Wednesday, January 17, 2018

"I Know No Man"

I.

These days we are more acutely aware than ever before of the cynical and often violent things that men do to women.  It seems like every day another powerful man is brought low by allegations of inappropriate and violent behavior towards women.  Just yesterday I read this disturbing article by a woman pastor whom I know, cataloguing a long list of abusive things done to her by men in the church!  

Now having been a Stated Clerk and sitting in on Committee on Ministry meetings for 15 years, I am aware that ministers sometimes do bad things.  But the amount and degree of casual and callous misbehavior she describes is truly distressing.  These are not just off-color comments, but physical bullying.  I probably know some of the men she talks about.  One she says had been the Moderator of General Assembly, for crying out loud!  

These incidents are certainly not about love.  Neither do they even have to do with a good, healthy desire.  They are about power.  They are about putting weaker people in their place and keeping them there.  They are about demonstrating who is boss, and who is merely an object to be disposed of according to the will of the stronger party.  They maintain the pecking order, the regime of superiors and subordinates, by which society structures itself.  Such behavior serves exactly the same purpose regarding gender relations, if on a different level of intensity and violence, as lynching is for race relations.  It is basically a calling card for rape, when it doesn’t degrade to rape itself.

So we are hyper-aware these days of the pervasive and persistent pattern of abuse of women so prevalent that for generations it was just considered normal.  It was what men did, and women just had to deal with it.  

Then we come to this story.  At first glance it may look like the ultimate example of the same dynamic.  Except here it is the almighty God himself who comes down to have his way with a powerless young woman.  Some suggest that Christianity itself is therefore based on a colossal act of sexual abuse, even rape.  In this reading, God is the unscrupulous boss, the strong man, who preys on a young, innocent girl, deliberately impregnating her with his child.  He is using her for his own purposes, not caring about what kind of disruption this will bring into her life.  For on top of the normal discomfort and inconvenience of pregnancy, there is the social stigma of not being married.  Mary has no real choice in the matter.  To some what we used to think of as the sentimental Christmas story now has a dark cloud over it.  

Meanwhile, others, getting God off the hook, wonder if Mary’s pregnancy wasn’t the result of some man’s violent misconduct, which God then redeems and transfigures, bringing good out of evil.  That is certainly a more theologically and morally coherent approach.  That will preach… but is it the story?  Is this story about abuse?  Is it another example male supremacy?  Is it another “me too” story, indeed, the ultimate “me too” story?

II.

One thing I have learned from our current Bible Study on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, is that, beginning with the beatitudes which are about lifting up the powerless, Jesus identifies the central problem in human life as a differential in power between people, that is then exploited for the benefit of the one with more power, who can exercise more violence.  Jesus’ solution is to renounce power if you have it, and receive it if you don’t.  He himself embodies this solution by coming into the world — not with lightning bolts and earthquakes, meeting out retributive justice to evildoers — but emptying himself, in extreme humility, vulnerability, powerlessness, and compassion.

I find that we have a serious theological problem in the Western church.  It is the conundrum that Jesus is good, but God is bad.  In fact, the idea is somehow that Jesus came to protect us from God.  If it weren’t for Jesus, feeding God his own blood, God would have wiped us out ages ago in a fit of uncontrollable rage.  A lot of people even think this is the gospel!

This view of God fits in nicely with the view of those who charge that the annunciation story is about rape.  I mean, if God is already a genocidal manic, ready to wipe out millions to appease his own honor, then what he does with one girl would be small potatoes.  So he sends his lackey, Gabriel, to tell her what’s going to happen to her, and she better like it.

I do not believe that is what is happening in this story.  The only way we know God is through God’s Word, who is Jesus Christ.  When God appears to be acting in ways that contradict what Jesus teaches and does, then we’re misunderstanding.  And Jesus doesn’t demand anyone else’s blood to appease his honor, but chooses instead to shed his blood and die on the cross, giving his life over the life of the world.  That is the way God must act, because Jesus is God.  

