The Feast of Guadalupe                     St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Zechariah 2:  10-11                             Albuquerque, New Mexico
Dec. 15, 2013

Guadalupe, Mandela and the Grinch Who Tried to Steal Christmas:
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Susan Allison-Hatch

Each year, on the 12th of December, people throughout the Americas rise early and make their way to church where they greet  La Virgen de Guadalupe with songs and flowers and a retelling of her story.  Each year they spend the day in celebration.

This year, I spent much of the day reflecting on her story, our story, and the crowds of people—black and white, South Africans and Afrikaners together—I’d been watching dancing and singing in the streets of South Africa as they celebrated the life and mourned the death of Nelson Mandela—the one they call Madiba. 

Late in the day, I took a break. I went off in search of a Christmas tree.  Every year we get our tree on December 12 and every year we return to the same lot to get our Christmas tree.  They have a nice selection of reasonably sized, reasonably priced, reasonably fresh trees.  And every year I ask the Anglo who escorts me through the lot the same question.  “Are you Swedish?”  It’s a reasonable question to be asking.  He looks like a Swede.  He talks like a Swede.  And, coming as I do from a part of the country where Swedes and Christmas seem to go hand-in-hand, I always hope he’s Swedish.  Every year I ask, and every year he deflects my question. 

Until Thursday, the Feast day of La Virgen.  We were looking at a Blue Spruce he pulled out for me to inspect.  Again I asked, “Are you Swedish?”  This time he answered, “No.  I’m South African.”  How could I not have asked him about Mandela?  So I did.  His reply knocked me cold.  “He was a terrible man.  I hated him.  I was one of four soldiers tracking him down.  He should have been eliminated, but the world got in the way.”

“What,” I said to myself, “What am I hearing?”  I wondered as I walked away to the other side of the lot, “Was it the world that got in the way or was it God—God dwelling in Apartheid South Africa?”  I had to get away.  I couldn’t stay with that question.  I couldn’t stay in that place.  I grabbed a tree—maybe one of the ugliest trees on that lot—and said, “I’ll take this one.” 

As I was getting ready to drive off, the man who runs the lot came up to me.  He put his weathered brown Juan Diego hand on my car door and held it open.  He had a story to tell, and he wasn’t going to let me go until he told it. 

The year before, one of his long-time customers came to the lot to get her tree.  She drove an old white pick-up that was in mint-condition.  As she was paying for the tree, he slipped her a note with his phone number on it and said, “If you ever decide to sell the truck, call me.”  On Thursday, the Feast Day of La Virgen de Guadalupe, her husband returned to the lot to get his tree.  As he was paying for the tree, he said to the owner of the lot, “My wife died last year.  She left you something in her will—that old truck of hers.”

I have no idea why he told me that story.  I like to think he told it as a counterpoint to the vitriol I’d just heard.  A Guadalupano moment of healing and wholeness and new life.  God dwelling in the here and now.

I don’t know the historicity of the Guadalupe we celebrate today.  I don’t know if there ever was a Juan Diego who encountered a brown virgin on the Tepeyac Hill.  I don’t know if, on that winter day almost five hundred years ago, the hill was covered with roses in bloom and the air filled with song.  There’s no documentary evidence to support those claims.  And yet there’s a truth to the story.

The story of a people defeated and a land conquered.  The story of a people dying from foreign diseases.  The story of a people whose very identity was quashed as their relationship with their gods was severed.  The story of a people confused, fearful, facing change they couldn’t understand and surely did not welcome.

The story of a people visited by a brown virgin giving them comfort, giving them hope, calling on them to work together with their conquerors to build her a shrine where she could listen to their cries of woe and alleviate their sufferings.

