March 25: Feast of the Annunciation

"Annunciation," lithograph by Salvador Dali.

For more art (and links to yet more art) on the theme of the Annunciation from different eras and from around the world, see here.

Nossa Senhora Aparecida

A couple of fine friends of mine in Brazil are about to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida, in Portuguese Nossa Senhora Aparecida or Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida. Here she is!

She is the patron saint of Brazil.

As you can see, she is a Black figure of Mary. She appeared to three fishermen, Domingos Garcia, Filipe Pedroso, and João Alves, in 1717.

Epiphany: we're in reruns again

Forgive us. We've been having what some would vaguely but appropriately refer to as "writing issues" here at Acts of Hope, or maybe that's "no-writing issues." Either way, we are being ecological again this year, as we were last Epiphany, and we are recycling. That's a more positive way of putting it than saying we are laggards. Well, +Maya Pavlova is no laggard. I am.

So, once again, here is an old sermon. Epiphany only comes once a year, so perhaps most of you had forgotten it by now. Blessed feast. Don't let Herod haunt you.

"The Magi," by He Qi

It's music time: Let It Be

I just posted this on Facebook for a friend who is deep in a writing job and thought I'd share it here for the assembled multitudes. I'm enjoying watching and listening to this video. (Sorry MP, I still love the Beatles.) And for you religious types, this has Mother Mary in it, too. What's not to love?

Enjoy.

With thoughts and prayers for the people of Mexico as they face the swine flu epidemic and the aftermath of an earthquake.

Annunciation!

With an exclamation mark, because the angel came to Mary with big news.

Acts of Hope invites you to a little trip down memory lane:

From two years ago, here.

From last year, here.

Now, where did I put my Annunciation Day sermon from five years ago? From the pulpit of a high Anglo-Catholic church, no less. I think it is on my wheezing old hard drive which I must take to the tech-y man. You'll just have to do with the Magnificat. Much better anyway. This is the version from the Carmelites of Indianapolis's People's Companion to the Breviary.

My soul proclaims your greatness, O my God,

and my spirit has rejoiced in you, my Savior,

For your regard has blessed me,

poor, and a serving woman.

From this day all generations

will call me blessed,

For you who are mighty have made me great.

Most Holy be your Name.

Your mercy is on those who fear you

throughout all generations.

You have shown strength with you arm,

you have scattered the proud in their hearts' fantasy.

You have put down the mighty from their seat,

and have lifted up the powerless.

You have filled the hungry with good things,

and have sent the rich away empty.

You, remembering your mercy,

have helped your people Israel,

As you promised Abraham and Sarah.

Mercy to their children, forever.

************** Luke 1:46-55

Mothering Sunday - Laetare Sunday

It's Laetare Sunday here in the Western liturgical churches and Mothering Sunday in the Church of England. My friend Rob (aka Padre Rob+, with a gorgeous new blog that is almost all visual) sent this prayer earlier today with a Theotokos, using one of the Theotokos apps on Facebook. I'm not the greatest Anselm fan on the planet (understatement), but this is lovely.

As a mother cradles her child, so you enfold us, gently in your arms. As a mother comforts their pain, you calm and quieten our souls with your love.

As a mother teaches her child, so, Lord, you guide us, leading us through life. As a mother listens and cares, O Lord, you hear us and answer our prayers.

As a mother cries for her child, so you are weeping over our sins. As a mother feeds us from our birth, you daily nourish us with the bread of life.

Jesus as a mother, you gather us all to you. In your compassion bring forgiveness and grace. In you tenderness restore and remake us, In your love, bring us joy, give us peace.

Song based on a text by St Anselm; music by David Ogden.

Rob notes that he is not the originator of this quote. A friend of his from London, John Woodhouse, shared it with him after his church sang it at Mass today. Come to think of it, John's is a blog I used to read regularly and hadn't visited in a while. Hello, Organist Librarian! And thank you.

Follow-up on the sermon

Attentive eleven-year-old to rector of All Saints, an hour or so after Jane's sermon, sometime during the Christmas Pageant rehearsal:

"So, if Mary AND Joseph AND Jesus were Jewish, why are we not all Jewish instead of Christian?"

A sermon for the 4th Sunday of Advent

On blog break, but as promised, I am posting today's sermon.

