Mary smashes the patriarchy

Luke 1: 46-55
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
December 23, 2018



The Annunciation by Rose M. Barron


            

Some of you may be wondering what does it mean to “smash the patriarchy”. On the website Quora I found this definition: “Smashing the patriarchy means challenging the dominant social, political and cultural system that values masculinity over femininity. The patriarchy perpetuates oppressive and limiting gender roles, sexual assault, and the political and economic subordination of women. Smashing the patriarchy means challenging and confronting the assumptions underlying this system. The patriarchy hurts both men and women, and both men and women can challenge it.”





But this doesn’t go far enough. Smashing the patriarchy means challenging the systems that value masculinity over every other identity and expression; the subordination of any gender that isn’t cisgender male; the patriarchy hurts everyone, and everyone can challenge it. Smashing the patriarchy means doing away with societal expectations based on gender, gender expression, sexuality, skin color, ability, class, nationality, and ethnicity. Patriarchy is the foundation beneath any system that values power over, competition, hierarchy, supremacy, privilege, violence. Patriarchy hurts and wounds all of humanity and the very earth from which it draws life. So in the silence of the priest Zechariah, when Mary prophesies and sings,



“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”





She’s smashing the patriarchy. She goes pretty far but not far enough, and yet she’s showing us the loose threads to pull which will lead to its unraveling. Why is strength masculine? Why is God my Savior masculine? In 1973, feminist theologian Mary Daly defined the patriarchy as, “If God is male, then the male is God.” So is Mary in the gospel of Luke saying, “Please, O God, unseat and topple the powers that oppress us but keep the domestic and religious arrangements the same”? In the words of Elastigirl, “I don’t think so. I don’t think so.” In an effort to liberate language about the Divine (and those who hear it), some churches use the feminine pronoun. “SHE has shown strength with HER arm; SHE has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.”



But even that language is still exclusive. If we are created in the divine image, God is all genders and beyond gender. “They have shown strength with their arm; they have scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. They have brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; they have filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” When everyone is made in God’s image, we see God in everyone. And use their pronouns.



Where Mary appears to go too far (yet we have not) is when she uses the past tense to describe these events. God has already accomplished all of this in Elizabeth’s and Mary’s pregnancies, in their children yet to be born. God’s promises are kept in the forthcoming births of John and Jesus. And yet do not all parents have high hopes for their children? Did not our parents have dreams for us and their parents and so on? Hopes that the world would be a better place because of us, will be a better place because of our children?





But then we look around us and we see how little the world has changed, how little humanity has changed since Mary sang her song; how we seem to repeat history but with increased technology. As we have increased our ability to care for and feed every human being, we have also increased our ability to destroy all life on this planet, and which one are we closer to realizing? Yesterday I read another of David Hayward’s cartoons, in which a crowd of people are poised over Jesus in the manger, with one person accusing, “So, Jesus, you know how it was prophesied that you would bring down the rulers from their thrones? Right about now would be a really good time for that!” We’ve had not only 2,000 years but hundreds more from the justice visions of Isaiah and Jeremiah and many others, all the way back to the story of God establishing a covenant with Noah, with all people living in peace and harmony. What happened to smashing the patriarchy?




The patriarchy is smart. It created its own throne, put itself on that throne, and enshrined itself with power and policy and prophets and tradition, then kept reinventing itself. Way better than Madonna. Even though it is power over, it’s subtle, insidious. When 39% of all women and 47% of white women voted for a president that hardly anyone would call a feminist, when the 2019 Congress will have a total of 126 women for the first time—one fifth of the seats, yet still comprising a little over half of the nation’s population—when the Violence Against Women Act is allowed to lapse in a government shutdown, when lynching is only now becoming a federal crime, when we are only now beginning to understand that no two human beings are the same and yet we all are bone and flesh and blood, and now divided more than ever, we can see how difficult it is to bring down the powerful, entrenched on their thrones.



If violence and force do not work, and waiting for God to do something begins to look like doing nothing, if our policies and politics clearly do not work, then maybe it’s time to smash by stepping over and around the power-over types. Listen to 15 year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden when she spoke on behalf of the world’s youth climate movement before the UN’s 24th Climate Change Conference in Poland earlier this month. She is a modern day Mary, full of her own hope and power.





As she sat next to UN Secretary General António Guterres, she rebuked, “How can we expect countries like India, Columbia, or Nigeria to care about the climate crisis if we who already have everything don’t care even a second about our actual commitments to the Paris agreement?” When school started in August, Greta went to the Swedish parliament and went on strike for the climate. Some people said she should’ve been in school. Others said that she should become a climate scientist so she can “solve the climate crisis”. Her response: “The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. And why should I be studying for a future that soon may be no more, when no one is doing anything to save that future? …Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. So we can no longer save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed.”





“So we have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for our future. They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again. We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not. The people will rise to the challenge. And since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago. Thank you.” And as usual, they gave the young prophet their smiles and polite, appreciative applause, instead of what should have been tears of remorse.






It’s on us. It’s always been on us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We cannot smash the patriarchy when we have made ourselves comfortable in it. Jesus came to make us, the comfortable, uncomfortable, which is good news for those who have been made to feel uncomfortable in their own skin; those who have been dehumanized because of their gender, their gender expression, their sexuality, their body, their mind, their religion, their skin color, their poverty. Jesus came to disrupt and disturb us, to show us how we have made peace with what does not bring peace. The peace we seek, the hope we desire, the joy that eludes us, the love that can knit us together, comes to us whenever we are able to say with the humility and strength of Mary, “Let it happen to me”, and we let go.


Amen.

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