THE  DI  VINE  CODE

Luke 1:26-38; Psalm 139:1-18

Sermon preached on Mother’s Day

May 9, 2004 at MCC Austin, TX

 

 

What a joy and privilege to be with you on this Mother’s Day.  I love that this holiday is in the spring and it falls during the season of Eastertide.  There are some historical reasons for that.  Did you know that Mother’s Day has been a United States national holiday for less than 100 years?

 

It started with a woman named Anna Jarvis who was an Appalachian homemaker.  She organized a mothers’ work day in her community to raise awareness of poor health conditions.  In 1905 Anna Jarvis died and her daughter, also named Anna, began a campaign to memorialize the life and work of her mother.  The way she did this was to lobby politicians to support a day dedicated to mothers.

 

In 1908 daughter Anna organized a church service to celebrate her mother and she handed out white carnations to everyone, because that was her mother’s favorite flower.  In 1913 the House of Representatives adopted a resolution calling for officials of the federal government to wear white carnations on the second Sunday in May.

 

On May 8, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a Joint Resolution which read; “I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the said Joint Resolution, do hereby direct the government officials to display the United States flag on all government buildings and do invite the people of the United States to display the flag at their homes or other suitable places on the second Sunday of May as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

 

That was the first official Mother’s Day in the United States and the tradition continues today.  Except I would venture to say, many of us have traded in our flags for flowers and brunch.  The second Sunday in May has become the most popular day of the year to dine out in the United States.

 

England actually has its own version of Mother’s Day and it is associated with the season of Lent.  Since the 16th century, the middle Sunday of Lent has been celebrated as “Mothering Sunday.”  Mothering Sunday began as a religious festival where people used to visit “Mother Churches.’”

 

In the 17th century Christians went to church on this day to pay their respects to the mother church of their religion.  Since everyone came to church on this day, it became a family reunion of sorts, and people would say they were gone “a mothering.” 

 

They began to bring flowers, usually daffodils, and treats to their mother on this day.  Today, many churches give the children of the congregation a little bunch of spring flowers during the Mothering Sunday service to give to their mothers as a thank you for their love and care throughout the year.

 

There is also a mother’s day that is observed in Israel, which occurs on the eleventh of the Hebrew month of Heshvan (around October or November).  This date is the traditional date of the death of the matriarch Rachel.  Rachel did not have an easy time achieving motherhood.  She spent most of her life watching her sister Leah bear Jacob many children, until she herself gave birth to Joseph.

 

It is the prophet Jeremiah who depicts Rachel as the archetypal mother of all Israel.  She weeps when her children are sent off into exile and will rejoice at their return from captivity.  In the Jewish mystical tradition Rachel was identified with the Divine Presence, or Shekhina. 

 

In the prayers which are said by Jewish women on Matriarch’s Day, Rachel is depicted as a fiercely devoted mother, interceding before God, on behalf of her children.

 

Out of these different traditions I believe we catch a glimpse of the longing all of us have for a Divine Mother.  For Israel that longing is symbolized in the matriarch Rachel.  For Christians, that longing is often symbolized in Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus.

 

There has been a best-seller recently that has tapped into that longing for the feminine divine.  Since its publication last year, Dan Brown’s, The Da Vinci Code, has sold more than 6 million copies and it has created quite a stir in the Christian world. 

 

There are Sunday school classes and Wednesday study groups reading and discussing the book.  There are also a variety of scholars who are writing rebuttals to the book, such as Dallas Theological Seminary’s Darrell Bock, who has titled his work Breaking the Da Vinci Code.

 

People who are upset with the Da Vinci Code believe its author has misrepresented Christian History and been too negative toward the church.  People who are intrigued with the book are curious about the issues it raises about what happened to the spiritual power of the feminine.

 

Dan Brown claims that the loss of the feminine in Christianity is a conspiracy covered up for the last 2000 years and visible only to those who are members of secret societies—in particular a society that can decipher the codes embedded in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci.

 

On this Mother’s Day I want us to explore the Di Vine Code that is in all of us.  It is not a conspiracy that has been covered up, or is known only by a few who dare to explore its mystery.  It is literally our spiritual DNA and it is the feminine principle that exists in all of us regardless of our biological sex or gender identity.  We have a Di Vine Code in our souls that is the birthing place for our life in God.

