I would like to honor two women because we will be thinking about Florence Nightingale as well as Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the calendar of saints, Tuesday, 13th August celebrates Florence Nightingale, nurse and social reformer, and Wednesday, 14th August is the feast of Mary Mother of our Lord.
Dr Val Webb, an Australian theologian has written what I regard as this definitive book on Florence Nightingale. You might be surprised to know that Florence nightingale was a theologian. Val Webb demonstrates this clearly by quoting from many of Florence’s letters and papers. I think Florence Nightingale would also have made a good member of the Women’s Interfaith Network to which I belong. She wrote a lot when she visited Rome, coming from a wealthy family, and Val reports that “she was struggling not only with the truth Within Christianity but with truth across all religions. She said “Can one look on the magnificent bust of Marcus Aurelius, the Great Roman Emperor and philosopher, and claim only Jesus was inspired and declare Aurelius’ writings an imperfect sermon on the mount?
Our reading from Isaiah today is from the same section Jesus read to his hometown congregation when he returned after his baptism and temptations. In Isaiah 61, the prophet announces God’s judgment on both the oppressors of the poor and those turning to other gods, promising delivery to the faithful. Poverty, or the state of being poor, was spoken of in two ways in Scripture. There are a few practical warnings of the consequences of laziness or ineptitude, but the majority of references name poverty as the product of social injustice. “The poor” are not individuals down on their luck but a whole class whose situation is connected to social inequities, injustice and oppression, held in place by oppressors. The Hebrew word used for poor means the needy without power or access to life’s essentials and abused by those with power through the power structures of society. If you know anything about asylum seekers you will realise they perfectly fit such a description of the poor. In the suffering servant passages of Isaiah, salvation as liberation was not about a life after death as recompense for suffering on earth, but liberation in this world from political and economic domination. This hope, placed by Luke on the lips of the young Hebrew woman Mary was repeated for her oppressed and dominated people- that through her son, God would bring down the powerful from their thrones, lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich away according to the promises made to Abraham and his descendants. God’s demand for the poor was empowerment, one writer expressing it as “to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy”. (I expect this could happen in some sense today if we allowed people on TPVisas to work). Perhaps Jesus grew to adulthood within this ethos spelt out in the Magnificat. Humanly speaking Jesus owed a lot to his parents and his siblings. Neville Ward, A Methodist minister wrote that Mary was for Jesus “the star of his morning and the cause of his joy”.
Luke has Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry announcing he was the fulfilment of his people’s hope of liberation. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration by Val Webb when she says that Florence Nightingale was also called to be a saviour in her time. Unfortunately, over centuries of church history, the task of Jesus being to proclaim a new reign of God with liberation for the poor was lost. Subsequent generations concentrated on Jesus as the pawn in some cosmic transaction between God and humanity and Satan, an atonement that did not necessarily release the poor from systemic distress, but saved individual souls from eternal separation from God, or hell. This individualised, other-worldly salvation obliterated the this-worldly promise of a liberating reign that Mary, according to Luke, had hoped her child would bring. I want to go to today’s epistle for a few moments.
These words from our Galations reading, “God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law…” were the first written words to be preserved by the Christian community describing the birth of Jesus. They were written by Paul probably about 50CE, some 20 years after the events of Calvary and the experience of Easter and probably another 20 years before the first gospel was penned. In a Jewish context, a person did not need a supernatural birth to be declared son of God. Birth traditions reflect the human need to understand the origins of greatness in the person who has so affected and shaped human history. It is almost inevitable that in time a literalising process will engulf the legendary birth narratives. It was so with Moses and Huhammad, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) and even Arjuna, and early historical figure in Hinduism. These birth narratives would not have been created had not the experience with the adult, in our case Jesus, cried out for an explanation. Who is this man? Whence has he come? It took years for the birth stories to be formed. The experience of the risen Jesus started with his death. Only slowly did people wander back in history until one could take pen in hand and write, “In those days, Joseph went from a town in Nazareth to a town in Judea…” as we had for our gospel reading.
I don’t want to stay with the birth story, but continue as I began with Mary’s song and Florence’s Nightingale’s interpretation of it.
Florence realised that many of the people of her day were devastated by the Calvinistic theology that hard work was rewarded by God, or perhaps seen as evidence of their election, and poverty became linked with personal sin, deficiency, or the sins of the fathers. Her people, (and she was a comparatively well off, educated Englishwoman but she had eyes that were opened to the poverty- not only to the unhygienic circumstances and spiritual poverty of her peers- but also of the English working classes) these people needed not only help for physical betterment but also a theology that liberated rather than condemned them, a Jesus who came to loose their bonds, not tighten them and promise a better deal in another world. Florence was ahead of her time. One hundred years later her approach would be called liberation theology, and she would then have been called a liberation theologian. More than anything else, I think Florence Nightingale was a theologian. Val Webb’s book records the warm relationships she had with a number of different male scholars, and quotes from letters she wrote and received from them. Arthur Clough edited and published her “Suggestions for Thought”, and she was devastated when he died quite young. When Benjamin Jowett, later to become the Vice Chancellor of Oxford, wrote to Clough about Florence’s work he said “I should be very sorry if the greater part of this book did not in some form see light.” Her theology, prefiguring today’s process Theology, led her to reform the army medical services and to draft the British delegation’s proposals to the Geneva Conference that would produce the Geneva Convention and the Red Cross. One of Process theology’s tenets is that everything in the universe is interconnected, each affecting the other… All things flow, and reality is relational- a social process. Florence, with modern Process thinkers claimed that the world is not external to God, but God is the essential soul of the universe. I urge anyone interested in process theology to start with the theology of Florence Nightingale.
Jesus of Nazareth had a name common in Hebrew society. It was Yeshua or Joshua. His birth was, in all probability, not noted by anyone other than Mary and whoever attended her. Mary’s labour was real. Jesus’ birth was human like every other human birth. There were contractions, pain, blood, an umbilicus that had to be cut, and the afterbirth with which someone had to deal. But 80 or 90 years later birth narratives would be constructed because what happened to Jesus cried out for explanation. I think part of that explanation is summarised in the song of Mary which we call the Magnificat and which we have read and sung today. Perhaps Mary gave some of these ideas to Jesus as he grew up. I actually toyed with the idea of bringing some aboriginal paintings of Mary that I found in this book (She Who believed: Australian Images of Mary) They are very powerful, and I’ll leave them out for you to see after the service. They portray very forcefully the intimacy between Mother and Child.
But I am also glad that one of Mary’s daughters, Florence Nightingale, is also remembered this week as one whom many generations will also call Blessed.
Sue Emeleus, August, 2013.
St Peter’s Cremorne, Sunday, August 18th, 2013
Is 6110- 623, Song of Mary (APBA 31), Gal 44-7, Luke 21-7.