I am sojourning at All Saints three Sundays a month till May or June -- back at St. Mary's next Sunday for my one Sunday a month there. All Saints is a wonderful worshipping community with a lot of kind, hospitable people. A special joy was giving communion to the children there. St. Mary's House doesn't have children these days (we are a combination "regular" congregation and university chaplaincy and the few families with children we had have moved on, especially as we have recommitted to our chaplaincy mission) and it's nice serving the young 'uns for a change. There are also quite a few elders at All Saints, though. I was at both liturgies, 8 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., and as is often the case, the early liturgy draws a lot of elders. And a zippy lot of elders they are! I'll be spending Christmas Eve at All Saints' as well. Then back home to St. Mary's House for the Sunday after Christmas.

I don't usually footnote my sermons, but this one was based on another I wrote three years ago and for which I did a lot of reading, so for the sake of honesty and interesting references, I've left the major notes in, the ones that have interesting references. Obviously they were not there in the oral delivery!! I love Beth Johnson's book on Mary, by the way, and recommend it highly.

4th Sunday of Advent (Year B, RCL)

December 21, 2008

All Saints Episcopal Church

Greensboro, North Carolina

Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38

In the name of the God
Who was
Who is,
and Who is to come,
Amen.


Have you noticed the people of Advent?It’s hard not to notice John the Baptizer,
that strange character with the raggedy clothes and
the strange eating habits, crying on the edge of the wilderness,
haranguing his contemporaries
and us.
He is squarely in the tradition of the prophets of Israel,
reminding people in a loud voice
of a God who calls them
and their institutions
to righteous living.

Prophets are not usually persons you’d want to have over for tea.
They are the not so gentle companions of Advent.

Mary
doesn’t harangue us.
We are observers from the outside,
hearing the story of the first appearance of Mary in Scripture,
perhaps envisioning already in our minds
our favorite Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation.

But Mary too is a prophet.
Do not assume she is only a soothing and innocent presence
on the way to the Christmas pageant.

I am always struck
by the way in which the conversation
between the angel Gabriel and Mary
parallels the conversation
between of God and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.

You may remember the general pattern:
God calls the prophet. Usually by name.
The prophet says, “Here I am, Lord.”
Then God says, “Listen, here’s what I want.”

And in every case, this “here’s what I want,”
God’s will for the prophet,
involves a particular role within the community of believers
and some kind of proclamation of who God is for this community.

And then the prophet puts up a fight.

Jeremiah says he’s too young.
Moses protests that he is slow of speech.
Amos argues that he is only a herdsman
and a dresser of sycamore trees.[1]
Jonah doesn’t say anything; he just runs away.

Now Mary – Mary has basically the same thing happen to her,
and she does ask a minor question about how this sign from God,
this birth, can happen when she has no husband. A logical question!
But she doesn’t run off or avoid the call;
in fact, in the scene following the one we just heard,
the second act of the story of Mary,
she run toward someone
to begin proclaiming what she knows to be true.
And that someone is Elizabeth, an older woman filled with new life and new hope,

who is also a proclaimer of good news, a bearer of revelation.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s get back to Nazareth.

The Mary we meet here is not Mary the mother,
as we will encounter her in just four days, in Bethlehem,
down South,
but Mary the young Galilean woman --
still in her northern hometown of Nazareth.

We don’t know much about Mary.
We don’t have facts and details about her early life,
or even about her life at the time we meet her
in today’s Gospel story.

In this she has much more in common
with the unknown people
of the first and the twenty-first centuries
than with those whose dwellings or divorces show up
in People magazine
or whose statements about war or money
make the front page of the newspaper
or prime time television news.

Mary has more in common
with the millions of people,
especially poor women,[2]
whose names we do not know
and whose lives
whose daily courage,
whose memories,
whose yearnings
we tend to overlook,
even though
they form the major portion
of our human family.

We do know that Mary came from Galilee.

Galilee was a backwater.
It was that place up north –
a good four days’ walk from Jerusalem
a little less if you had a donkey.[3]
We now know thanks to the work of archaeologists
that in Galilee there were several hundred villages,
and that Nazareth was a small village of maybe 300, 400 people.
It was off the main road, a place of no special importance.[4]

The economy in Galilee was heavily agricultural.
Joseph, to whom Mary was betrothed, was an artisan.
But he and his family would have also had a small plot of land
on which they grew some food – barley and wheat, grapes, olives.
Almost everyone did.

Galilee, even in the villages, was a crossroads of cultures.
In Mary’s daily life, the spoken language
was Aramaic, a close relative of Hebrew.
Educated and business people spoke Greek.
The Romans, who had conquered the land
and still occupied it,
spoke Latin.
And in the synagogue,
the congregation to which Mary and Joseph belonged,
the language of scripture and prayer was Hebrew.

