Annunciation Day

March 25, 2021 is Annunciation Day. 

This is the day we remember when the Angel appeared to Mary and told her God had God’s eyes on her. Big time.

This is the day we remember her famous response:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” Luke 1:46b-55

Great stuff. It’s hard to believe this speech was uttered by an illiterate 14-year-old who has just been told she is pregnant. In her unmarried state, extra-marital sex and pregnancy could get her stoned.

“Oh, crap,” would be a more understandable response.

But it is foolish to underestimate Mary. With titles like Queen of the Universe, Queen of Heaven, and Mother of God, she is a major player God’s drama.

Less known but equally important is her title, The Untier, or Undoer, of Knots.

Indeed, some of the thornier knots she faces can be detected in the Magnificat. There are no greater tangles than the pride that makes people think they are greater than God, or the arrogant power of politicians who oppress the poor. But the little peasant girl perceives that no imbroglio is beyond the power of God, who casts down the powerful, lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry, and sends the rich away.

But we all have painful knots in our lives, and one tradition of the church is that Mary has been given the power to loosen, unravel, and untie the bonds which paralyze us.

Mary, my Mother, God has charged you  

With untangling the knots in the lives of his children; 

Into your hands I place the ribbon of my life. 

No one, not the evil one himself, 

Can deprive it of your merciful assistance. 

There is no knot that cannot be untangled by your hands.

Anyone who has spent a morning detangling a gnarled spaghetti of computer cables knows that untying knots requires patience. Untying knots is a persistent trial-and-error of inserting ends through likely snags, un-inserting them when the knot tightens, gingerly reinserting in the hopes of loosening the kinks, and resisting the temptation to cast the jumble aside and walk away. Any time a knot is untied, it’s a miracle.

If Mary has the power to untie knots, it’s no wonder she’s the Queen of Heaven. 

Sometimes the knots we get in our lives seem beyond untangling.  We send an email to a trusted friend, complaining about a colleague, and accidentally send it to everyone in the office. We drink too much at an office party and the boss discovers us asleep beneath her desk. We forget to set the emergency brake of our car and it rolls down the driveway into a passing police car. 

But most of our personal knots are less dramatic. We say cruel words to a friend that cannot be unheard. We get overwhelmed by the complexities of our jobs and can’t get out of bed in the mornings. We shun family members because of imagined slights and can’t figure out how to start talking again. We are angry and frustrated by friends or relatives whose political views we regard as neo-Nazi and we build emotional barriers between us. We fall into a morass of boredom and ennui and don’t know how to restore meaning to our lives. 

As a lapsed Baptist, now a Lutheran Deacon, I well remember how Baptists pray to the Lord when these predicaments appear, and I remember how to do it: “Lord, we just pray that you will help, and we just pray Lord that you will just make things good again, and we just pray …” In my tradition, the word “just” is used the way “selah” is used by the Hebrew Psalmist. It gives us a sense of timing and sometimes makes us feel better.

Certainly Jesus loves us and understands our pain. But sometimes I wish we Protestants hadn’t forgotten how to pray to an untier of knots who knows what it’s like to be a loving and a long-suffering mother.

Unfortunately, most of us Protestants have cast Mary aside as if she was a remnant of archaic papist habits we have rejected, like making the sign of the cross or saying vain and repetitious prayers or imbibing actual wine during the Lord’s Supper.

Mary remains, however, an important character in our Christmas pageants. In our little community church in Morrisville, N.Y., we’d find a blonde girl who looked cute with a white towel draped over her head and give her the role of a lifetime: gazing adoringly at a 40-watt light bulb in the manger.

Even so, one has to wonder why low-church Protestants have been so unaffected by Mary’s charisma. She was, after all, the mother of Jesus. We cannot ignore that, but neither do we regard her with the same high status and deep respect as our Roman Catholic and Orthodox sisters and brothers.

Given what we know about Mary, we have vastly underestimated her. She was, among other things, a peasant girl. She was born into a patriarchal culture where girls counted for naught, and her family had to contend each day with an occupying army that regarded the Jews as superstitious bumpkins.