I know the truth of that story.  I’ve seen it at work in the power of her image—the image we see today. Whenever I look at that image, I’m reminded of the day I walked in her wake.  A May Day in San Francisco.  At the time, I didn’t really get what was going on.  I was just taken up in the moment.  Thousands and thousands of people crowded between the buildings lining Market Street in San Francisco.  Chants of “Si! Se Puede!” echoing through the crowd.  Helping my Jesuit friend Eddie Fernandez from El Paso hold up his weathered banner of Guadalupe.  People waving from second story windows, pointing to the banner and smiling.  Others coming up to the banner, kissing their fingers and then touching the image of Guadalupe.  A crowd of people—brown and black and white—marching in her wake.  There, standing out amidst all the signs and banners, the image of Guadalupe drawing people in, giving people life,  giving people hope.  Assuring a suffering people that a loving God is present with them, sharing their burdens, bringing them hope.  God dwelling with them.

To a people returning from exile, to a people filled with memories of life in a foreign land and tales of the war and siege and capture that brought them there, the prophet Zechariah offers a vision—a vision of God dwelling with them.  Twice the prophet assures the people of Israel—both those returning from exile and those who stayed behind—that  God will dwell in the midst of them.  That theme of God dwelling in the midst of God’s people and its variant—God’s people dwelling with God—is a theme that runs throughout the scriptures. A promise fueling the song Mary sings. A promise fundamental to life with God. And yet the very frequency with which that promise appears suggests that it’s a hard one for folks to grasp. 

So often when things are tough, when things don’t turn out the way we hoped—times of confusion and fear—we forget that God dwells with us.  We forget that the Spirit of God, as Paul puts it, working in us and through us can do far more that we ourselves can ever do.   And yet as the prophet Isaiah assures a people living in darkness, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in the land of the shadow of death, on them the light has shined.”  That’s a truth Nelson Mandela knew.  That’s a truth the people dancing and singing and chanting Madiba knew from the center of their being. That’s a truth they have lived. That’s a truth that man with a brown weathered Juan Diego hand knew.  That’s a truth he too has lived.

You and I, we—the part of the Body of Christ we call St. Michael’s—are living in a time of change and confusion and uncertainty.  Things aren’t now as they have been—for us as individuals and for us as a community.  We’re living in the bowl of a question mark and the sides of that bowl sometimes seem awfully steep.  And yet there’s something to be said for resting in the bowl of a question mark.  It gives us time to pause, to rest, to let God work in us and through us.  For God is at work in us just as God was at work in South Africa at the height of apartheid—at work birthing something new. 

Whenever I find myself falling into the frantic mode, I return to a canticle from the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer—a poem by Edward Carpenter.  Please pray with me:

Let your mind be quiet, realising the beauty of the world,
  and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store.
All that you have within you, all that your heart desires,
  all that your Nature so specially fits you for – that or the
  counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you.
  It will surely come to you.

Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time
  will it come.  All your crying and fever and reaching out of
  hands will make no difference.
Therefore do not begin that game at all.
Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind
  in this direction and in that,
  lest  you become like a spring lost and
  dissipated in the desert.

But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them
  still, so still;
 And let them become clear, so clear –so limpid, so mirror-like;
 at last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in
   peaceful beauty,
 and the antelope shall descend to drink and to gaze at her
   reflected image, and the lion to quench his thirst,
 and Love himself shall come and bend over and catch his
   own likeness in you.1

1Edward Carpenter, "The Lake of Beauty" in The New Zealand Book of Common Prayer, 157.

We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available at this time.

December 11, 2011
The Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

Today we join with millions throughout the Americas who honor Our Lady of Guadalupe. You know her - she appears everywhere: on cars, store signs, decals, and tattoos. Our image of her is on the outside wall of our parish hall, made of tile in Puebla, Mexico.

You probably know the basics of her story. Only 10 years after the conquest of the Aztecs, she appeared miraculously to a native convert whose Christian name was Juan Diego. She sent him to tell the bishop that a temple should be built in her honor. The bishop didn’t believe Juan Diego until he returned with a cloak full of roses - impossible because it was December - and an image of the Virgin imprinted on Juan’s cloak.

