History has been made this week with the announcement of the
first woman bishop in the Church of England.
The candidate is someone that has not been on any of the media shortlists
and was not one of the bookies favourites but has been one of the eight women
observers at the House of Bishops’ meetings.
She is an ordinary priest, Vicar of Hale in Manchester, though no doubt
with some extra ordinary gifts, as so many have. She is one of the batch of women who have
been ordained in the natural order of things – she was among the first to be deaconed
and priested according to the same timescale that her male colleagues have been
through. She was not ordained in any of
the catch up ordinations. She is, as I
termed it at the diocesan celebration of 20 years of women priests in the
Church of England, held here in June, part of the ‘new normality’. All of this is an occasion for great
rejoicing. “My soul magnifies the Lord.”
(Luke 1:46) “This is the
Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes.” (Psalm 118:23)
Libby Lane will be consecrated in the New Year, on 26th
January in York Minster. She will need
our prayers for what lies ahead, even without the added pressure of being the
first woman to hold such an office.
There will be a media whirl around her and I pray that she will not have
to bear this weight on her own for long, that there will be a flurry of similar
appointments over the coming months – there are certainly plenty of vacancies
and women with the gifts and skills required to match them. I expect at least one of the diocesan bishop
vacancies will be a woman in the coming months too. It would be bizarre if that were not the
case. Clearly there is a determination
for it to happen.
An ordinary woman changing history, bearing Christ to the
world, bringing to birth God’s grace among us!
Well, where have we heard that before?
We have heard it in our gospel reading as the angel announced the
startling news to Mary that she was to bear and give birth to the Christ, God
among us and this would be possible because the Holy Spirit would make it
happen (Luke 1:26-38).
God brings life to spring up where there was previously none. He makes those who think new birth is no
longer possible to conceive as in the case of Elizabeth, the mother of John the
Baptist. She is already expecting. God has worked wonders already. Just because it hasn’t happened before is no
straight jacket for the Christian Church founded on this gospel. Astounding things are part of the new
normality which Christ brings in through being brought to birth by Mary. The Christian faith has radical
transformation, change and disruption written into its title deeds.
And the wonder is that this comes through an ordinary woman. We know next to nothing of her background,
though traditions have been built up over the centuries. Sadly some of them serve to make her
exceptional and something separate from the rest of us and to my mind these
miss the startling point. The idea that
Mary’s conception was itself out of the ordinary, the belief held by some known
as the ‘Immaculate Conception’, is to the my mind a distortion of what we are
presented with in Mary. She is
ordinary. She is just a young woman. And the rest of us are just ordinary
too. But we also know that we can do
remarkable things and be agents of change in the world. So it should not surprise us that she can
too. We are all called to bring Christ
to birth in our hearts and lives and to be midwives of his kingdom. That is remarkable too. Mary being chosen is exceptional, but also
not. It is God’s incredible, profligate
love at work and it touches us too.
All of this is because God has confidence in his
creation. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t
bother with it. He made it, brought it
all into being through the mysterious and wonderful processes that are creation
and evolution, and this was not accidental but planned and thought through, if
we can use that language. Mary stands as
an incredible symbol of that confidence.
God is not distant but literally among us and inside us bringing his
purposes to fruition and completion. The
world is pregnant with the grace of God and so are we. This is startling news. We don’t need to be born through some out of
the ordinary way for God to find us worthy of his attention and overshadowing. We just have to say ‘let it be with me
according to your word’.
But there is a desire to keep God at a distance – God is so
much safer that way. If we could find a
microscope surely we could find God in the shadows or tucked away in some
distant corner of the universe. But this
is not what the God of Christ brought to birth through Mary reveals about
himself. We will not find him like that
because he is not separate in that way.
The world is alive because of God and without God would not be. It is not separate from but exists
within. So God breaking in, or breaking
out, however you want to see this, is not actually that unusual. And when we have got our heads round the
observation that there is sentient, conscious and intelligent life at all, then
God’s presence concentrating or popping up is not that fanciful after all.
Some of what we talk about when thinking of Mary is heavily
laden with metaphor as are all our religious musings. Some of those metaphors work better than
others for me. I find myself bristling
when the metaphor being used serves to distance us from God, rather than affirm
God’s confidence in his creation as it should do. So when the choir sings anthems from a past
age to Mary as ‘Queen of Heaven’, wonderful pieces from the choral heritage
that they are, at best I find them unhelpful – sometimes audibly so, as my
colleagues will testify! Everything we
say about Mary is actually about God’s grace among us and for us in Christ. She is one of us, not separate from us, and
so if we affirm her to be in a state of grace it is because that is the hope we
have been given in Christ, the one she bore, for ourselves. It is metaphor as are the crowns of glory
that await God’s saints, the holy ones, those who are brought into the
inheritance of Christ as sons and daughters of God. But it comes through Christ, through God’s
redeeming confidence in his creation.
That message gets confused and lost at times, and when I feel that is
happening, that is when I bristle! As a
son of the Reformation and unashamedly so, I want to restore a balance I think
has been lost, which is what the Reformation was about – recalibrating the
balance.
Some of what we say about Mary carries misogynistic
overtones. We refer to her sexual
status. On one level this points to the
wonder of God’s activity, bringing life and his grace to fruition, whether that
is as a metaphor or literal, but it is set in the context of a world that made
women ritually unclean and required purification after childbirth. This now seems strange at best to our ears. So we need to watch out that what we say
doesn’t slip into assumptions which are now seen as sexist and misogynistic. Mary is an unattainable ideal as a virgin and
a mother. This can form a wedge where we
want to affirm her unity with us. Mary
can be made into a stick a patriarchal church uses to beat women and in turn that
ends up beating men too because of what is lost of our self-understanding under
God through this distortion.
So any celebration of Mary always comes with a health
warning. What we say about her should
enrich and enhance our understanding of God in Christ, and our place in his
love and purpose. She is not the fourth
member of the Trinity, which is mathematically not possible, and we should be
careful not to imply she is. If we do we
damage the radical message and revelation which God brings about through
her. God has confidence in his creation
and loves it so much that he bothers with it.
Special as she is in the story of our salvation it is in her
ordinariness that we find our hope. God
calls us all to bring Christ to birth in our hearts and lives and to be
midwives of his Kingdom.
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