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Sermons
How Could One
So High Be Dragged So Low?
Luke 8:1-3;
John 19:25; 20:1-18
Rev. Kenneth M. Locke
The Downtown Presbyterian Church
Have you ever done a little digging around
in your family history and been embarrassed by what you found? You knew there were a few unsavory characters
but you never realized it was that bad!
I remember it dawning on me that my family had been unapologetic
slaveholders for years. I also have a
horse-thief, a moonshiner, and a murderer in my background. And the murderer was a woman.
These things are embarrassing but good to
pull out and remember because they remind us we are human, we are frail. They remind us families can rise and fall and
there are some mistakes we don’t want to make twice.
The one holy, catholic and apostolic
church, the universal church to which we all belong, is a family. And over the years that family has made
mistakes. Last week we talked about one
of the women of the Bible who was oppressed by our Scriptures. This week I want us to talk a minute about
one of the women of the Bible who was and is being oppressed by our church
family.
I’m speaking of Mary Magdeline, Mary
of Magdela. Magdela was a town on the
west shore of the
In all 4 of the Gospels Mary Magdeline is
at or near the cross when Jesus dies, unlike the men who have all run
away. And in each Gospel Mary Magdeline
is one of the women who goes to the tomb and finds it empty.
But then Mary drops out of sight. She does not appear in Acts or any of the
epistles. She disappears from the
record. But she does not disappear from
the popular imagination. Looking at the early church writings that
never made it into our Scriptures, Mary shows up a lot. In these non-canonical writings Mary has a
strong, powerful voice and often is portrayed speaking out against Peter and
the other male leaders of the church.
How is it then that Mary Magdeline is now
synonymous with prostitution?
That’s not in the Bible.
How is it that Mary Magdeline is the supreme example of the repentant
sinner? Why not Peter, who denied Jesus
three times and was nowhere near the crucifixion? Why not the Garisene demoniac, from whom a
whole legion of demons were driven, not just seven? Why is it that this woman, about whom we know
so little, why is it that she is now the personification of lust and sins of
the flesh? Some of you may remember when
calling a woman a “Magdeline” meant she had questionable
virtue. And I’m sure many of you
have seen the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ” where Jesus is
tempted to have children with the prostitute Mary Magdeline. How could one so high be dragged so low?
Well, part of the answer comes from church
history. In the 5th century
Pope Gregory Great, who gave us the Gregorian Calendar, first associated Mary
Magdeline with the nameless woman who anoints Jesus’ feet with costly
perfume. How did she get that
money? Well, she had demons so she must
have been evil so obviously her gains were ill gotten which means sins of the
flesh. Repenting, she used her money to
support Jesus.
The story caught on and became
accepted. In the Middle Ages there were
many devotees of Mary Magdeline. But
then she became less revered and now is remembered as the sinner who sunk as
low as you could get and still repent.
We remember that if Mary could go that low and be forgiven we can
too.
But being a conservative Calvinist I
believe there’s another reason for Mary’s mistreatment: the sinful
nature of human beings. Men and women
are corrupt. We are sinful by our very
nature and can do no good apart from the moving of the Holy Spirit within us.
Being men, the church leaders eventually
rallied around Peter. But Peter had
image problems: he had denied Jesus three times. The woman with the 7 demons was not only at
the cross, she was at the tomb as well and in John’s Gospel loves Jesus
so much she is fiercely clinging to him and won’t let go.
So what do we do, we make Mary a woman of
the streets. We demonize her. We take the demons Jesus removed and put them
back in her and say, “thanks be to God for this evil, wicked woman. If God can love her God can surely
love us.”
What we forget, of course, is that this
says more about us than it does about Mary.
What the male leaders of the church did
was forcefully create a sinner reflecting their own sinfulness and darkest
desires, and then held up that sinner as the worst of the worst, one whom only
God could forgive. Do you catch the
irony here? Do you catch the violence
being done to women in generals and to Mary in particular? We take a good and generous woman who is with
Jesus at his resurrection, the great turning point of our faith, and make her
into a sinner in our own image so God can forgive her and us.
I want to say again what I said last week
– I am not male bashing. Women are
just as sinful as men and if the positions were reversed women would have done
something similar. What I’m saying
is we in power positions must be aware of our tendency to project our darkness
onto others, and tar them with the sins we want to commit.
Now this is pretty heavy stuff and most of
it’s not very nice. But we need to
know what we’ve done in the past so we won’t do it again. We need to have the courage to look at our
ugly past and the assurance that that past is forgiven.
In a few minutes we’re going to baptize
a little baby. This baby is not going to
remember what happens here today. But
when he grows up and starts asking questions what are we going to tell him? Are we going to sweep our past under the rug,
or are we going to tell him about the violence our church family has done? Are we going to explain how the crusades were
blood sport, are we going to talk about the church in Germany capitulating to
Hitler, are we going to talk about clergymen in this country writing to Martin
Luther King Jr. to please calm down and not cause a riot? Are we going to explain why it took so long
for Presbyterians to ordain women and recognize their ministry as equal to
men’s? Are we going to help him
peel back the layers of abuse and discover the woman in the garden clinging so
tightly to Jesus?
How about if, instead of celebrating Mary
Magdeline’s supposed repentance, the repentance forced on her by male
leadership looking for a way to tighten its grip on power, how about if instead
we celebrate her stewardship of wealth?
How about we celebrate her following Jesus to the cross, and going to
the tomb? How about if we celebrate how
in the Gospels Mary Magdeline was commissioned to tell the good news of
Jesus’ resurrection before the disciples were? How about if we remember her oppression, and
then lift her up as a model disciple for everyone, women and men?
Now that’s a family with strength,
with faith, a family worth being baptized into.
May we be that kind of church family.
Amen.
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