Sermon by Joseph L. Morrow | March 26, 2023 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 26, 2023 | 10:00 a.m.

I Believe in Jesus Christ. . .
Conceived by the Holy Ghost and Born of the Virgin Mary
A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Joseph L. Morrow
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 130
Mark 6:1–6

In 1821 Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States and writer of the Declaration of Independence, was a seventy-one-year-old retiree living in his palatial plantation in the Virginia countryside. During that time, Jefferson wrote to a dear friend that in this period of his life it was his habit to spend an hour or so before bed each night reading and contemplating a passage of scripture. Given that Jefferson penned one of the world’s most enduring documents on the subject of freedom, while holding scores of his fellow humans in bondage, I would have highly endorsed him giving his life a cold, hard look through the lens of scripture. Except the book Jefferson was reading was not the same Bible that you and I will find in the pews here at Fourth Church. Instead, he was reading from a selection of scriptures he literally cut and pasted together with a razor from French, English, Greek, and Hebrew versions of the Bible he had procured. And Jefferson, being the Enlightenment Deist he was, fascinated by science and weary of superstition, decided to cut out those portions of the Gospels that smacked of magic and the unreasonably miraculous. He gave this volume the title “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” So, as you might suspect when it comes to Mary, Jefferson’s Bible has a different take. Drawing from primarily Luke’s Gospel, Jefferson introduces Mary as Joseph’s “espoused wife” who was “great with child.” Then goes on to say, “And so it was, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English).

That’s it. No annunciation by the angel Gabriel. No stirring “may it be with me according to your Spirit” by Mary. Nothing about Joseph quietly seeking to dismiss Mary as his wife after discovering her mysterious pregnancy without him. Jefferson conveniently skipped over these details in the same way that hip hop and electronica DJs skip beats over a record to create the musical harmony they prefer. Here comes DJ Jazzy Jefferson, mixing in the beat of a scientific, rational discourse into the gospel while skipping over discordant passages about virgin births, healing miracles, and nature-defying acts like walking on water.

But when it comes to scripture, we are all mix masters, not just Jefferson. We cut and paste our favorite passages and figures into a canon within the canon until the sacred text conforms to our tailor-made theologies. In my college years as I was seeking out churches to attend, I found myself one evening putting denominational mission statements on the floor, comparing and contrasting them. I liked this one’s welcome policy, but not this one’s Christology. Another one’s Ecclesiology, but not their Pneumatology. I remember at that time just wishing I could cut and paste together everything I favored and let all the doctrines and values I found unjust, distasteful, or embarrassing just hit the cutting room floor.

For many this business of Mary and the Holy Spirit is a beat we’d rather skip over, a belief some would rather confine to the cutting room floor. We who are uncomfortable with the divergent paths of faith and science would rather skip it. To borrow the phrasing of Mark, we, like the crowds of Nazareth, take offense at “conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary.” We take offense at the scandal of this all-too-mutual mixing of divinity and humanity — the great I AM and poor teenager, this identification of a holy savior with mere peasants. How could God’s chosen liberator be the carpenter who puts in the floorboards?

But if we were to wind back the clock to the first-century world of Mediterranean empires, the prospect of gods and humans mixing, even making babies, wasn’t all that odd or offensive. It was part of the way in which rulers burnished their reputations and peoples established their identities with narrative and symbolic power.

So we get stories like that of Apollo — a poster child if there ever was for gods behaving badly — and his child Asclepius born of a human mother, Princess Coronis. The story goes that Coronis fell in love with another human while pregnant with Apollo’s child and then, in a rage, Apollo sends his twin sister Artemis to kill her but spare the child. Asclepius, like many demigods and heroes in the Greek patheon, goes on to do much good. He becomes a renowned healer, taught the art of medicine, and his staff with the snake coiled around it would go on to become the familiar symbol of medicine in the modern world. Asclepius’s human origins were not considered the source of his power, only the font of his compassion and understanding of ordinary human suffering. As such he was considered among the first century’s “savior” gods.

Women like Princess Coronis were often incidental to the main plot of Greek mythologies. And so it might seem in Mark’s Gospel as if Jesus’ mother is much the same. She is but one of many names we are given of Jesus’ earthly family, such as Joseph, James, even sisters. But none of them save Mary make it into the Apostles’ Creed. She is one of only three humans mentioned in it, but she is no royal like Coronis. Mary is at her core, as theologian Wilda Gafney reminds us, a Jewish woman (Wil Gafney, “Mary of God,” 16 August 2020, and “The Torah-Observant Virgin Mary,” 5 February 2014 at www.wilgafney.com). She is a young first-century Jewish woman, an identity that for all but a lucky few was associated with poverty. And for whom the hierarchies and patriarchy of Mediterranean societies constricted her life. In the words of soul group Sly Family Stone, she was “everyday people.”

Mary’s very name is Miriam in Hebrew, and thus she is the namesake of Miriam the sister of Moses, who, if you’ll recall, used her cunning and persistence to save her baby brother and set in motion his rise in the house of Pharoah. And Miriam would be there, tapping her instrument and rallying the fearful Israelites across the Red Sea with the song attributed to her name: “‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:21).

Mary is more than a symbol of poverty and humility. She is the steward of a world-upending story of liberation and providential care, which she affirms when she sings that God topples the mighty from their thrones. She is also the enduring caretaker who will be present as Jesus grows and console him in his agony.