Skeptics question this story, of course. They say the Spanish made it up in order to further their conquest, by appropriating an Aztec goddess and making her Catholic. Who knows, maybe they’re right. But to the millions who have been devoted to her for these 480 years, she has come to mean far more than conquest.

For some, she is the feminine face of God, offering motherly divine love. It is said that she told Juan Diego that her temple would be a place where she would offer all [her] compassion, help and protection to the people. At times this motherly love has otherwise been difficult to find in a church that has been male-dominated, demanding, even cruel. The kindness and mercy that Our Lady of Guadalupe brought were in short supply, and so God - or the people -  had to create her.

To a lesser degree, you could say the same about our church today. We’re still fairly male-dominated. That’s why we need new rites such as Enriching our Worship, with phrases like these:

You laid the foundations of the world and enclosed the sea when it burst out from the womb; You brought forth all creatures of the earth and gave breath to humankind.

As a mother cares for her children, you would not forget us. Time and again you called us to live in the fullness of your love.

For others, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a sign that miracles do happen, and they can happen for us, too. She appeared miraculously. She healed Juan Diego’s father. Inexplicably, the image on the cloak has not deteriorated in nearly 5 centuries, despite extreme changes in temperature and humidity, candle smoke, the kisses and touches of thousands of devotees, and a bomb thrown at it by an anarchist. Some inspectors claim that in her eyes, one can see the inverted image of Juan Diego, as if in a camera lens.

I know that there’s a lot of wacky stuff out there about miracles: television quacks who close their eyes, extend their hands, and claim to be healing someone of lung cancer who is watching the show as he sits alone in a hotel room in Des Moines.

But I also know that perfectly sane human beings can experience visions and miracles. Weird stuff does happen. Anything is possible if respected physicists can talk about the possibility of the world we live in being a projected hologram of things existing on the spherical skin of a distant black hole...(I’m not making this up!)

We are rationalist fools if we don’t recognize that the world is a mystical place. So who’s to say that a young Jewish woman from 1st-century Israel couldn’t appear in a parallel time and place? And who’s to say that something supernatural couldn’t appear to help you in your life?

But there is another meaning to the Virgin of Guadalupe, perhaps the most radical one of all. She came as a mestizo, a brown-skinned, mixed-race person. She appeared to a poor Aztec and spoke his language, Nahuatl.
She imprinted her image on a rough-woven cloak made from cactus. In the Virgin of Guadalupe, God was identifying with the poor.

More significantly, she didn’t appear to the Spanish bishop in his opulent residence. By sending a campesino with the roses, she was getting in the face of the bishop. Hey, Prince of the Church! You think my son was kidding when he said that the last would be first and the first - namely you - would be last? Blessed are the poor, you schmuck!

And so the Virgin of Guadalupe became the property of the people. For in her, God had become one of them. The skeptical bishop couldn’t suppress her, and neither could the Vatican, once they got wind of a movement that had taken on a life of its own. She continues to be fiercely held by the people, and they don’t really care whether some worry that they are idolatrous. They know she is Emmanuel, “God with us.”

This is the message that the liberation theologians so controversially taught in the 1970’s: God’s preferential option for the poor. Now this doesn’t mean that God loves poor people more than the rich, only that the most vulnerable hold a special place in the heart of God.

They hold a special place in the hearts of those who love God, too. After all, we are God’s children, made in God’s image. And so if we are in touch with our Creator, we will naturally care, as God does, for those who are mentally ill, for children and the frail elderly, for the homeless and addicted, for the depressed and lonely, for those without access to medical care or education. We are made to be like the Virgin of Guadalupe, offering our compassion, help and protection to the people.

If we have no soft spot in our heart for the most vulnerable, if we do nothing to help them in their weakness, we do not have within us the Spirit of the One who does. And it may be time to get reconnected with that Spirit.

One good way to do that is to reconnect with our own poverty, our own vulnerability. It was the gospel of Matthew that changed Luke’s Blessed are the poor to Blessed are the poor in spirit,  and those two words brought in all of us. As the Buddha said, Life is suffering. B.B. King put it in his own way: Everybody’s had the blues.  

