what matters.  And it gets us to let go of what doesn’t matter.

Let us go forth from this time of lessons and carols with a resolve:  to live from a babe-lical worldview.  To feel and think and act, all the time, as if we’ve just had the privilege of sitting with and admiring a newborn baby.  If we do, we’ll be moved to do our parts in bringing heaven down to earth – right here, in Simi Valley.

 

Silent night, holy night,

all is calm, all is bright

round yon virgin mother and child.

Holy infant so tender and mild,

Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.

Amen.

Mary's Many Faces

La Virgen del Cerro  - painting by Jim Burklo

 

 

There’s La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Mary of Mexico.  Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Czestechowa, our Lady of Aparecida, Our lady of Kineho, Our Lady of Pontmain, Our Lady of Siluva, Our Lady of La Salette, Our Lady of Medjugorje, and so many more.

But there’s no Jesus of Simi Valley, no Jesus of Peru, no Jesus of Omaha, no Jesus of Rwanda.  Sure, there are all sorts of depictions of Jesus with different ethnicities and characteristics.  And of course people report having visions of Jesus.  But they aren’t “of” anyplace or anything. 

Yet there are always new apparitions of Mary, specific to certain places and events.  The very nature of Mary, it would seem, is shape-shifting.  Mary shows up where and when she is needed, and in the form that is needed. 
 
That’s certainly what happened with the Mary of Mexico, la Virgen de Guadalupe.  In 1531, only a decade after the bloody conquest of Mexico by the Spanish, an indigenous peasant baptized as Juan Diego went to the site of the ruined temple of the Aztec goddess, Tonantzin, to pray.  Ponder what he might have been praying about.  He had lived through a holocaust.  The violent invasion by the Spanish and the ruin they imposed on a whole civilization was the least of it – because nearly half of the indigenous people of the Aztec empire were wiped out in a very short period of time by the smallpox virus that came with the invaders.  Juan Diego had a lot weighing on his soul.  While praying, he encountered the Virgin Mary, who appeared to him as a dark-skinned indigenous woman.  He went to the bishop to report what had happened, and was sent away dismissively.  Again he went to the place called Guadalupe, where the Aztec temple had once stood, and again encountered la Virgen.  Again he went to the bishop, and was ignored.  Finally, after an encounter in which la Virgen's image miraculously was imprinted onto his peasant tunic – the first tee-shirt art in the Americas - and then she filled his tunic with Castilian roses that did not grow in Mexico, he went once more to the bishop, showed him the tunic with the roses, and then the bishop declared “milagro!” – miracle!  And professed belief.  A belief that proved convenient for the Catholic church in Mexico. La Virgen de Guadalupe provided an iconic cultural bridge between the native religion and the Catholic faith, across which indigenous Mexicans could move. 
 
The same sort of thing happened in Europe, where, before Christianity, dark-skinned female goddesses were worshiped.  Hence the cult around Our Lady of Czestechowa in Poland, an icon of Mary with dark skin.  She was a bridge between the old religion and the new.  And there is a similar dark Mary next to Poland in Lithuania – Our Lady of the Door of Dawn – whose image above the city gate was said to have protected Vilnius from being overrun by invaders. 
 
I just learned about Our Lady the Undoer of Knots, also known as the Solver of Problems.  A wealthy man in Germany in the 1700’s was having marital difficulties and prayed through Mary and he credited her with bringing peace to the household.  So the next time your family gets tied in knots with some kind of conflict, consider asking Mary for intercession! 
 
Our Lady of Medjugorje in Bosnia showed up to some teenagers in the dark days of communism there.  Our Lady of the Rock, an apparition of the Virgin Mary seen by an Hispanic woman in the sky in the Mojave desert, drew thousands of pilgrims.  Stella Maris – Our Lady, Star of the Sea, guides home fisherfolk from the ocean when waters are rough.  And La Virgen del Cerro, Our Lady of the Mountain, is the guardian of miners at the silver mine at Potosi in Bolivia.
 
Mary’s everywhere, sticking up for us when times are tough, showing up when we need her, taking care of us when all else fails, when all others give up on us.  As she was there for Jesus from birth through death, she’s there for us through thick and thin. 
 