For early Christians wrestling with the creed, Mary had another namesake in Israelite history. She was to them the Almah of the prophet Isaiah, as in the verse often heard around Christmastide: “Behold, the Almah would conceive and bear a son called Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). Isaiah was speaking here of a great redeemer through whom the exiles might return to their homeland. For some, that redeemer was interpreted to be Cyrus, the Persian conqueror of Babylon, who let the captive Jews return to Jerusalem), to others Jesus, and to others a messiah yet to come. But in their interpretations, early Christians became drawn to the word Almah, which could in Hebrew mean a young woman of childbearing years or it could mean a virgin, the very source of the miracle that is Christ’s birth. Either way you see it, the very idea of the Creator of Heaven and Earth conspiring to partner with a young Jewish woman of the first century is quite the miracle. Isaiah’s Almah remains nameless, but Mary has name, identity and power that leap off the pages of scripture and into the everyday lives of those seeking God.

Mary has a surprising way of showing up in the everyday lives of diverse peoples and cultures. She was the subject of reverence around the dinner table of my childhood Irish Catholic friend. She was the hope of my Muslim friend Eboo Patel’s father, who made a habit of prayerfully lighting a candle in her honor at Notre Dame’s grotto of Our Lady (Eboo Patel, “Two Futures,” 15 May 2018, www.insidehighered.com). But lately I’ve been drawn to the way that Mary showed up in the French countryside for African American woman theologian Christena Cleveland. Cleveland was going on pilgrimage to visit the Black Madonnas found throughout Europe, where you’ll find more than 400 such statues of the Virgin Mary found throughout many churches and cathedrals. Some were intentionally painted a dark hue, and others have turned that way because of age and exposure to elements. One day Cleveland found herself face-to-face with the Black Madonna in the Cathedral of Moulins. The Madonna stands about 3 feet tall, seated upon an imposing altar, with an upward gaze. Cleveland likened her to “a general on a horse” (Christena Cleveland, God Is a Black Woman, pp. 67–68). This was the same Madonna that Joan of Arc prayed before in 1429 on her way to lead troops for the liberation of France and its peasants from English control. Cleveland wondered whether Joan of Arc, who had to dress in men’s clothing to march into battle, questioned whether she was sacred.

How many times have you stopped to wonder “Am I sacred, am I of great worth?”

How many times have the women in your lives, mothers, sisters, spouses, known their worth?

Do the 100,000 Black, Latina, and Indigeneous woman missing in the US as of 2021, do they know their worth? (“The Neglected Epidemic of Missing BIPOC Women and Girls,” 3 March 2022, www.congress.gov)

Do the 129 million girls around the world who lack education opportunities know their worth? (“Girls’ Education: Gender Equality in Education Benefits Every Child,” www.unicef.org).

Do all women in your lives, our lives, our city, and our church know that we know their worth? Do we enable them to rise to the heights to which God calls them and all of us? Joan of Arc left her encounter with the Black Madonna to face the menacing army believing “I have God, my Lord, who will know how to clear the route. … It was for this that I was born!” (Fredereic Chapman, ed., The Works of Anatole France referenced in Cleveland, God Is a Black Woman, p. 70). Only a mother of God with power and grace could give young Joan such boldness.

Remarking on Joan’s story and her own, Cleveland observed that those who are among “society’s least sacred” are “made sacred by Mary’s identification with them.” She concludes, “then truly all are sacred” (Cleveland, p. 72). It is Mary’s very human identity through which we see the worth, goodness, and power of those our world has left behind.

It is in this Lenten season that we in the church confront most acutely the broken and sinful side of our nature. We agonize over how God in Jesus redeems what Immanuel Kant calls the crooked timber of humanity. We feel shame in who we are, our shortcomings, our fleshiness. So it’s not surprising when we cut, paste, and confine the image of God, Mary, and our own faith until they not only conform to the rigid categories of our culture or times but until they become mere abstractions of other worldly purity, or of Plato’s divine impassability as Platonic, or of supernatural power like that of Greek gods and demigods. All this because we would rather run from our humanity than embrace it. Because it’s all too easy to find the Godliness of Jesus in his conception by the Holy Ghost.

But the scandal and truth of the creed is this: the woman known as the Godbearer, the Theotokos as our Eastern Orthodox cousins describe it, was not only bearing the God we know in Jesus through her womb but also in her own fleshly and womanly self was bearing divine goodness we witness Jesus.

Without the virgin Mary we might miss what Reformed theologian Karl Barth reminds us of: “God’s deity does not exclude but includes God’s humanity” (Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, p. 49).

And if, as they say, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, then the Jesus we confess must have the divine DNA of Mary’s fierce femininity, the divine DNA of the overlooked but resolute, the divine DNA of a liberator and dance partner with the Holy Spirit.

May those of us who wait on the Lord, as the psalmist tells us, consider that God is waiting on us to recognize the worthiness of those our world has overlooked and left behind. So the next time you encounter someone wondering their worth, look into their eyes — or, as the case may be, look in the mirror — and see the power and goodness of Mary and, through her, the face of Jesus and then the transcendent beauty of God. And then know that our humanity is not something to be disparaged but loved and redeemed by God, so that we might do, like our Lord and Savior, great deeds of power! Amen.