Third Sunday of Advent, December 12, 2010
Year A: Canticle 15
Grace Episcopal Church, Norwalk, CT
Loving God, you call us to be your stories in the world. We come before you seeking to be touched by your story. Open our lips to share our stories with one another and to bring comfort, inspiration, joy and laughter to each other. Amen.
The first time I went to Ireland I had to take the bus from Shannon in the center of Western Ireland to Sligo, which is in the Northwest part of the country, to meet my tour group. The trip included a bus change in Galway. As we boarded the bus, a group of nuns got on and sat in front. I didn’t think anything of it until we pulled out of one of the small towns on the route, and the driver announced that our next stop was Knock. I almost fell out of my seat laughing.
Knock is the site of a shrine to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and you’re probably wondering why I found the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock funny. Some years ago the local parish priest managed to push through the approvals and raise the money to build an airport just outside of this small Irish village. Build it in time for a Papal visit. The priest became the laughingstock. Why did this tiny town, shrine or no shrine, need an airport? And Irish folk singer Christie Moore wrote a song about the building of the airport. A bitingly satiric and funny song. I don’t know if the priest lived long enough to see it, but he had the last laugh. The airport at Knock is one of the busiest regional airports in Ireland even without the pilgrims coming to visit the shrine.
The shrine in Knock is a walled complex. As we pulled into town, the bus was just high enough for me to look over the wall and see the church built where several people saw a vision of St. Mary, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, and Christ as the Eucharistic Lamb. The street that runs along the wall, the village’s main street, is lined with souvenir shops. You wouldn’t believe the number of plastic holy water bottles, plastic statues of Mary, plastic rosaries—or maybe you would. Between the tchotchkes and the song, how seriously can you take this kind of thing?
Before my visit to Ireland, the only direct experience I’d had with people who visited a Marian shrine and made devotions to Mary were members of, well, a cult, for lack of a better term. This cult is centered on the so-called Our Lady of the Roses, Mary help of Mothers in Bayside, Queens. These women—and they are mostly women— in their blue berets would show up in Hartford and other places across Connecticut for any legislative hearing or vote and any activity surrounding civil rights legislation for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. This group was virulently homophobic and cited messages from their Mary to justify it. On the other hand, even the local Archdiocese has found the supposed visions to completely lack authenticity and condemned the group for proclaiming things contrary to Roman Catholic teaching. For the better part of a decade, if I was attending or participating in something to do with the fight for the protection of my civil rights, they were there, too.
Not very positive or favorable experiences when it comes to Mary’s presence in the world.
Of course, most of us of European descent have heard of the more famous shrines of Mary: Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje, to name a few. There’s even one held dear by Anglicans—Our Lady of Walsingham, with a secondary shrine in Ohio, of all places. But I would hazard a guess that most of you hadn’t heard of Our Lady of Guadalupe until Lois arrived here at Grace, and we began our conversations with Iglesia Betania. I hadn’t either, until several years ago when I took a job at the Episcopal Church Center where I worked regularly with individuals, congregations, and dioceses in Province IX, which includes parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Why not until then? Because, quite frankly, my involvement with Latin American, specifically Mexican, communities had been fairly limited until then. My first serious boyfriend may have been Mexican and Apache, but given that period in time and his community’s culture, we didn’t have much to do with his family. So we never went to any family celebrations.
So let me tell you another story; this time not one of mine. This is Juan Diego’s story.
Almost 500 years ago, in the Mexican portion of the Spanish empire lived a mestizo, a young man of mixed native and Spanish blood, named Juan Diego. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 9th, he was on his way to mass in Mexico City and passed Tepeyac Hill—and I’m going to mispronounce the name of the hill throughout because it predates the coming of Spanish to Mexico—he passed the hill where he heard music that sounded a bit like birds singing. He stopped to see where the music was coming from and heard a young woman’s voice calling his name. He climbed the hill and saw at the top a young mestizo woman surrounded by radiant light, the Virgin Mary. She called Juan mi hijo, my son, and told him that she wanted him to be her messenger to the bishop of Mexico City. Her message was that she wanted a church built for her children.