Mary and other girls were inconsequential members of their families, valued only for their cooking and cleaning skills. Mary was not expected to read, have opinions, make decisions, or fall in love. She did not go out and choose her husband because she liked his limpid brown eyes and sinewy pecs.

Joseph, like everything else in her life, was assigned to her by her father. Joseph, one might even say, was forced upon her. Based on what we know about the culture, Mary would have been between 12 and 14 when she was betrothed, which probably happened shortly after her first menstrual period.

What happened next must have been terrifying. Look at it from her point of view. She’s 14. She’s engaged to a stranger. She’s innocent of the ways of the world. She may not even understand what sexual intercourse is, but she’s old enough to know that if she does it before she is married, her parents and her neighbors will drag her out of the house and kill her with rocks.

Then one day Mary is told she is pregnant. That could not have been good news, even if it was delivered by an angel. Her first thought must have been that the angel was delivering a death sentence.

And even when the angel sought to reassure her that everything was all right, it’s hard to imagine she was in any sense relieved. With child, you say? With child? by God? You wouldn’t believe it today if someone said you or your daughter was pregnant by God.

This moment at which Mary was informed of her pregnancy – the Annunciation – has been portrayed in literature, song, Frescoes, statuary and art for two thousand years.

\Certainly a miracle has happened, and throughout its history the church has seen it this way: a virgin has conceived by the Holy Spirit, God knoweth how.

But, according to Luke, a new miracle of equal power began to unfold. Once the shock wore off and Mary caught her breath, this 14-year-old peasant girl, this cipher who can’t read and has been told never to think, commences to utter one of the most revolutionary statements in human history.

God has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’ (Luke 1:51-55, NRSV)

Overthrow the powerful?

Raise up the peasants?

Feed the hungry?

Reject the rich?

The angel must have been as shocked as Mary was when she was informed she was pregnant. No sooner than she opens her mouth than she begins untying the cosmic knots she sees around her.

From the very beginning, demure little Mary far exceeded the expectations of her family and culture.

In the same way, she obviously exceeds the expectations of Baptists and others who set her aside along with the high liturgical trappings and arbitrary hierarchies of the oppressive churches we escaped. 

Ironically, as we can detect from her opening speech, Mary is the one thing we should have held on to.

Many low-church Protestants shed a lot of high-church trappings that reminded us of the Church of England and other oppressors. 

Given the importance Mary’s son assigned to his last supper, for instance, it seems almost heretical that we limit our communion ordinance to once as month. We’ve abandoned the beautiful litanies and liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer because we think it’s holier to pray from our hearts. And despite our eagerness to be transparent witnesses of our faith, we toss aside the most visible demonstration of what we believe: making the sign of the cross when we pray.

I guess we can live with that. Baptists also exchanged priests, bishops and hierarchs for soul liberty and the priesthood of all believers, and who can say they are not better off?

But when you consider the importance of Mary to the church and to Jesus, I wish we had not been so quick to set her aside.

Mary’s first utterance, as recorded by Luke, sets the scene for all that is to come. She quickly grasps what is happening: the God everyone expected to come in shock and awe is actually coming as a mewling, puking boy. But that counter-intuitive revelation preceded the turning of the universe on its head. And with Jesus still zygotic in her womb, Mary knew it all.

But more than that, it was Mary who nursed him, guided his first steps, toilet trained him, and whispered in his ear the Godly secrets that would change the world. 

In a sense better understood by our higher church sisters and brothers, Mary is also our own mother in that she symbolizes a side of God we rarely acknowledge: God’s feminine side.

Years ago I attended the funeral of a good friend on the American Baptist staff. He was young and energetic and his sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage was a devastating shock.

As we sat sadly in our pews, my late friend’s wife was surrounded by her young children. The children, confused and frightened, began to cry. And their mother reached out her arms to them and hugged them tightly, whispering comfort in their ears.

The minister who officiated at the funeral pointed to the widow.