Which means that what is happening in this story is not a young woman being overpowered and impregnated by a stronger, male entity.  That’s the kind of racy story you get in Greek mythology, but it is not the gospel.  The gospel is the trinitarian God’s love overflowing into creation, and one young woman resonating so completely with it, that God becomes part of her.

That’s what it means when God’s messenger, Gabriel, starts off with, “Greetings, favored one!  The Lord is with you!”  She isn’t arbitrarily chosen.  Favored doesn’t mean “lucky.”  The word literally means one who participates in grace.  God is already with her.  The early church has other stories about Mary that do not make it into the New Testament, stories that indicate how Mary had led a particularly sanctified life even before Gabriel showed up.  There is already something about Mary making her particularly resonant with God’s Wisdom and Presence to find her and well up within her.

The Holy Spirit, which is to say the wind or breath of God flows over and through her, the Presence and power of the most high, the One with the most all-inclusive, broad, and expansive vision, the One who sees and knows all, this bright cloud of the divine Presence, called in Hebrew Shekinah, will overshadow envelop and embrace and encircle and fill her.  And new life, the very life of God, will emerge within her.  That’s what Gabriel is saying.

III.

It reminds me of the particularly powerful words of Sojourner Truth, the escaped slave, abolitionist, and preacher.  As part of an amazing address she gives, she says, “That little man in black there say a woman can’t have as much rights as a man because Christ wasn’t a woman.  Where did your Christ come from?  From God and a woman!  Man had nothing to do with him!”

And that is what is going on in this text.  Man, as in a male human, had nothing to do with the coming of God into the world.  It was between God and Mary.  This is clear where Mary says, in verse 34, “I am a virgin.”  In the original what she says literally is “I know no man.”  

To which Gabriel says, “Man?  You don’t need no man!  God and you are going to do this without the men getting involved at all!”  Even Gabriel wasn’t male since angels have no gender.  No, this is the Spirit of God — “Ruach”, a feminine word — arranging with a woman to deliver the saving Presence and Wisdom of the living God into the world. 

Part of the purpose to God’s action was to separate this whole event from the men who ruled the world with violence.  The powerful men who did as they pleased, who owned all the property and made all the decisions?  They didn’t have anything to do with this decision.  Indeed, this act of God undercuts their power and drains them of all authority.  

Here is something that happens without the government getting involved.  The movers and shakers in the marketplace have nothing to do with this.  No Emperors or generals, no CEOs or bosses, no judges or owners or even fathers serve any function in this event.  Only Joseph, the foster-father, will play an important but strictly supporting role.

In choosing Mary, God affirms that it is in and through the powerless and the poor that blessing and goodness and peace will come into the world.  And powerlessness and poverty is not necessarily quantifiable and measurable, but they are spiritual attitudes.  They represent qualities of emptiness and openness, of receptivity and resonance with God’s purpose.  They bear fruit in a life of letting go, listening, staying awake, and being ready for God.  God is always seeking to emerge in our lives; it is the empty vessels that receive God’s light.  The full ones are like the Bethlehem inn, in which there was no room.    

Mary herself realizes what is going on, and in her famous hymn she celebrates the reversals God is bringing about.  In this child she will bear, God “has scattered the proud… put down the mighty… lifted up the lowly… filled the hungry… and sent the rich away empty.”  Those are the folks we identify with, body and soul.

IV.

This text has been horribly misread, as if the virgin birth means God is  somehow anti-sex.  Sex is not the problem; God invented that.  The story does not devalue sex; it devalues men, those who have already taken for themselves more value than they warrant.  The problem is power, and the people who have it and wield it.  Throughout history, violence has been mainly perpetrated by men.  And men, interpreting this passage, have made it about sex in order to draw attention away from themselves, mansplaining Christology.

God is never planted in the world by the force of human will.  But God emerges in the marginalized, devalued, ignored, disenfranchised, degraded, depleted, and debased places, filling them with the bright cloud of Presence, making them zones of healing and new life.  God comes not as a conqueror, but as a gentle breath of fresh hope and reassurance, inspiring us to answer with Mary: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

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