You may have an persistent medical condition or feel stuck in a deadening job. You may struggle with alcohol, depression, or an unhappy relationship with your partner or child. You may feel a creeping angst now and then, wondering what’s the point. Whatever it is, we all have some kind of poverty of spirit.

We can make the mistake of seeing our vulnerability as the enemy, something to be gotten rid of, fixed, or transcended. Why, I’d be happy if only...

But what if that is one of the primary places where God tends to appear? In your poverty? We certainly meet God in gratitude and satisfaction, but we sometimes overlook how accessible God can be when we are empty. It is in these times that dependence upon God can become a matter of survival - when we know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.

In this place we surrender; we give up on the exhausting effort to make ourselves full and rich. We humbly accept our emptiness. Not wishing or pleading anymore for something particular to happen - because we’ve already asked too many times, and it hasn’t - we nevertheless remain open, trusting. Not expecting a specific outcome, we dare to remain expectant.  Something will shift. Something or someone will come. We say to ourselves I don’t have to do this alone. And we don’t.

The Virgin of Guadalupe came to the Aztecs in their defeat. And she comes to us in our defeat, our poverty of spirit, offering to us, as she did in 1531 to all the Americas, God’s compassion, help, and protection.  

This is the spirit of Advent. For in this season that moves inevitably towards the darkness of the solstice, we watch for the coming of the light. And God’s light appears in the darkness, not instead of it. It will appear in our poverty of spirit, if we will but pray, watch, and wait.

Luke 1:26-38

Since the angel Gabriel spoke:  Mary blessed are you: we have debated “why?” She is the subject of theology, the object of devotion even the recipient of scorn.  She is embraced and cast aside.  Different cultures create Mary in their own image.  She is Indian, Polish, French and African.  White, black, brown, red and yellow.  She is Mary is of Galilee, called the Mother of God, a spiritual woman, she is Guadalupe.

Why is she special?  Many sermons will speak of her faithfulness; despite the unknown journey God has placed before her, she says yes.   Theologians will point to her humility and devotion.  Never at the adulation of great miracles, only at the first, Cana, yet she stands with her son at the foot of the cross.   Mary gave Christ his humanity and his human features.  He may have had the same color eyes, the texture of hair; maybe their laughs sounded the same.  

Women speak of her liberating qualities.  I am startled by her determination.  In a time, where women were treated with no respect and little regard, and in many places not much has changed, she stands as a symbol of change and courage.  God first had to liberate Mary, before Christ could liberate us.

I find it interesting that the countries that tend to have a strong machoistic culture, Mexico, Latin America, Italy, have strong reverence for Mary; maybe a way to reconcile the feminine with the divine.  Think of her strength.  Other than Christ, she was the world’s greatest prophet.  She delivered the voice that continues to transform the world.  Her heart is for the oppressed, the Magnificat sounds eerily similar to the Beatitudes.

Mary for those who are pushed aside, the oppressed worker, those discriminated against, those who society rejects or forgets, embrace Mary’s strength.  Thousands of protest marches always seem to have a picture of Mary leading their steps.     

In this sanctuary, we have beautiful representations and my favorite is probably the least accepted.  In the 1800’s Dante Rossetti painted today’s Gospel, and it seems to answer that question as to why Mary is truly special.  Mary is not a grown woman, strong, resplendent in beautiful robes passively gazing upon the divine.  She is not smiling, humbly accepting or sitting in prayerful repose. Mary is young, and is recoiling as if disturbed from sleep.  She is dressed in a simple gown, and her hair is rumpled.

As Gabriel is handing her a white lily and with the Holy Spirit is in the background waiting to enter Mary, she has this look, that I can only describe as….sheer terror.  What makes Mary special is not solely her love of Christ, her faithfulness or strength.  Mary is special because despite all the obstacles and overwhelming odds against her; she understood that God was working in her life.   Mary… was able to see the beginning of miracle.   

