A Real Mother’s Day Gift
It’s a hard week for Mother’s Day, with a Supreme Court leak where powerful folks want to decide so much about how and when folks give brith. Frankly, It’s the worst Mother’s day gift ever and so much of the conversation leaked as well as the conversation we have witnessed in our own state capital show just how little we all know about bodies and birthing and medical care. Do they honestly think birth is so simple? Just move an embryo that implanted in the fallopian tube? The family using IVF will just have to keep praying for the best? The woman who isn’t ready to parent will just have to deliver a baby and give it to the fire station? Do doctors need to weigh the possibility of felony charges while they also weigh life and death and whole health conversations with a patient?
Because, I am guessing the conservative supreme court justices and the lawmakers waxing on and on about heartbeats won’t be there in the room when there are tears of grief and loss, they will not be there when you are bleeding or cramping or writhing in pain. They will not have to look families in the eyes. They will not be there in the struggle and yet they will only exercise control.
And they will say, this is faithful, Christian even.
But I want to invite us into the Mother Story today. Let’s lean into Mary Magdalene as the founding mother of our faith and remember that what is faithful is being there in the struggle. This passage is one that get’s left out of the readings on Good Friday and Cynthia Bourgeault says when you leave Mary out of the Passion, “all you have left is hate, abandonment, misery and human violence” and none of the transformative love that Mary illustrates by staying with Jesus the whole time.
Mary’s role is so important and so powerful that it is likely that her stories get broken up and given to other Mary’s. And she may be from the town of Magdala but she like all of the other faithful folks may have had a transformative spiritual initiation. Saul becomes Paul when the scales fall from his eyes, Simon becomes Peter and becomes Peter the rock as second time when Jesus invites him back into relationship after his denials by saying, Simon, do you love me? Feed my sheep. This spiritual translation that changes your name happens with Abraham and Sarah as they laugh into God’s promise. It happens when Jacob wrestles with God and then becomes Israel to start a new day and a renewed life in the promise. Magdalene means tower. Mary the Tower, the apostle to the apostle, the one Jesus reminds everyone they can look to when surrounded with grief, fear and terror, the one they can look to as they find their way. Mary the Tower, the one who always gets it, the one who shows up at the cross and the one who pours out the costly ointment while the others look on not understanding the path Jesus is walking. Jesus rebukes them, says this will be done in memory of her…even as sometimes we leave out her name. That’s the thing about Mary, even if you take the stories from our cannon and let go of the Gospels that didn’t make the cut, she is always the one who gets it. And those men complain about the cost she spends because they are so unprepared to pay it. They are so confronted by their own failure to walk the path with Jesus…all they can do is point to a budget.
Mary Magdalene’s story doesn’t fit the Master Story. The story the church has love to tell, at least since it became a part of the Roman Empire. The Master Story likes a pretty clean line and the clear implication that Peter is the apostle to follow. So they cut her Gospel, they change her lines, they take her name away and attribute the work to Anonymous Woman. And yet, she survives. And yet we can find her and learn from her and look for her word of transformative love that shows up at the cross and is the first to proclaim Easter.
We have this history of religious mansplaining. This history of gross reduction and editing. We have to do extra work to find Mary Magdalene but guess what we will. The church we inherit does this again and again to the voices that don’t fit the master story and I believe it is a part of how we see God that keeps us doing this.
Call God, “Mother" in prayer and a church will run you out of the pulpit. Call God, “She” and grown folks will melt into rage filled toddlers and throw a tantrum before your very eyes. This of course doesn’t say much about God but it says a lot about us. Because when you have a singular understanding of the divine, you always end up with God as HE. And as Mary Daily reminds us, if God is Man, Men are God. This leaves no room for She, let alone They. How we see the divine impacts how we value the actual bodies and beings around us, how we listen to people, how we give some people authority so easily and minimize the autonomy of others so quickly that it seems…well natural. Like God ordained it. I am certain if the Sistine Chapel imaged God like the Venus of Willendorf, Lizzo would be president and the Bishop would be calling me for my thoughts.
Our tradition is deeply masculine, that’s what happens in Monotheism. HE has eclipsed all the ways we can see God. And yet there are metaphors of God in Labor, Birthing life. Birth is powerful, creative and involves struggle and heartbreak and hope.
If we could see God as Mother. Maybe we would treat mothering as sacred rather than offer a cheep holiday. Maybe our birth centers would look like temples and the OBGYN’s office would have at least some softer lighting, warmer socks and there wouldn’t be paper crunching every time you have to scoot down on the table. If Mothering was sacred, maybe we would have a lower maternal death rate and access to care that includes postpartum support. If mothering were sacred we would listen the stories of struggle, miscarriage, infertility, mensuration, rape and child birth. They would be heard with love and then taken as a work for compassionate change, making rape and incest and maternal death a thing of the past. If mothering was sacred, early childhood education would be funded, we would have universal family leave and ample childcare and our schools would be state of the art! Women would not face a gap in pay, risks in the job market for taking time off and wages would be for a life that is really abundant for all.