Still, Galilee in Mary’s day
was far from the circles of power,
though the power of the Roman empire did reach there,
in the form of a triple tax.
There was no middle class. Most of the people were poor,
living at what we would call subsistence level.
The rich and powerful
were a very small percentage of the population.
The story in the Gospel of Luke
is not about them. Not yet.

The second Book of Samuel,
from which we also heard this morning,
is about the powerful –and the famous.
Both books of Samuel are organized around the careers of Samuel, Saul, and David.[5]
An official prophet –a professional—and two kings.
They are stories of the people of Israel
But they are also very much the story of God.
Woven throughout the many tales and adventures of the prophet and the two kings
are God’s attempts “to maintain or [to] recreate a relationship of loyalty
between God and [God’s] people.”[6]

The second book of Samuel is very concerned about institutions.
By the time we get to today’s story,
David has ascended to the thrones of both Judah, the little country in the South,
and Israel, the little country in the North.
He settles in Jerusalem, which is now the capital of the newly united kingdom.

And into the story comes
Nathan the prophet, who gets a little visit from the Lord at night.
Nathan hears from God
for David
a promise that appears to be unconditional:
Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me;
your throne shall be established forever.[7]
But it’s a little deceptive.
As is often the case today,
you need to read around and underneath the sound bites and the official statements
to get the bigger story.

If you read on in the Second Book of Samuel
you’ll see that humans keep behaving
like humans.
King David, the great king,
gets involved in a good dose of treachery, adultery, plots of murder,
and a few other things that make us love him and hate him
for his larger than life humanity
and also make us wonder
why he gets touted as Joseph’s ancestor.
Certainly not because he is a model of virtue!

Read on in the Second Book of Samuel, and beyond,
and you’ll see that the house of David
isn’t exactly what we would call secure.
A generation or two after today’s story, things start falling apart.

Now, kingship arose at least in part out of people’s need for security;
And humans
–all of us, from Galilee to Greensboro—
crave security.
Give me an answer! Give me a formula!
Give me a strong leader!
Give me an economic miracle!Give me a new technological toy!
Give us a nice clean war!
Give us well defined gender roles!
Give me a quick fix!
Give us ten steps to prosperity or
peace of mind or
firm abdominal muscles!

The major message in the second book of Samuel
is not that the king is the source of the people’s security.
It is that God alone is sovereign.
God alone offers security.
All institutions are relative.

Generations later, the story in the Gospel of Luke tells us,
After destruction, exile, and many other empires,
in the days of the Roman Empire,
a descendant of David now living in this backwater of Galilee,
a descendant named Joseph
is betrothed to a young woman named Mary.

Mary and Joseph were betrothed.
That’s not like being engaged in the contemporary sense.
It had what we would call legal status.
It really was the first of two stages of marriage.

So we know that Mary was from Galilee
in the days when Rome reigned.
We know that she was betrothed to Joseph.

We also know that Mary was Jewish.
As was Joseph. As was Jesus.
They were observant Jews,
living their faith within the rhythms of ordinary life,
daily and weekly,
faith in the one sovereign God.[9]

And this faith,
“belief in one God
whom no graven images could capture
clashed” with the new god who was about in the land:
Caesar, the emperor,
“full of power [and] glory.”[10]
Roman religious belief
was inseparable from Roman politics.
The Lordship of Caesar
was on a collision course
with the religion of Judaism.

Another few things of which we can be fairly certain:
there is a good chance
that Mary was very young.
Girls were betrothed around the age of twelve,
maybe thirteen, fourteen. Probably not much later.
And Mary was likely brown-skinned,
like most people in the region,
and muscular
from the labor she performed
outdoors and indoors
and which was a lot more strenuous
than pushing a vacuum cleaner.

So Mary, a brown-skinned, muscular,
working-class Jewish girl from Galilee
is sitting around one day
minding her own business (or maybe not)
when,
as happens in biblical stories,
and sometimes in other places too,
an angel shows up.

Shalom! Says the angel. Greetings!

Angels don’t have a translation problem, have you noticed?
They are messengers from God
who speak in the language of the person they happen to be visiting.
We can assume they are a multilingual lot.
Shalom, says the angel.
YOU are special to God,
and God is with you.

“Huh?” thinks Mary.

Or as the text says in our contemporary translation
...she was much perplexed by [the angel’s] words
and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.[11]

In other words,
“Huh?”