The Catholic doctrine of Mary indicates that not only was Jesus conceived “immaculately”, without male sperm, but Mary herself also had an “immaculate conception” – and that, therefore, she too was free of original sin from the moment of her conception.  Otherwise, how could she have issued a sinless human from her womb?  And Catholic dogma also says that when she died, she experienced an “assumption” – body and soul - as distinct from Jesus’ “ascension” into heaven.  The delicate difference is that Jesus went up to heaven on his own, but Mary got an Uber ride to heaven with God.  The dogmatic difference in holiness and divinity between Jesus and Mary is, to say the least, a fuzzy one.  While the Catholic church does not equate Mary with God, as it equates Jesus with God, the distinction between them seems trivial.
 
In the Catholic church, Mary intercedes.  You ask her to pray to God on our behalf, to get stuff that we want and need.  The implicit idea, of course, is that she has access to God that we don’t have.  So human, eh?  You ask a big shot, all too often a male, for something, and you get ignored.  So you ask somebody close to the big shot to make the request on your behalf.  Better results.  So that idea worked its way into Catholic Christianity.  And it resonates with the biblical myth of Jesus and Mary at the wedding in Cana.  Jesus didn’t want to turn the water into wine.  He was done with that party.  But his mother ordered him to take action on behalf of the host of the wedding, who had run out of wine.  Do something!  Okay, okay, all right, already…. So he worked the miracle.
 
The role of Mary in Christianity points convincingly to the reality that the Christian religion is a mirror of the human psyche, the inner human condition.  The truth of Christianity is not factual or propositional.  The truth of Christianity is how faithfully and artfully and creatively it reflects our inner spiritual experience, our soul’s journey through life. The figure of Mary is a reflection of that elemental connection within us all with our mothers, within whom we gestated, from whom we were issued forth into the world, and from whose breasts we were fed. 

Momma is in there, wayyyy deep, in all of us, whether she is with us in the flesh or not.  Mary is her avatar, the mother of us all.  But not just of us all, but of us each, because the nature of mother is that she is our mother.  That’s why we have specific Marys for specific places and people and moments.  Whereas we don’t have specific Jesuses for specific places and people and moments.  Which is why the figure of Mary in Christianity is so important.  While there was no basis in the Bible for making Mary a quasi-divine figure, the human need for the divine feminine was so strong that the Church had no choice but to adjust.  It is a case of theology bubbling up from the people instead of trickling down from the religious big shots.  The church had to contort its theology to accommodate the overwhelming need of its people for a sacred representation of motherhood.  And in doing so, the church found a means of adjusting to the deep cultural needs of its far-flung constituents.  Hence La Virgen of Guadalupe, the dark-skinned indigenous Mexican manifestation of Mary.  And the many other Marys of other places and peoples.  Mom accommodates, adjusts, intervenes, intercedes, for the well-being of her children.  So the church, despite its deep sexism, had to allow expression of the divine feminine.
 
At its best, Christianity meets us where we are, and how we are, however we are.  Christianity is human.  It’s us, groping for words, symbols, rituals, music, art that can reflect back to ourselves our quest to be in harmonious relationship with an Ultimate Reality intimate with us yet also infinitely bigger than us.  So gender, in all its complex manifestations, is going to be part of that language of faith.  And certainly the elemental depth-psychological experience of motherhood is going to be part of it.  Which brings us to Mary.  And brings Mary to us. 
 
Mary is the star of the sacred myth of Christmas, after all.  Jesus didn't even get a speaking part in the play.  So may we all have a Mary Christmas.  A merry Mary Christ-myth.  Amen!

Maginifying the Microfied

 

Image: Scott Griessel (c) 2013 creatista.com

 

 

There’s no such thing as a nobody. 

That’s the message of Mary.

Until her immaculate conception, until she howled out the Magnificat, she had become accustomed to being treated as a nobody.

Then came the miracle.  Quite suddenly she was fully aware, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, that she was a somebody.  A divine consciousness was implanted within her.  Call it Christ consciousness.  The consciousness that she mattered, that everybody matters.