This is difficult for me, and I assume many of you. We try to get at miracles from the wrong end.  We want the results and not the process. The conversion instead of the pain.   We want the  butterfly instead of the cocoon.  The light without fumbling through the darkness. A new life, instead of grasping the miracles in our own lives.  

It is much easier to immediately attribute the events in our lives to the results of something: our intelligence, our actions, bad decisions, even fortune. Yet, we may fail to realize that something deeper in working in our lives, God.  We fail to see the beginning of miracles.  The start of a new life that none of us had planned.

Mary had no way of knowing, yet she felt the possibility of a miracle.   If we lose our job, that relationship ends, or a diagnosis is received, do we see the end or the beginning?  Like Mary, can we find the miracle occurring within?

I was once told that Mary had it easy because she was chosen by God.  Really? The Gospels point to a life that probably mirrors ours.   Gabriel’s message could have been taken as tragic.
A poor, unwed, pregnant teen in 1st century Galilee – it was a death sentence.  An angel told her she would bear the Son of God and then he was born in a barn surrounded by animals?  Do you think she questioned her judgment or whether the angel was telling the truth? Her entire life was filled with pain, obstacles and challenges.  She and Joseph were homeless immigrants running from the authorities, sneaking into foreign land with a small child.  

Joseph dies and she is left widowed, penniless and on her own.  Her own family believes that Jesus is out of his mind and shuns him, yet she believed in him. Mary witnessed her son’s murder, yet she does not hate, or condemn. Mary has every reason not to believe in miracles, yet for some reason she knew that that cross was the beginning of another miracle.

Where did this come from?  Gabriel says two things that become foundational in Mary’s belief of the miraculous in her.  Mary asks “how can this be?” Gabriel responds “God is with you and nothing is impossible with God.”  She did not know what tomorrow would bring so decided to live for today.   Despite the ups and downs, the tears and the laughter;  she knew that God was with her.  And more than that, she knows that nothing, nothing compares to the greatness of knowing God.
 
Maybe that is why so many different cultures and colors have made her their own. Everyday Mary, a person no different from each one of us was chosen by God to bring the Good News, to bring Christ into the world.  And the beauty of God is that God chooses each one of us to bring Christ into the world.

Since we truly do not know what tomorrow will bring, we must look for the miraculous all around us, like Mary believe in the possibility that we are chosen to bring Christ into the world.  When we make that choice, we see God in the everyday.

I imagine that God was present in thousands of burning bushes in the desert and thousands passed by that burning bush blind to the miracle, yet only Moses stopped and said, “here I am Lord.”  On that barren mountain in Mexico City, how many did not notice roses in the depths of winter.  Far too consumed with the barrenness of their hearts to notice life blooming around them.   That cold night in Bethlehem where the voices of billions of Angels bursting through time yet many choose to sleep, while simple shepherds looked up, listened to heavenly song that a Savior is born.  Maybe they understood the beginning of the miracle, that angels could sing to sheep and Messiahs could be found wrapped in rags and sleeping in a feed trough.

Large events or small events are the beginning of transformation, at times the smaller the better, constantly occurring around us.  Often I find myself complaining about the winds in fall, yet I sit in fascination at the flowers in the spring.  Forgetting, that the wind picks up a seed, drops it into a place of new life.  Little miracles occurring all around my life.  

A diagnosis of an illness the loss of a job, refocusing our attention on what truly matters in life.  
The death of my father, truly painful in that December over 30 years ago, a beautiful reminder that his seed of goodness bloomed in me the miracle of true love for my own wife and son.  Little miracles occurring all around me.  

I doubt that young terrified Mary truly knew her response would lead to a beautiful man’s life, that would lead to a cross that would lead to everlasting life for each one of us. Or the same yes, would bring each of us from different journeys, different faces, different places, to the miraculous celebration of the Eucharist in a small church in the North Valley of Albuquerque.  The beginning of all these little miracles.  