Mary was not someone likely to be singled out.
She was not one of the truly destitute or the most marginal:
she was betrothed to an artisan; she had a place to live;
but she was an ordinary girl in an ordinary village.

“Hello, Mary! I’m here for you!
I’ve got a word from God!”

Mary is still digesting this one,
and then comes the big news.

“You’re going to have a baby, Mary.”

And it’s not Joseph’s baby.
This child announced by the angel
is not what we would call legitimate.

Anticipating Mary’s reaction,
the angel reassures her,
invoking her people’s history,
talking of thrones, of David the royal ancestor,
of a kingdom that will have no end.

Being a smart Jewish girl,
though probably illiterate,
Mary says
How can this be, since I am a virgin?[12]
Or as the original text says much more eloquently,
How can this be, since I do not know a man?[13]
And somehow satisfied with the angel’s answer,
willing, somehow, to say,
“All right, God, I’ll do it,”
Mary the prophet goes forward.

Now,
hold together
the angel
and the village,
the message from God
and one particular, ordinary, daily life,
history writ large
and history writ small.

Here in Greensboro,
it’s four days before Christmas in another kind of empire.
One in which
we, like Mary, are not living in the centers of power,
but where the centers of power reach us.
In this empire as in the earlier ones
institutions and their leaders fail us:
corporations, investment banks, government,
the military, schools, even churches.

We in this American empire
are about to celebrate the birth of Jesus
and we look also in this season of Advent
to Jesus’ coming again
at the end of time.

And what do we do,
as we prepare for this?

We contemplate Mary.

We remember her as the human being she was,
in the little we know of her and her surroundings.

This is a much deeper and more challenging mystery
than if Mary were either the ideal woman
or the feminine face of God
or an archetype or a model
or even the ideal disciple.

“As with every human being, as with every woman,”
[as with every girl, every boy, every man,]
“[Mary] is first and foremost herself.”[14]

I am not saying that we can’t also appreciate Mary as a symbol.
But Mary is and remains
“truly our sister,”[15]
“a concrete human being”[16]
“....who acted according to the call of the Spirit
in the particular circumstances of her own history.”[17]

This is no reason for us to toss our Fra Angelico reproductions in the trash bin
Or to take the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe down from the wall.

On the contrary, perhaps they, along with other images,
can help us to remember that Jesus,
true God among us
and truly human,
was the son
of a truly human mother,
a particular mother
in a particular place.

For some reason
God loves history.
God loves our history.
God lives in our history
through us,
with us.

It is in that history that Mary will go off to visit Elizabeth,
And that she will cry out in song
That the God of promise will turn the world upside down,
That the hungry will eat,
That the powerless will be filled with new strength,
That the mighty will tumble from their proud thrones,
A message worthy of the prophets
Of Mary’s people Israel.

My friend Gene Rogers,
Who teaches at UNCG, has written a book in which
he comments on an ancient hymn about Mary
from the Christian East
And here’s what he says of her:
As a woman of low estate, she opens up a time for justice;
as a willing recipient of the Spirit, she opens up a site of joy.
In preparing the justice of God’s realm, she plays the role of the prophet.[18]

The Gospel on this fourth Sunday of Advent asks us:
Are we ready
with Mary our sister
to open up a time for justice?

Are we
willing recipients of the Spirit?
The Spirit!
Not the shortcut solution.
Not the security for which we hunger.
Not the ordinary exercise of power.
The power of the Spirit -
the Spirit of God
the one with the messages in the middle of the night
the one with surprise visits in broad daylight
the one who visits the backwaters of conquered lands.

Are we ready
to open up a site of joy?

Are we willing
as Mary was willing
to be that place
where God lives
and where, make no mistake,
neither Mary nor we
will serve as passive incubator
for a pop-up Jesus?

Will we be
a living, breathing, choice-making site of joy,
a real being who makes room for the action of the Holy Spirit
whatever it is?
At a really inconvenient time?

Think about it:
This woman –we would call her a girl– is virtually married.
And in what form does the Spirit show up?
A baby who’s not her husband’s.
Let’s see. In her historical context
she could lose
her husband,
her economic support,
her reputation,
even her life.

Never mind the how the pregnancy happened
Look at what the fact of Mary’s pregnancy says:
God is really really inconvenient.
And really risky.
And really close
to us.

Jesus
flesh of Mary’s flesh
flesh of our flesh
is coming soon.

And the angel
in some form, in some voice, in some manner,
will come to us
as the angel came to Mary
and ask
the Advent question of God:

Will you bear my word to the world?
This world?
Will you hold my word in your heart?
This heart, your heart, in this time in history, in this place,
in your skin, in your faith, in your life?