"My soul magnifies the Lord," sang out Mary, a peasant, and a woman, at that -- considered a second-class citizen in that time in that backwater of the Roman Empire.  She sang out a world turned upside down – in which the rich would be sent empty away, the hungry would be filled with good things.  In magnifying the Lord, Mary magnified her microfied self. 

Her conception was a crystal-clear concept to Mary:  the new and electrifying concept that her life really and truly made a difference.  As handed down to us, her Magnificat is a political document -- it's the immaculate conception of the principle of democracy, of the equality of all human beings.  Read the Magnificat and you'll get a hint of the Bill of Rights that followed from it, long afterward.

The old Westminster Catechism, an old Protestant primer on what it means to be a Christian, begins with this wonderful line:  "The chief end of man is to praise God and enjoy him forever."  I'm here to do no less, and maybe not much more, than that.... to magnify the Lord.

But when I magnify the Lord I become more fully realized and fulfilled as an individual.  I am more who I am supposed to be, more who I am meant to be, in such moments.  Praising the divine love who is God brings us all up to a higher level of being.  People who magnify the Lord are not nobodies: they are each and all somebodies whose lives have dignity.  When you magnify the Lord, you put yourself in the company of divinity, and surround yourself with God's glory, and the shine rubs off.  Mary magnified the Lord, and in doing so, the Lord magnified her.

That concept is one that doesn't come easy for a lot of people -- folks who for various reasons feel outside looking in, who feel less-than, who feel shut out, who feel ignored.  I got an interesting taste of this experience years ago.  I prefer to dress casually almost all the time.  Very casually.  It may just be a bad habit, but I've gotten away with it this long, so ---  Anyway, I was the pastor of a church.  I was wearing a pair of boots, ripped levis and a plaid vest and a baseball cap, stacking up chairs to get ready for the carpet cleaners who were coming the next day.  While I was doing this, a group of upper-middle class women was in the building.  I had welcomed the group to come play with their babies in our building once a week. Not one of the mothers greeted me, even though I was within a few feet of them.  I was not accustomed to being ignored at my church, so I found this treatment to be odd.  It took a while for me to realize that the ladies believed I was the janitor.

I did not exist.  I was a nobody.  It was fascinating!  I was right there, moving around among them, and they saw right through me and right past me and paid me no mind whatever.  Now, mind you, I think these women were perfectly nice, decent people.  They were acting just like I have acted many times -- ignoring people who are members of a different economic and social status than their own and my own.  I learned something that day.  If you want to be invisible, stack chairs while wearing scruffy clothes. 

There may be some of you who have this experience all the time... being out in the world, but not seen, treated as a nobody instead of as a somebody.  In any case, I think everyone, including myself, has treated others like nobodies plenty of times -- in restaurants, in hotels, in airports, dealing with faceless "customer service representatives" on the phone -- we're all guilty of "microfying" people instead of magnifying them.  That day at the church, I woke up to this experience -- and had a taste of what it would be like to be treated like I was nobody.  I realized how deeply that could affect a person -- how it would get to my head, and make me feel small and less-than and devalued.  And it makes me think about the Magnificat, and how God became visible to an invisible woman, and how that moment made her fully visible to herself, and to others.

The Magnificat is a political document that ought to give rich and powerful people the shivers.  But they aren’t shaking, because in their churches they’ve paid for stained-glass windows of a Mary meek and mild.  Find me a stained-glass image of Mary howling out the Magnificat, instead of just looking quietly beatific while hovering over the manger.  The rich and powerful have curated Mary’s image, they’ve hired publicists to sanitize her.  Did you know that there is an office for the Virgin Mary at the Vatican?  The brother of an Italian friend of mine is in charge of it.  Need we say more?  A man is in charge of the way that Mary is presented to the world. 

There are two distinct ways to magnify people.  One is to lift everybody up, at the expense of no one.  The other is to lift up some folks by pushing down others.   Lifting up everybody is democracy at its best.  Lifting up some by pushing down others is populism.  I’ll just go ahead and say it:  it’s Trumpism.  Those vermin, those coastal elite people (himself not included, somehow), those socialist communist Democrats, they are your enemies, they are the reason you feel one-down.  They mock you for living in flyover states, they think you are nobodies.  They are the bad guys.  You are the good guys, the real Americans.  Vote for me because I’m your defender.  Through me, you are a somebody, not a nobody.