My favorite poet, Mary Oliver wrote this poem that speaks to the beginning of a miracle.

How does the seed-grain feel when it is just beginning to be wheat? How does the catbird feel when the blue eggs break and become little catbirds, maybe on midsummer night’s eve, and without fanfare.  

And how does the turtle feel as she covers her eggs with the sweep of her feet and leave them for the world to take care of?  Does she know her accomplishment? And when the blue heron, beaking his long breast feathers, sees one feather fall, does he know I will find it?  Will he see me holding it in my hand as he opens his wings softly and without a sound as he rises and floats over the water?

And this is just any day at the edge of the pond, a black and leafy pond without a name until I named it.  And what else can we do when the mysteries present themselves, but hope to pluck from the basket of brisk words that will applaud them, the heron, the turtle, the catbird, the seed-grain kneeling in the dark earth, its body opening into the golden world.  All miracles.  

During this most holy season, what made Mary special was that always believed in the possibility of a miracle occurring in her life, she knew that God was always placing her at beginning of the miracle.  God was with her and nothing is impossible with God.  

We must keep our hearts open to the miracles are occurring in our lives, the beginning of the miracles that will changes our lives.  When we open our heart to God’s miracles, maybe, just maybe where we will hear God calling out to us from a burning bush and respond “here I am.”  

Maybe just maybe, we will hear angels announcing that a savior is born.   We will awaken our hearts to the possibility that roses can bloom on a barren hillside in December.  

When we open our heart to the miraculous, when we open it to God, and this brings belief.
And blessed is she or he who believes.
And like Mary, blessed is each one of you.
For unto us, unto you - a child will be born. Amen.



*Many thanks to Margaret Silf whose article inspired me to recognize and speak of little miracles on this Feast of Guadalupe. 

St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church 
Albuquerque, New Mexico 
Sunday Dec. 13, Advent 2/ Fiesta de Guadalupe 
Sermon: Christopher McLaren 
Text: Traditional Story of Juan Diego 1531 Mexico City
Title: Like Roses in December is God’s Surprising Love

Roses in December. I have always loved the story of La Virgen de Guadalupe, with its captivating mystery, the music of birds, the fragrance of flowers, the brown-skinned Lady, and the voice of the poor being heard in the halls of power. Our home has a nicho dedicated to Guadalupe.  Each day as drive the children to school I pass the image of Guadalupe; painted on walls, at the old church on Griegos, on the side of our parish hall. My day is surrounded by this beautiful image of the Protectress of the Americas but I realized that I have never really understood or embraced Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe for myself?  I delighted in the celebration of Guadalupe last December as mí Hermano Daniel was ordained a priest in this church. As a boy I grew up in charismatic pentecostal land a decidedly anti-marian environment. You may be saying, “Christopher you’ve come a long way babym,” but there is still more to go.  I’m sure my grandparents are turning over in their foursquare protestant graves at the mere thought of embracing La Virgen de Guadalupe.  

One cannot understand the power of this Lady without understanding the history of Mexico. It is not an easy history lesson. Cortez landed in Mexico on Good Friday 1519.  At first the Aztec people mistook Cortez and the Spaniards for gods, remembering that the great priest Quetzalcoatl had promised to return to renew their way of life centered on human dignity, simplicity, and prayer. The tradition was that Quetzalcoatl was a large man with blue eyes and blond hair who eerily fit the description of Cortez. 

While the Aztec ruler Moctezuma was convinced that Cortez was a god all that changed after the massacre at Tóxcatl (Toshcatl).  This festivity was the principle feast of the Aztecs. It was not only very similar in content to our own Paschal mystery, but also it was actually celebrated with great solemnity a few days after the Christian celebration of Holy Week. 

At the celebration, masses of people were gathered in the main temple.  Pedro de Alvarado, the captain in charge during the temporary absence of Cortez, ordered the entrances sealed by soldiers and then ordered the soldiers into the temple to kill warriors and captains of the people.  The killing was horrific. Almost no one in the Temple that day survived. The final defeat of the Mexican people came after a long and difficult battle at Tlatelolco which lasted from May until August, 13 1521.  It marked the end of a civilization. More than 240,000 warriors were dead and many others had died from starvation and disease. 