Will you share my word with the world ?
Will you
open up a time for justice
in this place, in this empire?

Will you
be a willing recipient of the Spirit?
Will you open up a site of joy?
Will you, with the help of the Spirit
risk being a prophet?

Saints,
Says the angel with the Advent question of God,
Will you
bear my word to the world?


Amen.

********************************************

[1] A dresser of sycamore trees is someone who makes little cuts in the sycamore fruit so that they can grow to be edible. It was a lower-class job in the low-class food business; sycamore fruit was for people too poor to afford dates.
[2] Elizabeth Johnson makes note of this when introducing Mary’s Galilean context. Elizabeth A. Johnson, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (New York: Continuum, 2003),137.
[3] Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 172.
[4] Ibid.,141.
[5] Jo Ann Hackett, “1 and 2 Samuel,” Women’s Bible Commentary, expanded edition, ed. Carol A Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 91.
[6] David Gunn, “2 Samuel,” Harper’s Bible Commentary (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988), 287.
[7] 2 Sam 7:16.
[9] See Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 165.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Luke 1:29
[12] Luke 1:34, New Revised Standard Version.
[13] Luke 1:34, literal translation from the original Greek. This also happens to be the King James Version’s translation, which is not always the most accurate, but which in this case is closer to the text.
[14] Johnson, Truly Our Sister,101.
[15] While the phrase “truly our sister” comes from Pope Paul VI, Johnson also notes in the frontispiece of her book that several women theologians, whose writings evoke the words and beliefs of grassroots women in Mexico, Korea, Brazil, and the United States, refer to Mary as a sister.
[16] “[T]he proposal to interpret Mary within the company of the saints entails this corollary: First and foremost Mary is not a model, a type, an archetype, a prototype, an icon, a representative figure, a theological idea, an ideological cipher, a metaphor, a utopian principle, a feminine principle, a feminine essence, the image of the eternal feminine, an ideal disciple, ideal woman, ideal mother, a myth, a persona, a corporate personality, an everywoman, a cultural artifact, a literary device, a motif, an exemplar, a paradigm, a sign, or in any other way a religious symbol. All of these terms are drawn from contemporary religious writing. To the contrary, as with any human being, as with every woman, she is first and foremost herself. I am not saying that the contemporary human imagination cannot make use of her in a symbolic way. But it is the luminous density of her existence as a graced human being that attracts my attention. As Rahner argues, ‘We, however supremely elevated our spiritual nature may be, still remain concrete historical beings, and for this reason we cannot consider this history as something unimportant for the highest activity of our spirit, the search for God.’” Johnson, Truly Our Sister,101.
[17] Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 42-43.
[18] Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2005), 104. For my own rhetorical purposes, I have left out of this quote from Rogers’ elaboration on Hymn XI of Romanos the Melodist a fourth point, which immediately follows the three I quote: “In preparing the joy of God’s realm, she plays the role of patriarch.”

Guadalupe

I am posting this on Sunday, though I have manipulated the date of posting back to Friday, when many of us honored the feast of La Virgen de Guadalupe. I have a large image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in my home. My friend Eduardo Fernández, a Jesuit theologian in Berkeley who is Mexican-American and from El Paso, Texas, gave it to me, and I treasure it.

JohnieB update

This one is for friends of JohnieB.

So, JohnieB's internet connection went away. Now it is back.

However, the computer has gone kaput.* JohnieB is considering his options.

He's also getting an MRI as a follow-up on his kidney adventure of a couple of weeks ago, tomorrow.

3 p.m. is the time, so light your candles to the Blessed Mother then, or before if you prefer.



JohnieB is also in the middle of moving to new and more spacious digs.

The official move date is Tuesday. Miz Scarlett the Cat is not entirely amused.

JohnieB sounded fine on the phone, but he has a lot on his (usually quite gourmet) plate. Sending a few good vibes or leaving messages on his blog for him to find when he returns to the intertubes would be a good thing. (Hey, he's in Connecticut, so "a good thing" is the appropriate expression there in Martha Stewart Land.) Prayers too, if you're one of us church mice. Squeak!

* As a former Californian, I just had to make an astrological comment and blame it all on the fact that Mercury went retrograde yesterday.

Glycophilousa icon written by Luiz Coelho

Mother of God Similar to Fire

This rendition of a 19th-century Russian icon, Mother of God Similar to Fire, is by the Jesuit iconographer William Hart McNichols. It shows "the Mother of God on fire with prayer and the life of God within her."