This is very powerful and effective rhetoric.  It’s also incredibly dangerous and destructive rhetoric that pits half the people of this country against the other half.  So it is time we listened to Mary’s rhetoric, which distinguishes 99% of the population from the less than 1% who held the levers of power at the time, but does so without demonizing anybody – she just says they’ll be brought down from their thrones to mix with the 99%.  Welcome to the real world, King Herod!  Welcome to our world. 

When the British army came to America to put down the American revolution, its soldiers came face to face with ours.  And there are accounts of how the British were shocked by their encounters with Americans, whom they had considered up to that moment to be fellow subjects of King George.  The British could see by the demeanor and the bearing of the American soldiers that they were not dealing with subjects.  Not King George’s subjects, not anybody’s subjects.  The Americans had obvious and striking personal dignity.  They were magnified.  The British officers found this to be both impressive and disturbing.  In Europe, they were accustomed to send their subjects into war with the subjects of other kings and queens.  The Revolutionary War was revolutionary for the British, because they’d never gone to war with an army of somebodies. 

You are nobody’s subject but God’s.  And to be God’s subject is to be your own subject.  Because God is the loving relationship between you and yourself and other people and all other beings in the cosmos.  That loving, accepting, forgiving relationship ennobles you as a crown of creation.  By magnifying that relationship of divine love, you are magnified, and you magnify the others around you.  Not half of them.  All of them.  Such are the politics of Mary!

Structural Happiness

 

This past week, I read an inspiring article in – of all periodicals – Vanity Fair, highlighting the efforts of Senator Chris Murphy to address the epidemic of loneliness and isolation in America.  He made a name for himself when he relentlessly and successfully pushed through a rare piece of gun control legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook mass shooting.  But such a modest improvement through public policy was only treating the symptom, and not the root causes of the epidemic of gun violence.

“There are just real practical impacts to people feeling lonely and disconnected,” he said.  “Political instability and polarization are driven by be people feeling upset and angry when they can’t find positive connection and they go find it in darker, more dangerous places.”  He has gone on a quest to learn all he can about why people have gone to those dark places, and how they might be brought to better ones.  His mission, in his words: “diagnose and treat the metaphysical state of America.” The epidemic of loneliness is not something that he believes can be fixed by “self-help”.  It’s what he calls “structural unhappiness”, and it has to be addressed at a social-structural level.

From a recent Politico report:  "Murphy’s first attempt at loneliness policy, the 'National Strategy for Social Connection Act,' was born out of those realizations. The bill calls for creating an office of social connection, with a director who would advise the president and create a national strategy combining public health, technology and social infrastructure to foster social connection. An advisory council with members from the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Veterans Affairs, Education, Commerce and other agencies would help assess and implement the plan."  Murphy is working closely with Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, who is conducting a nationwide campaign to address loneliness and isolation. 

As a consequence of his mission, Murphy finds himself attending church again – after leaving it as a teenager.  “All our other temples [besides faith communities] – social media, consumerism, a ‘me first’ individualism – are just telling you to be you.” 

Our progressive churches teach “you to be you”, too.  But not just “you to be you”.  We teach each other to be a “you” that includes “us”.  And an “us” that includes “you”.  We teach each other how to belong, how to be curious about each other, how to care for each other, and to care for others beyond our circle.  The fruits of this teaching?  Kindness, compassion - and positive civic engagement.

So simple!  But for so many Americans, belonging is a lost art.

Chris Murphy does not believe that connection and community can be revived in America by federal legislation.  But he does believe that legislation could help, alongside the efforts of citizen activists across the political spectrum. 

Just by existing, our progressive churches are part of the movement that Murphy wants to build.  We don't believe that folks who don't believe the way we believe are going to hell.  We don't have the imperative to convert people and grow our churches that motivates fundamentalists.  But we do have another, even more compelling reason to invite our friends and neighbors to join us at church.  We are connectors, community-builders, friend-makers - a powerful cure for the public health crisis of isolation and loneliness. We are builders of structural happiness.

Let’s celebrate our vital role in diagnosing and treating the messy metaphysical state of America!