 

Listen to how Professor of Spiritual Formation, Susan Muto explains it: 

As creatures, as mortals, be-souled by God, our anima (soul) is the receptive center of our being and becoming; it gives breath to our body, life to our living.  Our essence, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, our soul-form, preceded our existence in time and space….Before we existed in time, as the child of this or that set of parents, we were, are, and remain in essence children of God by virtue of our creation and later by our redemption and adoption.  Our soul, so to speak, inhales the Holy Spirit and exhales love into the world.  Anima is the feminine or receptive component celebrated by the mystics every time the Word is born anew in their soul.

No mystic understood or articulated this better than a fourteenth century German Dominican named Meister Eckhart.  He said we must all be like Mary of Nazareth and receive and birth the Word of God in our heart.  It is an “acoustical event” in which one hears the Word and then experiences its being conceived by pure grace in one’s soul.

 

Some have experienced this acoustical event as a literal voice, but for most of us I believe it is a resonating experience—a quickening, or reverberation in our spirit, when we read or hear or call to mind scripture, or when we experience God in nature, or have a powerful dream, or an insight that comes to us in prayer.

Mary of Nazareth had such an acoustical event and she is an example of the feminine principle in all of us that says “yes” to God who longs to be born in each of us.  Professor Muto says she models for us “pure, uninterrupted receptivity.  With her whole being Mary of Nazareth waits upon the Lord….she lives in awe-filled abiding.”

The very millisecond Mary says yes to the Divine Messenger, her virginal womb opens to welcome the seed of the Word that will be enfleshed through her obedient, courageous consent, her surrender in full abandonment to the mystery.  No hedge of hesitation prevents her from relinquishing all that she is, does, and thinks to God.  Her submissive receptivity, far from being a mark of feminine weakness, becomes a passageway to transformative power, to the magnification of her inmost self to such a degree that the impossible becomes possible, “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:3)

 

Mary is our model for what it means to be a disciple.  We are to be radically open to God’s Word.  In our receptivity and obedience we allow the Word to be born from inside of us out into the world.  Bringing healing to our world.  Being a reservoir of divine energy and love that flows into the cosmos.

Evangelical Christians like to use the phrase ‘born again’ to speak of a conversion experience.  For them, a born again Christian is one who asked Jesus Christ into their heart as their personal Lord and Savior. 

The phrase comes from a conversation Jesus has with Nicodemus, who came to him in the dark womb of the night.  Jesus tells him, “No one can see the realm of God without being born again/from above.”  Nicodemus doesn’t understand, he asks, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?  Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”  To which Jesus answered, “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’

I believe if there is a conspiracy in Christianity it is the limitation of the meaning of this passage concerning our spiritual birth.  Being born again or from above is not a one-time event.  It is a life-time invitation to give birth to the Word of God in us, AND to be born from above.  One writer has said, “We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.”

The great mystics tell us our whole life is about being born in God.  They call it Divine Union or Spiritual Marriage.  Not only do we invite Jesus into our heart, but our heart becomes hidden in God’s heart.  Our heartbeat is God’s heartbeat.  We are born again and again back to our original source.

This is what Jesus meant when he said, “You must be born from above.”  This is what Paul meant when he said, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live, but it is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.”  Through the resurrection power and mystery of the risen Christ we participate in his life and death.  We die to our ‘old selves’ our ‘wounded selves’ our ‘ego selves’ our ‘scared and fearful selves’ our ‘hateful and judgmental selves.’  We do this by letting go into the divine mystery, only to find that we are born again and again, raised to newness of life, with every letting go.

 

There were some Christian mystics who understood Jesus suffering and dying on the cross as ‘labor pains’ for humanity’s spiritual birth.  And we owe a great debt to the 14th century English mystic Julian of Norwich who called Jesus our mother.  She says,

 

Our Saviour is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born….

 

Our kind Mother, our gracious Mother, for he would be wholly our mother in every way, he took up the ground of his work at its lowest point, in the Maiden’s womb, with utter meekness….clothing himself in our poor flesh, so that he might himself perform the service and office of motherhood in all things.

 

The mother’s task is nearest, readiest, and most sure, for it is the most real truth.  This task might never, nor could it, be done by anyone other than himself.  We well know that all our mothers bear us to pain and to dying.  Yet what does he do?  Our own true Mother Jesus, he who is all love, bears us to joy and endless living—blessed may he be!

 

The mother may suckle her children with her own milk, but our precious Mother Jesus, he may feed us with himself.  And he does this most courteously, with much tenderness, with the Blessed Sacrament that is our precious food of true life.

 

The mother may lay the child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus, he may lead us homely into his blessed breast by his sweet open side and show within in part the Godhead and the joys of heaven, with spiritual certainty and endless bliss.

 

Happy Mother’s Day.