It’s important for you to know a couple of things at this point in the story. Remember, the Spaniards had conquered Mexico not too long before. Unlike the English up here, they were more interested in accumulating wealth. They moved in just enough colonists to govern the area while forcing the native population into a state of near, if not actual, slavery. As with any kind of clash of cultures, children are born of mixed parentage. So it was in Mexico. And those children, the mestizos, were looked down upon and excluded not only by the Spanish but by the Mexicans as well.
So when Juan arrived at the bishop’s residence, before he could even tell his unbelievable story, he had to deal with the fact that he was coming to see a Spanish bishop served by both Spaniards and Mexicans who wanted nothing to do with the likes of Juan Diego. The servants tried to turn him away, but he was persistent and was finally granted an audience with the bishop. At first, the bishop didn’t believe Juan and asked him to come back another day. A discouraged Juan retuned to Tepeyac and asked the Virgin to use someone else more worthy than himself. Sound like anyone else we know? Moses, perhaps? Mary assured him that she had chosen him personally as her ambassador. The next day he returned to the bishop to try again. Still disbelieving, the bishop sent Juan to tell the lady he needed a sign in order to know if she truly was the Virgin Mary. Doubting Thomas, anyone?
When Juan relayed the bishop’s message, Mary told him to return the next day, and she would give him the sign he needed. But when Juan got home, he found his uncle very ill. So instead of returning to see the Virgin, Juan stayed home to care for his uncle. On the morning of December 12th Juan rushed to Mexico City to find a priest to administer the last rites to his uncle. He went around the back of Tepeyac hill in order to avoid Mary, though he thought she would understand. But she met him on the path took and told him that his uncle had already been healed. Later Juan would find out that at that same moment the Virgin had appeared to his uncle, who was immediately restored to health. Mary urged Juan to go to the top of the hill where he would find flowers growing. He did as she asked and was astonished to find so many flowers where there should have been frost. He cut and gathered them in his cloak. Mary arranged them, rolled up his cloak, and told him not to unroll it until he saw the bishop.
Once again, the bishop’s servants gave Juan Diego a hard time, but again, he persisted. When he finally reached the bishop, he told him about his conversation with the Virgin. Then he unrolled his cloak, and the flowers tumbled to the ground. The bishop, Juan, and everyone else in the room were startled by what else was there. On Juan’s cloak appeared an image of Mary as Juan had seen her. The bishop then believed and promised to build the shrine requested by the Virgin.
Juan Diego’s story does not end there. In 2002 Pope John Paul II canonized Juan Diego, making him the first Mexican saint. And his cloak is preserved to this day in la BasÃlica de Santa Maria de Guadalupe in Mexico City. If you get a chance, you can see a copy of this image in the chapel, where the young people of Betania have decorated the altar for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And when you look, I want you to notice something different about the image of the Virgin. Unlike every other apparition of Mary, even throughout Latin America, she isn’t a young white woman. Mary appeared to Juan Diego as a young mestizo woman. She looked like him. And by calling Juan “mi hijo”—my son—she was telling not only Juan, but the whole world, that he and all those like him, the despised mestizos, were her children and children of God. She arrived with a changed appearance to bring a message to a changing world.
So why have I told you these stories, mine and Juan Diego’s? Why are they important to a small Episcopal congregation in Norwalk, Connecticut? For one thing, without stories, there would be no church. Without the stories of the first disciples and first Christians, we would have no sacred story and no Christian community. It was through the retelling of stories that the Gospel spread. And not just stories about Jesus, but also the very personal stories of those early Christians and Christians across the centuries. It is those personal stories that forge community because they help us to get to know each other and understand each others’ faith journeys. They are what help us to forge a community. Here at Grace we are in the midst of forming a new community with the members of Iglesia Betania.
Even with each other we need to keep telling these stories because not everyone has heard them. For instance, we of Grace and many of Betania have not heard Juan Diego’s story because it comes primarily from the Mexican communities. Although that’s changing both here and across Latin America
Now, more than ever, we need to share our stories. We need to learn from each other that we are individuals, not those Anglos, those Islanders, or those Latin Americans. Each of us has something important to bring to this new community. And without telling our stories to each other and then not only telling them to the larger community around us, but then engaging that greater community in shared ministry, without sharing ourselves, how do we bring the face of Jesus, the face of God, to others?
Almighty God, of your saving grace you called Mary of Nazareth to be the mother of your only begotten Son: Inspire us by the same grace to follow her example of bearing God to the world. We pray through Jesus Christ her son our Savior. Amen.
