“Thank You,
Bird Women, for Keeping Us Down to Earth”
OK, OK. So this is how it was. It’s
Thursday, right? We’re all standing around the corner, squatting down,
listening to Jesus talk and ask questions as usual, right? I mean, these
forty days since he died and rose from the grave we have been following what
he was saying a whole lot better than we used to when we thought it was all
about us. We used to think the whole point of learning the faith and going
to worship and saying our prayers and studying scripture was so we could
become closer personally to God and impress God with all our holiness and
even escape the worst judgment of God when that day came. I mean, we used
to wonder a lot which of us was doing best and would get to sit closest to
Jesus on his throne up in heaven forever. We thought it was safe to be
saved!
But once Jesus rose from the grave, and
showed us how real his wounds are, and even asked us for something to eat,
and told us to stay in Jerusalem, right where he had been arrested and
killed, and we thought we were next – then we began to get it. It was not
so much about us earning our way to see God somewhere else, like in that old
“three-story universe” we used to think of. Rather it was about opening
ourselves to God here on earth, making a way for God to live in us and with
us and for us and through us, and not just us – not just us as holy persons,
not even just our people Israel as a holy nation. Jesus was saying and
showing us by his own life and work that there was a new source of power, a
new way of being and doing, even a new way of baptizing, not just with
water, as John did, to save us from the end-times, but also with Holy
Spirit, with a fire that burns and never goes out. We would be led, wounds
and all, to follow.
We would be led to witness in our own
lives and in our own works all that Jesus had come to say and to do, and
even things Jesus could not say and do, because this Holy Spirit would go
before us and make a way for us in the hearts and minds, the bodies and
spirits, of all other peoples whoever they are, wherever we meet them. We
get it now. It does not mean we are headed off safely to heaven with Jesus,
to wait for some kind of future “coming again.” It means the crucified
Jesus is alive and well and at work in the Holy Spirit and leading us here
and now, through the places we already are and know, through Judea and even
Samaria, which we always tried to avoid like the plague, and to what Jesus
keeps calling “the ends of the earth!” And maybe, just maybe, we are
beginning to see, “the ends of the earth” are not means of saving ourselves
from death and destruction. Rather, the ends are the means of giving
ourselves to God’s promise and passion to bring salvation, fulfillment, to
earth itself!
And the means of God’s promise and
passion are, for us, the life and the work of Jesus. In our baptism with
Holy Spirit, again, and again, and again, Jesus keeps “coming again,” and
Jesus’ “coming again” is us! We are the body of Christ! We are the only
provision Jesus has made to see that his life and his work go on! And to
prove it, as we stood there watching on Thursday, like a bird, like a plane,
Jesus took off! He was lifted up into a cloud, and we never saw him again.
Again, we were tempted to keep looking up, to keep hoping, even against all
the hope he had been showing us, that we could avoid or escape all the
hazards and hassles of following him here as those saved on earth, instead
of as those safe in heaven. For suddenly, there on the corner, stand these
guys in white robes we never had seen before. And they’re asking why we
think Jesus would quit on us now, after all he has gone through, for us and
for all the world! Why we think Jesus would take any easy way out for
himself before God is done with everyone else! Why we think we cannot just
bloom right where we are planted!!
My mother is here this morning. She is
known to family as “Bird Woman” in more ways than one. Ever since her
teacher, her Aunt Harriett, started a bird chart in her third-grade room, my
mother never met a bird she could not spy and try to identify! Our coffee
table teemed with bird books. When her kids left the nest, my mother
replaced them with a nature print gallery there, featuring all her mostly
local favorite bird artists. Imagine how thrilled we were to find a nest in
the wreath she sent us for Christmas! It’s of the family lore that
throughout her pregnancy with me, mom and dad bantered about how easy it was
for “Bird Woman,” Sacagawea of Lewis & Clark tradition, just to pop off the
trail behind bushes and bear her child all by herself! When the doctor came
out from delivering me, the first thing he asked my father was, who is this
“Bird Woman” anyway? According to him, the last thing my mother said as she
went under anesthesia was, to hell with the Bird Woman! Specially on this
day and at this time and place, we need a “bird’s eye” view of the whole
world, combined with a “Bird Women’s” connection to the whole earth.
However any of us got born, we are here
to acknowledge this morning, a mother made it possible. Our common way of
origin is unequivocal. None of us gets here but through a womb. Women,
mothers, are closest to God in the cycle of bringing forth life on the
earth. Undoubtedly some kinds of disbelief about that, some kinds of dis-ease
with our own limitations, lead men to fear the powers of women, often to
polarize our responses. We tend to pedestalize Mary and to demonize Eve.
Sojourner Truth -- forerunner to Jeanette Rankin, Susan B. Anthony (who’s
the only woman other than Sacagawea to be put on a gold dollar!), and many
others in the ongoing, worldwide struggle for women’s rights as freely,
fully human rights --says in her famous speech of 1851 –
“That man over there says that women
need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have
the best places everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or
over mud-puddles, or gives me any best places. And ain’t I a woman?
Look at me! Look at my arms! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered
into barns, and no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman? I could
work as much and eat as much as a man when I could get it – and beat the
lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and
seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out my mother’s
grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain’t I a woman?”
“Then that little man in black there
says women can’t have as much rights as men ‘cause Christ wasn’t a
woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come
from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. “If the
first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the whole world
upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it
back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it,
the men better let them. “Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old
Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.”
Women, mothers, motherhood express the
purest impulse of God as Holy Spirit, “The Lord, the Giver of Life” -- for
motherhood is pure gift-gifting. If the work mothers do was compensated
fairly, it would add forty percent to the Gross National Product! Mothers
give freely and fully in pure response to need, any need, without question,
qualification, condition, even much hesitation. Genevieve Vaughan, author
of For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange, urges us to get over
our need to idealize and sentimentalize women, mothers, marriage, and
family. Jesus redirects our attention from “thy kingdom come, thy will be
done, in heaven because we sure can’t find it on earth,” to “thy kingdom
come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus compares
himself to a mothering hen who longs to take the troubled city of Jerusalem
under wing, but we the people will not do the justice that makes for peace.
Genevieve Vaughan proposes motherhood as
the model for a whole new way of life together, a whole healthier way of
arranging our business together: “Women’s free labor in the home . . . can
be seen as a gift of those practicing a gift economy . . . . Gift relations
create community . . . . Giftgiving gives value to the other . . . .
Restore the mother image as the human image and giftgiving as the human way
. . . . Mother Earth is not just a metaphor. Nature actually functions
according to the gift way . . . . Appreciate and learn from gift aspects of
indigenous cultures. Educate all children to be nurturing like their
mothers. And educate mothers to validate giftgiving and to see its
extensions in society at large . . . . Women must lead also because we have
been doing more free work for centuries than men, paying attention to needs
in the family and in society. Otherwise children and society would not have
survived. We must lead, informed by the values of the gift economy which we
have been practicing so that gift giving can be restored as the way to peace
and abundance for all.”
Let us thank women, let us thank mothers,
let us thank mothering, as we thank God this morning, for all gifts of life,
for all gifts of love, for all gifts of care and attention, all gifts of
nurture and growth, all gifts insight and change, all gifts of heaven on
earth! Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