“Here we see how God comes to us as a mother,” he said. “God shares our grief, our sense of loss, but the Mother God’s first instinct is to embrace and console her children.”

Sometimes we need a divine mother, a goddess, who knew something Jesus didn’t: the experience of motherhood.

One thing the angel did not reveal to Mary at the Annunciation is that giving birth to God’s son would not be all gold and frankincense.  That message fell to a dying old man when the baby Jesus was presented in the temple.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul, too. – Luke 2:34-35, NRSV)

Throughout history, when a woman is overwhelmed by the joys of motherhood, or when the sorrows of motherhood break her heart, the mother of Jesus understands with an intimacy that transcends the experience of fathers and sons. “I’m a mother so I pray to Mary,” many women say. “She was a mother, too.”

Sometimes I wish I was as comfortable as many of my Catholic and Orthodox friends in relying on Mary as an eternal reminder that God whom we call Father has another dimension we rarely call on: the Goddess. God the mother.

And precisely because she is a mother Mary has the spiritual and moral power to be the untier of knots.

Advent is a perfect time to remind us of the crucial role this peasant woman played in the life of Jesus and in the foundation of the church, and give her the honor she is due.

Mother Mary, come to us, speaking words of wisdom. Untie our knots. Let it be.

Racists 'R' Us

As racist attacks on Asians rise alarmingly in the land of the free, we are appropriately outraged. But if any of us believe we have not ourselves been tainted by the sin of racism, we are part of the problem.

A New Yorker cartoon put it this way: a white man is sitting on an examination table in his doctor’s office as a physician shows him an X-ray: “This is the racist bone you said you didn’t have in your body.”

That’s the point: we all have racist bones in our bodies. 

Which is worse? Brandishing our racist bones as bludgeons against persons we consider “others”? Or continuing to hide our racism while we pray the divisions in our society will go away?

The Psalmst writes: 

O LORD, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart; who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors; in whose eyes the wicked are despised, but who honor those who fear the LORD; who stand by their oath even to their hurt; who do not lend money at interest, and do not take a bribe against the innocent. Those who do these things shall never be moved. Psalm 15.

Back in the day, most hate mongers tended to obscure their identity. What goes around comes around, folks said, and wicked words could backfire. Best to spraypaint swastikas and racial slurs in secret, lest the good guys come after you.

Not so today. Venomous words that used to be hissed in moral sewers are now tweeted from the cyber mountaintops. Many recent tweets have referred to the “China Virus” or “Kung Flu,” and the slurs have been accompanied by vicious attacks on all Asians. Most of these 140-letter messages are signed.

Of course we can dismiss these miscreant tweeters as idiots, but the ease with which they flaunt their odium is frightening.

The ironic thing is that all these racist twitterers who think their country is going to hell are entitled to express their views by virtue of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Stupidity is constitutionally protected – a reality we can celebrate every time we sway to the rhythms of “God Bless America.” And while it can be unnerving that racists express themselves publicly with such impunity, the First Amendment also protects right-wing pundits such as Tucker Carlson who define their hate speak as mere conservatism. 

But let’s be careful here. As noxious as the hate speakers may be, they clearly fall in the category of those Jesus told us to love.

And recent events also remind us there are at least two types of racists: those who flaunt their hatred and those who deny it.

The fact is, racism persists in our culture like an infection and many who have the most virulent strain don’t even know they are sick. 

Today in a million offices and schools, white folks will make stupidly racist remarks based on stupidly racist assumptions about Asians and persons of color. They will react to persons of color differently and treat persons of color differently – and, when challenged about it, they will be stunned and hurt because – as they will tell you – “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”

Racism flourishes in the land and each day the majority finds a new way to make the minority feel marginalized. My daughter, who is racially mixed (as are my five other children), reacted this way a few years ago when President Obama tried to make peace between a cop and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an African American professor, The cop arrested Gates on the professor's own porch because the cop assumed he was an intruder. Obama invited the cop and the professor to the White House for a beer. My daughter wrote in her Facebook update: “Elita wishes she could have a beer with the president every time she gets racially profiled.”