As one post-conquest canticle expresses it: 

Please let us die, let us disappear, for our gods have died!

It is difficult for us today to truly comprehend the trauma of this defeat. Only when we go through a personal experience in which every single person or thing in which we had placed our hope and security has disappeared and we feel totally alone, rejected and without possibility of any aid might we be able to begin to comprehend the Mexican experience of the conquest by Spain. 

It was a painful crucifixion. Their world had vanished. Their greatest capital city and indeed the most beautiful and well organized, had fallen. They continued to live but in effect they were dead.  Many indigenous were forced to abandon their villages often being reduced to slavery (Elizando,  p.59).

It is in this apocalyptic situation with these portents in the sky that the little brown-skinned Mary appears to Juan Diego a simple indigenous man. On December 9, 10 years after the conquest of what is now Mexico City, Juan Diego was walking across a hill called Tepeyac on his way to catechism at a local church. As he walked he heard the beautiful singing of birds and then a beautiful dark-skinned Aztec woman appeared and spoke to him in his native language of Nahuatl.

The woman told Juan to go to the bishop and tell him, “You are to build me a church on this hill.” Juan must have been surprised, because the hill she meant was a holy place for the Aztec people, not for the Spanish.  But Juan when to the bishop and said everything just as the woman had instructed him. 

The bishop listened to the humble Indian and then told him, “No there will be no church on that hill.” Perhaps he also knew that the hill was an Aztec holy place. 

Again, Juan saw the Aztec woman.  He asked, “Who are you?” She answered, “I am Mary, the Mother of God.” And she told him to return to the bishop. 

Juan went again to the bishop. He was persistent and the bishop listened again. Juan recounted all that the dark mother had said.  The bishop wondered who Juan Diego was.  He was only a humble farmer, a man of little learning and no power.  He was an Aztec.  Why should the bishop believe him? 

Juan left the bishop discouraged. He needed a sign to prove that the Aztec lady had truly appeared to him.  Several days passed since he first saw the woman.  He was worried about his uncle who was sick and went to find a priest.  On his way the woman appeared to him again.  This time she told Juan to go up on the hill and gather flowers even though it was winter and to take them to the bishop as a sign of her presence.  

Juan found roses, heavy with blossoms a sign of new life and hope for the Aztec people. Roses in December! Who could imagine such a thing?  Mary told Juan to gather the flowers in his tilma (cloak) and take them to the bishop. Juan full of wonder ran to the bishop with his fragrant surprise. 

The bishop was probably irritated to see Juan again.  How many times did this stubborn Indian have to be told no? But the bishop’s irritation turned to amazement when Juan opened his tilma to show the flowers. As soon as the Bishop and all those with him saw the flowers they were amazed but there was something even more wonderful than roses in December, there on the fabric of Juan’s cloak was the image of the dark Aztec woman, The Mother of God who had appeared to Juan on the holy mountain and sent him to the bishop. 

Shortly after a chapel was built on the site and the image placed there. Pilgrimages began immediately. Since that time several new edifices have been built to accommodate the nearly 10 million pilgrims that journey to the Shrine each year. 

The evidenced suggests that the early Church was bitterly opposed to the Guadalupe happening. Yet the devotion spread like wildfire and brought about millions of conversions within a few years.  As one writer puts it, “almost immediately the Mexican people came to life – the pilgrimages, dances and festivals began again and continue to this day. The devotion is not dying; on the contrary, it continues to spread, even in the major cities of the United States. ”

There is so much to learn about Guadalupe, so much to understand about this woman whose message of hope breathed life into a defeated and suffering people. The Mexican American theologian Virgilio Elizondo, believes that the origin of devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe involved resistance on the part of the native conquered people not only to the European invaders but also to the all-male God in whose name they conquered.  In the mist of their resistance the poor, vanquished people of Mexico, enslaved and abused by their new rulers became the gracious recipients of a major disclosure in the development of the Christian understanding of God, namely that the mystery of God embraces both male and female identities.  

