My sisters, here we are, this glorious last morning of our time together. Is it not wonderful! I think times like these are "eschatological glimpses," glimpses of what the kin-dom of God will be like. "Eschatological" refers to the fullness of time when things, animals, the earth, humans, we all will have the opportunity to reach beyond, to become what, who, God intended us to be. So eschatological glimpses are moments in our lives when we have a sense of "this is what it is going to be like."
This assembly is an eschatological glimpse because we have reached beyond, we have listened, we have dialogued, we have shouldered the burden of knowing. This assembly is an eschatological glimpse because we leave empowered and ready to be evermore women of revolutionary integrity, women who do justice, women who stand in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. Yes, this is what the kin-dom of God is like, la familia de Dios. No uso la frase "reino de Dios" porque para mí Dios es amiga, es madre tanto como padre. Y "reino" es una palabra sexista.
I use kin-dom instead of kingdom because kingdom is a sexist word referring to males, and it is a classist term that refers to monarchs. We are the family of God, the sisters and brothers of Jesus who do the will of God. We are God's kin because, as Patricia Tucker told us night before last, for us to be blessed means to be willing to risk, to be willing to risk in order to bring about justice.
Today our Bible study has to do with Mary. Mary, the mother of Jesus; Miriam of Nazareth; Mary, the bride of Joseph, and she married him!1 What a woman! As she said to us in the dramatization we just experienced, she was an insider, she was a disciple, the disciple par excellence.2 I'm not sure the disciples of Jesus would have stuck together and made a go of it, followed The Way—as Christianity seems to have been known in the beginning—I think they might not have stayed together at the beginning had Mary not been there.
My favorite image of Mary is at the beginning of the book of Acts. The disciples are together at the upper room. The men in the group had run away when the going got difficult. They had failed Jesus; one of them had betrayed him and their leader had denied him. And now Jesus was not with them anymore, "When is he going to come back?" They keep wondering. So Mary gathers them, "Let's stay together," she says to them; "let's encourage each other, let's figure out together what we should do." And then, Pentecost takes place.
Mary of Nazareth, Mary the mother of Jesus, and for the early community-at least the community that is the context for the Gospel of Luke- Mary, the representative of the followers of Jesus. When in the Magnificat we hear her say, "All generations will call me blessed," this is not a boastful proclamation. For the Jewish people, in poems like this one, in proclamations, during their celebrations, the person speaking identified with the group, speaks for the group. In this poem, based on the song of Hannah in chapter 3 of 1 Samuel, what is to be called blessed is the group of Jesus' followers of which Mary is the prototypical disciple. This is the Mary, the follower of Jesus, who says the Magnificat. She is saying, "God has looked upon us with favor and we are blessed and will be blessed. We are God's people and Jesus has shown us what this God is like. And we have to be likewise." María, la disicípula de Jesús por excelencia.
As a second point of our study I want to look at verses 52-53 of the first chapter of Luke. What is this God to whom Jesus repeatedly pointed, what is this God like? What is this God whose family we are called to be, what is this God like? Well, this God puts down the mighty from their thrones and sends the rich away empty. This God, whose family we say we are, exalts the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. This God of Jesus and the God we Christians claim as our God makes a preferential option for the poor. And if we claim we are God's kin, then we have to do likewise. We have to opt for the poor, we have to cast our lot with the poor and the oppressed.3 El Dios de María, el Dios de Jesús, el Dios que los cristianos proclamamos como nuestro Dios, hace una opción preferencial por los pobres.
How do we opt for the poor? Let me suggest two ways that I believe we are to express our option for the poor. First, we have to denounce injustice. We have to call it as we see it through our Christian lens in our families, at our workplaces, in our churches, in our society, in our country. And what if our families dislike us, or worse yet, ignore us? What if we lose our jobs? What if our churches do not ordain us or revoke our orders? What if we are considered unpatriotic, anti-American? Like Eve we have to choose, and Mary's Magnificat makes clear that we have to opt for the poor, speak out against injustice, regardless of the consequences.