It goes without saying – or should – that racism is not the sole bailiwick of whites. It’s endemic in the human condition. My wife, who was born in Havana, looked sufficiently different from the locals when she worked in Americus, Ga., in the early 1980s that she was pointedly asked, “What are you?” 

Martha has often commented on the surprise expressed by us American Baptist white folks when members of the Hispanic American Baptist Caucus complained about the domination of the Black American Baptist Caucus in denominational life – as did the Asian Caucus and Native American Caucus. “How can people who live under discrimination and injustice despise one another?” white folks would ask, genuinely shocked.

Occasionally Martha suggests that Cubans – residents of an island that projects a carefully calculated image of edenic racial harmony – are as racist as anyone. “Black members of my family make a distinction between themselves and ‘negros americanos,’ who obviously don’t benefit from the same redemptive mestizaje of the islands,” she says.

But I doubt Cubans have cornered the market on racism. The people I grew up with in Central New York State were too good at it to cede the honor to anyone else. There were only a handful of African Americans in Madison County, some of whom may have been descended from slaves who settled in Peterboro, an outpost of the Underground Railroad operated by the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Looking back, I am appalled by memories of how the white majority – including me – treated them. Black children were taunted with the ‘N’ word on the playground, or slapped by white teachers and – in one memorable incident – subjected to an incredibly obtuse but well meaning teacher who used the ‘N’ word in a rhyme to select the next person to read from a text book: “eeney, meeney, miney mo ...” 

I can’t begin to imagine how uncomfortable we made children of color back then. And most of us oppressors would have insisted that we didn’t have a racist bone in our bodies.

I haven’t seen Tony Campolo for years, but judging from his press pictures, he’s the least changed of my Eastern Baptist College professors from the sixties.

Tony was known for making startling claims with ex cathedra authority, which was challenging in the day when you couldn’t vet his claims through Google, and he tried out some of his more famous lines on us: “Last night when you were sleeping, 30,000 kids died of malnutrition and you don't give a shit about it. Worse, you're more upset that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids starved to death.”

Once Tony said something, it was hard to forget it. Among the Tonyisms I remember:

“If you grew up in the United States, you are a racist.”

I first heard Tony say that in Soc 200 in 1969, and the notion surprised me. But as the years pass, I find fewer reasons to doubt it. I’m a racist, you’re a racist, all God’s children who grew up in the race-obsessed cauldron of American culture are racist.

Now, that’s not necessarily a peculiar aberration. Racism is a sin, and we all know we are sinners who fall short of the glory of God. To deny our racism is to deny we are sinners.

The next time you hear someone say, “I'm color-blind,” or, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” smirk ironically and walk away. 

Certainly people in the U.S. (and elsewhere) who openly tweet their hatred are to be feared – loved as Jesus willed it – but feared nonetheless. 

Particularly scary are those white folks who complain they have lost their freedom and status because a black man was twice elected president, and because he declared a commitment to universal healthcare, economic justice, immigration reform, and gun control. 

Those nervous white folks have difficulty seeing that they haven’t lost any freedoms because freedom is being offered to more people. In fact, the more races, ages, ethnic groups, and sexual orientations that are empowered in the U.S. system, the more freedom everyone has.

Be that as it may, the most dangerous people in America are not those who tweet their hatred openly. 

Even more problematical are those who don’t believe they are racists. 

That problem group may include you, me, Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Al Sharpton, or anyone who is supposed to have a dispensation from the sin of racism. 

But racism is like any other sin: all have done it, and all have fallen short of the glory of God.

Racism is also a deadly virus in the body politic. Jesus sought to make it clear wherever he went that the realm of God requires opening our hearts and minds and loving God as much as every human we encounter on the shadowy pathways of life.

Loving our neighbors and loving our enemies is the only cure available for the virus of racism.

Repeating the gospel of Campolo: “You can’t grow up in the United States without being a racist.

And the first step toward the cure is to admit is that racists are us.