Feast of Mary

I have a copy of this icon by Robert Lentz on my desk.

I know Trinity Stores is Robert Lentz's exclusive distributor (well, not exactly, you can buy the cards in some specialized stores too) but that little square commercial thingie in the lower left corner is really irritating.

I've had "Protectress of the Oppressed" in my office or in my study at home for nearly two decades. She's in my study now. (In the company of her hubby.) In my office, I have Mother of God, Mother of the Streets.

Swamped

SWAMPED.

Sigh.

Yes, I am breathing.

Also, Her Grace the Feline Bishop Extraordinaire had a little unexpected escapade yesterday, but it was short and without ill consequences except a bit of pouting.

Here's a sweet sculpture of la Virgen de Guadalupe which I found online earlier today. (Yes, work-related; I was finishing up some icon research for a late set of changes in the text of the book.) Apparently she lives in a cottonwood tree in Albuquerque, New Mexico, permanent home of my friend the Bear-in-Exile, Paul the Byzigenous Buddhapalian. Paul heads back to the beautiful city of New Orleans today for more work and more long-term-temporary sojourning in humid climes.


Credit, as you can see, goes to something called NewMexicoPhotos.com. Not sure who the artist is (in addition to Mother Nature) or whether one ever signed the work.

Icon blogging: Ethiopian triptych with Mary and Jesus

Got the icon from here.

Anonymous painter. Triptych with Virgin and Child Flanked by archangels, scenes from the life of Christ, apostles and Saint George and Saint Mercurius. Ethiopia (Gojjam?), late 17th century. Tempera on panel.

Annunciation

I almost posted the same icon as last year because it is so beautiful.


Instead, I am posting this one from the same online collection of Coptic art. It is less beautiful in the classic sense, but that's why I am posting it. Because it is less stylized --perhaps it is older-- and the figures look slightly more human, it forces upon us not so much the idea of the Annunciation as its reality. We all have Fra Angelico on the brain of course, we Westerners, and so in our mind's eye the Annunciation is full of delicacy and light.

But was it?

And what are our standards of beauty? Do we impose them on angels and on the mother of Jesus? What happens when an icon shows what appears to many of us a slighly lumpy, ungainly Mary? When the angel, despite the beautiful robe and the eye shadow, is not exactly smiling or serene?

What do our lives look like when the surprises of Godde land in them? Are they, and we, all smooth and round and radiant?

Pietà - a short poem for the 13th Station of the Cross

As I mentioned earlier, St. Mary’s House (Episcopal), Greensboro has a Good Friday Stations of the Cross service at which 14 different people offer meditations (some verbal, others musical or visual) at each of the 14 stations.

This was mine.


The Thirteenth Station:
Jesus is taken down from the cross
and placed in the arms of his mother


They brought me my boy.

They placed his broken body
in my arms.

I cannot tell you what I felt
now
these many years later

even knowing
what I now know.

It was as if
the world imploded
into silence
or a scream
perhaps mine
I am not sure
silence or scream
it made me deaf

They brought me my boy.

Who brought him?
I do not remember.
Someone did.
There were others there.
Miriam.
The other Miriam.
Friends.
Soldier?

They brought me my boy.

His body in my lap.
His body which had come
from my body.

As my womb tore open
and bled
to give him to the world
my heart
tore
bled
dry.

They brought me my boy.

There is no meaning when your child dies.
No voice speaking.
Only the great void.
And the holding
holding his body.

His body.

His body.

My boy.

Jane Carol Redmont

Good Friday, 2008

Friday cat blogging and Haghia Sophia

So, I walked into Haghia Sophia (an earlier post tells me it was on December 13) and there, in the penumbra, was a cat. Right there in the church-turned-mosque-turned-museum, HUGE (the building, not the cat), dark and cavernous and ill-lit in the entrance, then glorious with its high, high vaults and windows and walls of marble and Byzantine icons and Arabic inscriptions. The two cat photos are lousy, but just so you know there really is at least one cat in Haghia Sophia, here they are.

Below them, though, are photos of some of the other sights. Mostly I didn't take pictures. I figured there were better photographs in books and online, and for the most part the things I wanted to photograph were too high or too far away or not really accessible or too large for the lens I had. Also, I spent the first hour or so looking up with my mouth hanging open because the place was so amazing, so I doubt I'd have been capable of taking photos. My second hour there, or some part of a second hour, I recovered a bit and took these few pictures. Some are, as you will see below, photos of photos.