The second thing we need to do to opt for the poor the way the God of Mary, the God of Jesus does is this: we need to stop being so liberal and we need to become radical. We have to stop wanting to please others and be liked. We have to stop thinking that feeling guilty is enough. No, don't feel guilty; instead, do something to change the situation about which you are feeling guilty. For example, don't feel guilty about having certain privileges like education and money. Instead use your privileges to bring about justice for all. But, can I be honest with you? Bringing about justice necessarily means that we all are going to be affected. We are part of that tiny percentage of people in the world who eat three times a day, have roofs over our heads, get medical check-ups once a year. The resources in this world of ours are not infinite, and we must share if justice is to triumph. And remember, no justice, no kin-dom of God. So let us be radical, let's demand change, and let's start by demanding it of our own selves.
The third and last point I want to make this morning has to do with Luke 1, verses 48 and 50. This poem talks about generations: "from generation to generation."
Yesterday I talked about la lucha, the struggle. That is what gives meaning to the lives of the poor and the oppressed. And what the Magnificat always reminds me of is that God knows we need divine mercy, that we need it from generation to generation because the struggle is for the long haul, que la lucha continúa de generación en generación. It was precisely this understanding that led me to pay attention to the importance of the struggle. The struggle goes on; it has meaning in itself.
In many ways our job as women who struggle to do justice is to receive from the "mothers" of our different groups, different denominations—some of them sitting here in this hall with us today—to receive from them the struggle. We must be in touch with what they have done, with their vision. We do not start from scratch. We must not waste time by ignoring what they know, what they did, how they remember and understand what they did, how they see what we are doing and how they see the future.
After we receive the struggle from our "mothers" we must take that struggle and nourish it, put our own imprint on it. Our struggle for justice today, the struggle of this generation, includes issues and understandings that either were absent before or were present just in embryonic form. Issues having to do with ecology, with health, with economic justice: do not think the "mothers" did not struggle in these areas. But our task today is to add our own wisdom to theirs. Our task is to develop and implement strategies to bring about change according with the way institutions operate today, in ways that are effective, in ways that most probably will be different from the way things have been done before.
And in this process of struggling from generation to generation, our task is also to pass on the struggle to our daughters. Our task is to nurture the young ones, to welcome them and their viewpoints and ways of acting.
What understanding of the struggle do we pass on to our daughters, our nieces, our younger sisters, the new members of our churches, of our groups, of the staff? The text before us today tells us that the understanding we need to pass on is the one of option for the poor. It is the understanding that justice will flourish only if we opt for the poor and that our option for the poor impacts our lives, who we are, how we live, what we own, what our values and norms are.
The struggle today has taught us that it is impossible to separate charity, love, agape, from justice. And justice today means solidarity with the poor; it means that we embrace their struggle, their world-view; it means that we privilege their understandings about our world and about God.
My sisters, la vida es la lucha, vivir es luchar y luchar es vivir. To struggle is to live. For us Christians there is no living that is not a living to struggle for justice, a struggling to live justice.
My soul magnifies our God, a God for whom mercy and compassion are not possible without justice.
My soul magnifies our God and is ever grateful to the God of Mary, of Jesus, of our foremothers, of our sisters, of you, and you, and you, for having called me and for calling you to la lucha, to the struggle, to the struggle for justice.
Abracemos la lucha por la justicia. Entonces podremos ser la visión. Let us embrace the struggle for justice. Then we will be able to be the vision.
My sisters, sí se puede; it can be done, it must be done. To be Christians we must be women of justice. That is what being the vision is all about.
1An inspirational book for me on Mary is Ann Johnson, Miryam of Nazareth (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1984).
2Elisabeth Schussler- Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 140-154.
3For further reading on the issue of option for the poor and solidarity with them, I recommend the following. Gustavo Gutierrez, The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1983), Chapter 4, "The Historical Power of the Poor." Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz, "Solidarity: Love of Neighbor in the 1980s," in Lift Every Voice, eds. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 31-40.