This disclosure to Juan Diego through the song of the birds, the fragrance of flowers and the Queen of Heaven deigning to speak to one so lowly is of significance not just for the wounded people of Mexico but for the whole Church. Guadalupe helps to liberate everyone from a restrictive, masculinized view of God.  

Interestingly several aspects of the Aztec religion serve to illuminate this important revelation. First, the place of the original 16th century apparition was the sacred site of an ancient temple dedicated to, the Indian virgin mother of the gods. The flowers and music of the vision were part of her temple worship.  Now on the very site where the feminine aspect of the one, all powerful, creative spirit had previously been venerated a new beginning was emerging. The dark skin of La Morenita little dark-one, the language she spoke, the colors she was wearing and the celestial symbols surrounding her were all reminiscent of the goddess of the defeated people.  Yet it was not the Aztec goddess it was Mary the mother of the Christian God who was speaking to Juan Diego and through him to all people.  Guadalupe wears a black maternity band which means she is with child and offers this child as gift for a new world, a new beginning, a new people. The fertile soil of this cross-cultural encounter is not difficult to see.  The figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe combined the Indian female expression of God which western Christianity had tried to wipeout as erroneous with the Spanish male expression of God, which the Indians had found incomprehensible, since everything that is perfect in the Nahuatl world-view has both a male and female component.  

In essence Guadalupe combines in some perfect way the male-centered and patriarchal Christianity with the female Mother of God which allows the true face and heart of Christianity to shine forth: compassion, understanding, tenderness, reconciliation, forgiveness, and healing. 

So at the same time while the imperial powers of Spain full of their religious triumphalism are oppressing the indigenous peoples whom they do not understand and so consider pagans, on the other side this surprising revelatory event is giving birth to a new reality, a new humanity, a new church, a new way for those who had lost everything.  It is at once traditional and new.  Without this revelatory event it is hard to imagine what might have become of this defeated people, but God’s bird-song and flowers breakthrough, compassion, understanding and loving care are demonstrated in the dark-skinned lady that is one of them, and loves them. 

From Guadalupe we have learned much and have much to learn. As we celebrate the recent election of two, yes two women bishops, in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles one openly lesbian, we see that we are slowly making progress in embracing the feminine in our own spiritual life, seeing and embracing the image of Christ in our female leaders like our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. 

Mother’s know the pain of conquest, of growth, and of change. Mothers are always ready and willing to stand by and be with their children in their days of triumph or defeat, and they are also there in their moments of development and conversion.  Our Lady of Guadalupe continues to encourage the poor, the disinherited, and the powerless, the outcast in their struggles toward the freedom of the children of God.  I’m sure that she is hovering over the expanding work of the food pantry, blessing the ministry of the Albuquerque Opportunity Center, smiling with compassion on the breakfast at St. Martin’s. She is the compassionate Mother who watches over her smallest children and brings them self-dignity, self-confidence, and self-direction.  

Our Lady of Guadalupe is there not only for the Mexican people but for us as well, as the Protectress of the Americas, of which we are a part. She is among us to remind us of God’s love for the poor, the discouraged, the marginalized, the stranger, the depressed, the lonely, the forgotten. And when that person, for one reason or anther is us, when we are depressed or lonely or forgotten, she is ready to take us to her loving heart and carry us to her beloved Son who has and will continue to love us to the end.  Like roses in December is God’s surprising love. 

I am deeply endebted to the writing of Mexican American theologian Virgilio P. Elizondo on Guadalupe for a new and deeper understanding of this remarkable Lady of Guadalupe.  His book La Morenita: Evangelizer of the Americas was my essential guide to embracing La Morenita. 

We're sorry, the full text for this sermon is not available at this time.