There is scaffolding in Haghia Sophia. There is almost always scaffolding there. It's an old building and an architectural miracle, so something always needs repair or threatens to collapse unless it's held up by something.




By clicking the links above, you will see photos that give you a little sense of the vast space. With my camera, I only took close-ups. Haghia Sophia is even bigger than you can imagine. The Byzantines never built anything close to that size again.

I've already posted a photo of the tile below, but I want you to get a sense of sequence in which I saw and photographed.



Many kinds of marble were shipped here to make the walls. (Remember, this is back in the 6th century, so we're not talking freight trains.) This was just one among many of the marble slabs, though one of the most beautiful.


I went upstairs after this. To get to the second floor, you walk up a corridor that winds around and still has what looks like the original pavement and walls.


I kept imagining, both on the bottom floor and as I walked up this corridor, what liturgy must have been like here. The robes, the incense, the processions.

All men, of course.

The Empress and her ladies sat upstairs, in a special gallery with a balcony.

I imagined what it might have been like to walk to the upper floor in this very corridor, on these very stones.

That's not a dead end. The corridor turns left when you get to that wall in front of you.


In one of the upper galeries was a photo exhibit. This isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. The upper walls of Haghia Sophia have magnificent mosaics (icons made of mosaic really), but you can't see them up close. With the help of some sort of fabulous photographic technology and maybe some scaffolding, a photographer whose name I don't have handy made this set of pictures of the mosaics. The curators then put them up in light glass or plexiglas frames so that they would have the real thing just behind them and you could thus get the best possible perspective on the mosaics. So I took photos of the photos.

This here is the Theotokos with Emperor John II Comnenus and Empress Irene, his wife. (There was more than one royal Irene in Byzantium. This is not Irene the Icon Queen --not her real title-- who lived many centuries before.) The mosaic dates from the early 12th century.

Then we've got someone who looks like John the Baptizer, but I must check. Sorry for the flash, but it was dark dark dark in there.


And here again is Herself.


After the fall of Byzantium in 1453, Haghia Sofia became a mosque, so it has minarets, and this is a view of one of them from the outside yard.


An ablution fountain, which I have mentioned before, is outdoors. It is not used since this place is now a museum, but it was for the use of the worshippers at the mosque, and there are many like it, though much less ornate, around town in other mosque courtyards.





And then there was a not too happy looking cat in a corner, outside either Haghia Sophia or the Blue Mosque. It looks cold to me. It was a grey rainy day. The cat inside Haghia Sophia was happier, sheltered under the great vaults and clearly at home in the building. I don't know what this business is in Orham Pamuk's memoir about packs of dogs roaming around Istanbul. I saw cats, cats, and more cats.

Advent Chagall series: "Lovers" (for Joseph and Mary)

Questions with Mary in late Advent: the end of a sermon

Two years ago, in Lectionary Year B with different readings, I preached on the 4th Sunday of Advent at my congregation, St. Mary's House in Greensboro. (We are a combination of chaplaincy for three local universities and colleges and a "regular congregation.") Since we are not in year B and the sermon was on the long side, I won't share all of it. And this year, the star of the Gospel is the righteous man Joseph, not Mary. Still, Mary is one of our Advent companions, and I thought I'd offer the end of the sermon here.

The sermon began with one of the songs from the magnificent Boston performance of Langston Hughes's Black Nativity and drew heavily (but not in academic style) from Elizabeth Johnson's wonderful book Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints.

The final draft of the sermon (including the final draft of this final excerpt) has footnotes because I used a lot of sources. Obviously I didn't preach the footnotes -- I added them later because I am a compulsive academic who cites her sources and because some members of the congregation wanted a copy. The book author I mention is a good friend of mine here in Greensboro, a theologian member of the congregation who teaches at U of NC at Greensboro, as does his partner, who is a specialist in Byzantine Christianity. The quote is especially appropriate since it comes from the Christian East, from whose heartland I have just returned.


Our brother Gene has a new book out.
In Gene’s book, there is a beautiful passage
from which I want to quote only in part, because that part is so rich.
He’s commenting on an ancient hymn about Mary
from the Christian East
And here’s what he says of her:

As a woman of low estate, she opens up a time for justice;
as a willing recipient of the Spirit, she opens up a site of joy.
In preparing the justice of God’s realm, she plays the role of the prophet. [1]

Let me repeat that; it’s worth a second hearing.
As a woman of low estate, [Mary] opens up a time for justice;
as a willing recipient of the Spirit, she opens up a site of joy.
In preparing the justice of God’s realm, she plays the role of the prophet.

