Whether Or Not It's True - December 24, 2006

Meditation for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

Advent follows a certain cycle each year: in each of the four Sundays we hear about the apocalyptic, the prophetic, the soteriologic, and the incarnational aspects of God’s purposes for the world.  In other words:

  • God is coming. 
  • God is coming, look busy!
  • God is coming to save us (Hooray!).
  • God is coming, and surprisingly, God looks just like us.

Today, God is coming, and surprisingly, God looks just like us!  Somewhere, each year, in the Advent cycle, we are reminded of Jesus’ humble start—we hear about his mother, a young unmarried Jewish girl we call Mary.  Some Christian traditions make a much bigger deal of Mary—she gets her own prayers and statues; people make pilgrimages in her honor, and name their churches and children after her.

But we give Mary short shrift in our tradition, I think.  We only talk about her at Advent/Christmas time, and occasionally when we remember her son’s death and resurrection.  Most of the year she is— like lots of mothers of famous people—an afterthought.

Mary is, for my money, one of the most mystical, fascinating characters in the whole drama of God’s purpose for human life.  A virgin teenage girl who is mysteriously, willingly impregnated by the Holy Spirit, convinces her fiancé to stand by her side, travels to his hometown while in labor, and gives birth in a feed trough to the Savior for the world.  That would make a wonderful movie plot, wouldn’t it?  (In fact, I think it already has.)

I’ve told you before about my new favorite television show, “Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip.”  The most recent episode was titled “The Christmas Show.” In this episode, one of the executive producers, Matt (played by Matthew Perry) wants to do a Christmas show episode.  Nobody else thinks this is a good idea—not even the token evangelical Christian in the cast.  When Matt is trying to get the writers excited about the idea of a Christmas-themed show, they commence to de-bunking Christmas, by throwing out helpful comments such as

  • “Jesus was born in the spring.” 
  • “It had to happen in warm weather; otherwise the shepherds would have frozen to death.” 
  • “There was no star of Bethlehem.  It was a comet, probably Ursa Major”
  • “The original text says ‘young girl’, not ‘virgin.’  The immaculate conception has nothing to do with Christmas.”
  • “The wise men never traveled from afar—it was about six miles.  And by the way—nowhere in the Bible does it say that there are three of them.”

And my personal favorite:

  • “If Jesus was born in Northern Africa, why do artists insist on making him look like a Bee Gee?”

It seems of all the details of all the biblical stories that we have to navigate to be a believing Christian, there is one that sticks out for us, and that one is Jesus’ parentage.  I think most of the time we can reconcile the parting of the Red Sea, the burning bush, the plagues of Moses, even the resurrection of Lazarus.  But the virgin birth?  C’mon…we’re far too sophisticated for that!  We might say in our creeds,  “We believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary”, but deep in our hearts, don’t we have our fingers crossed behind our backs?  Just a little?

When I was in seminary and beginning to learn how to read a Church Information Form, our seminary leader showed us one that included in the congregation’s requirements that the successful candidate must believe in the Virgin Birth.  No, that’s an unusual requirement for a Presbyterian Church—it reminds us of some other traditions, those which hold Mary in much higher esteem.

The leader of our discussion group told us that when we see something like that on a form, what the church is really trying to discern is if a candidate will be a rabble-rouser.   I must’ve had a concerned look on my face because she asked me, “Julie, are you going to be a rabble-rouser?”  I replied, “Yes, but not over the virgin birth.”

Maybe a more fitting litmus test for our faith is this: Do we believe that God is fully human and fully divine?  Do we suspend our disbelief in things scientific long enough to understand that there are holy mysteries being done by the hand of God that we don’t have to understand?

Diana Butler Bass tells a story in which she was listening in on an Adult Education class in a church where the virgin birth was being discussed.   A young man was stacking up some chairs after class, and had a very disturbed look on his face.  He had listened to the class participants essentially saying that they didn’t believe in such a notion—that they didn’t think it really happened.  The young man stated, “It doesn’t matter if it really happened or not.  It’s so beautiful that it must be true.”

It’s so beautiful that it must be true.  That is Mary’s story.  That is our story.  That is grace.  To comprehend the beauty of this story, to understand Mary’s song, we must separate for a moment factuality and truth.