But that is not what we have. It is what we may want but it is not what we have. We are so pro-life we don’t have any of the things that make life abundant. Jesus says he came that we might have life and have it abundantly. But we have a tradition that pays lip service to Mothering and honoring the feminine. We have a tradition that says Christians are pro-life and they actually are only pro-birth.
In 1968 the evangelical magazine, Christianity Today published the work of conservative Dallas Theological Professor Bruce Waltke saying, “God does not regard the fetus as a soul no matter how far gestation has progressed.” He continued his reflection citing Exodus 21: 22-24’s penalties for murder. I am not sharing this because I believe we should base modern laws or medicine on Exodus but because the Christian right did not always hold the position that equated abortion with murder.
In fact, the Hebrew Bible is all about breath. Life is about breath. The Spirit and Ruah is breath, divine breath, empowering breath. God’s breath makes us human in one of the creation stories. Breath is the start of life and it’s absence is the end. There isn’t much to argue about heartbeats, at least if you want to make your argument about the Biblical Narrative.
So what changed? Why are “Christians" calling folks Baby Killers or suggesting that I love “the genocide of Generations” and “murder” because I believe a person should get to talk with their Doctor to make medical decisions? (PS I don’t love genocide or murder, just to be clear.)
In 1969 Bob Jones Univeristy and a few other southern buddies are facing legal action for racist practices (Shameless by Nadia Bolz Weber). In the face of this affront to their white supremacy/Christian Nationalism conservative evangelical faith leaders rally to their side. They lose, technically when it comes to racist admission policies being okay, but they win by making a coalition. Paul Weryrich of the Heritage Foundation has a dream (probably a wet one, for him) build the political power of the evangelicals and push the national agenda.
They hold a conference call…its pre-zoom and they brainstorm what issue to take up next. Do they choose ending hunger? No. Do they choose global poverty? No. Do they choose access to medical care? Nope. Then a voice pipes up, “How about abortion?” (Thy Kingdom Come by Randle Balmer)
That’s it, How About Abortion? How about Abortion, so easy for a conference call of clergy who have never been pregnant. No one in that moment spoke as I might have, about entering the ER bleeding so much that they asked you to sit on a trash bag because blood is streaming down your legs, through your pants, into your shoes and on to the floor and it would be a real shame if you stain the Waiting Room furniture while you wonder, what is happening to your body and try to google D & C between deep, deep breaths.
WE know so little about bodies and birth, we know so little about the struggles people face on the journey to birthing…until its us. For all the gifts of being there are so many complications, so many mysteries and so much more we could be learning. And yet folks who know so little feel so empowered to manage and control and decide for others.
This Mother’s Day we face a new round of Christians calling for Laws that are pro-life. These laws are not about being pro-life. They are about controlling life. And they will harm women and birthing folks. They will limit medical care and they will hurt the most vulnerable among us. It is not pro-life and it is not faithful.
I confess, I have not preached on this before. I didn’t think we needed too. I have shown up here and there but should have said more. It was a mistake to not speak up. And now is the time. We must make access to healthcare our priority. We follow a healer named, Jesus and making barriers to healthcare is antithetical to the way he lived and taught. Birth is complex and complicated sex and sexuality are too; our job isn’t to control. Our job is to show up and love people as they make hard and heartbreaking decisions.
How easy to say you are pro-life? It asks nothing of you. You don’t have to change your economy or your behaviors, you don’t have to show up for the heartbreak and the grief and the loss. It asks nothing of you and allows you to see yourself as a hero, a campion for Life. It is big ego and little transformation.
What is actually life-giving is not easy, it is not black and white. It is showing up in the heartbreak and the hurt, in the hope and in the longing for something new. Faith, like pregnancy is always more complicated than anyone assumes it will be on the surface and it is more practice than easy absolutes. There are no easy boxes to check, pamphlets to follow or slogans to shout.
That is the work Mary Magdalene did and does with us in sprit. She was there at the crucifixion. She sat at the tomb. She understood where Jesus was going and anointed his body because she was the only disciple who understood the cost of discipleship. That’s why she pours out the costly ointment while the men bicker about budgets. She was the TOWER they could look to when they were afraid and in the end she is the one who proclaims Easter as the Apostle to the Apostles
Faith requires epic generosity and personal transformation. It makes us able to be present with people in the worst moments and it makes us able to look for resurrection hope. Mary was there for trauma and loss, grief and fear and she was the one who saw Easter first, proclaimed it and lived it. She is our Spiritual Mother, we are a part of her church too.
May we have the courage to show up.
May it be so. Amen.
PS. Want to help? Email our manager to be a person who will drive people to other states if healthcare is lost in our community. manager@theurbanabbey.org