In the era in which the ancient hymn was written,
Mary was often viewed as more than simply a human sister.

But Gene’s beautiful passage can apply just as well
to Mary our human sister, our companion.

Here we are on the fourth Sunday of Advent.
And this year we’ve got a whole week,
unlike some years when we only have two days
between this day and Christmas.
We can spend the week with Mary–
Mary who is “truly our sister;” [2]
Mary who “has to accomplish her life in the midst of the struggles of history,” [3]
despite or maybe because of
her little visit from the Gabriel the angel.

So Mary’s presence on this fourth Sunday of Advent asks us:

Are we ready
with Mary our sister
to open up a time for justice?

Are we
willing recipients of the Spirit?
The Spirit!
Not the shortcut solution.
Not the easy power.
The power of the Spirit:
the Spirit of God;
the one with the messages in the middle of the night;
the one with surprise visits
in broad daylight;
the one who visits the backwaters of conquered lands.

Are we ready
to open up a site of joy?

Are we willing
as Mary was willing
to be that place
where God lives
and where, make no mistake,
neither Mary nor we serve as passive incubator
for a pop-up Jesus?
A living, breathing, choice-making site of joy,
a real being who makes room for the action of the Holy Spirit
whatever it is?
At a really inconvenient time?

I mean, think about it,
You want inconvenient?
This woman –we would call her a girl– is virtually married.
And in what form does the Spirit show up?
A baby who’s not her husband’s.

Let’s see. In her historical situation
she could lose
her husband,
her economic support,
her reputation,
even
her life.

Don’t just look at the fact of the pregnancy.
Look at what it says!

Never mind the miracle and how it happened.
Look at what it says:

God is really really inconvenient.
And really, really risky.
And really, really close
to us.

We’re not in Jerusalem;
we’re not in Washington;

but we live within the circles of power.

Jesus
flesh of Mary’s flesh
and flesh of ours
is coming soon.

And the angel
in some form, in some voice, in some manner,
will come to us as it came to Mary
and ask,

Will you bear my word to the world?
This world?
Will you hold my word in your heart?
This heart, your heart, in this time in history, in this place,
in your skin, in your faith, in your life?
Will you share my word with the world ?
Will you
open up a time for justice
in this place, in this empire?
Will you
be a willing recipient of the Spirit?
Will you open up a site of joy?
Will you, with the help of the Spirit
risk being a prophet?

That’s a little scary.
And you probably heard those questions
addressed to you as an individual.

Let me ask them again.
Hear them asked to us as a community.

Will you
bear my word to the world?
This world?
Will you, St. Mary’s community, hold my word in your heart?
This heart, your heart, in this time in history, in this place,
in your skin, in your faith, in your life?
Will you share my word with the world ?
Will you
open up a time for justice
in this place, in this empire?

St. Mary’ community, will you
be a willing recipient of the Spirit?
Will you open up a site of joy?
Will you, with the help of the Spirit
risk being a prophet?


Let us pray.

O unknown God,
whose presence is announced
not among the impressive
but in obscurity;
come, overshadow us now,
and speak to our hidden places;
that, entering your darkness with joy,
we may choose to cooperate with you,
through Jesus Christ, Amen. [4]


[1] Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2005), 104. For my own rhetorical purposes, I have left out of this quote from Rogers’ elaboration on Hymn XI of Romanos the Melodist a fourth point, which immediately follows the three I quote: “In preparing the joy of God’s realm, she plays the role of patriarch.”

[2] While the phrase “truly our sister” comes from Pope Paul VI, Johnson also notes in the frontispiece of her book that several women theologians, whose writings evoke the words and beliefs of grassroots women in Mexico, Korea, Brazil, and the United States, refer to Mary as a sister.

[3] Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 110.

[4] Janet Morley, Collect, Advent 4 Annunciation, from All Desires Known: Inclusive Prayers for Worship and Meditation, expanded edition (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1992), 5.

Mosaics and frescoes from Chora (Kariye) Church

A church sort of day: morning worship with the local Anglicans (smells and bells!) and afternoon at the breathtaking church of St. Saviour in Chora, a.k.a. Kariye. I am up correcting the last of the student papers and calculating final grades, since the grades are due first thing in the a.m., so words will have to wait, but meanwhile, some pictures. The church is now a museum. But the icons still speak.


Photos by Dick Osseman. Thanks to Arthur Holder for the URL.