Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 2013

Once or twice a year, my son, Ian, and I, go on a puzzle spree.  The coffee table in our living room has two finished puzzles lying on it.  This week the oldest of the two was broken up into its separate parts for someone else to reconstruct.  And we began a new puzzle.  So far we’ve gotten the outside edge done and are working our way from those outer edges to the center.  When I think of how to explain the events surrounding Jesus birth, if only to myself, I begin in the same way.  

I practice pastoral theology. That is to say, I need my theological constructs to be rooted in something other than uneducated speculation or the mythological ideologies of a bygone era.  I need theology to actually make sense, because if it just doesn’t make sense, or if it asks people to believe in something that really is not quite believable then it becomes inauthentic.  We Christians are not unreasonable people, but we do require a solid theological base on which we can entrust our lives. It must be authentic; it must be real; it must be believable.  I’m not discounting mystery and its role in the least; but even mystery must function within an authentic construct. 

The most frustrating part of doing a puzzle is coming across that piece that should fit, except it doesn’t.  It’s so close, but it is shaped in such a way that makes clear it’s meant for another place. I confess that this is how I have sometimes felt about the biblical account of the virgin birth.  It seems it should fit perfectly, and yet the way we have been told the story, and the way we keep retelling it, well it seems a forced fit. 

So I was particularly happy when I came across the work of Czeck theologian Jan Milic Lochman. He died in 2004, but left us with a theologically sound and equally bold assertion regarding the virgin birth. It has aided me is framing in the edges of this puzzle of the charming Nativity scene that is repeated across the world in children’s pageants and as lawn statuettes.  It is a lovely scene, but it often reduced to the stuff of legend. It is a lovely scene, but when we try on our own to unpack it theologically we’re left with is an incomplete puzzle that cannot be finished because none of the pieces seem to really fit. And we can never get past that struggle, that frustration of trying to find the right piece in a pile of 500 or 1000 pieces. It is just too big a task for us, and so we are left with a partially complete Nativity scene, a one dimensional image of a coffee table puzzle, and no idea of how to complete it.  

One of the keys of puzzle-construction is that you work on it only for as long as you are making progress. When you’re stuck, its best to leave it for the other person to have a go. So in this case, I had gone as far with the Virgin Birth puzzle as I could. So I took a break from trying to work it out, to make sense of it.  Fortunately, Lockman (and a host of other capable theologians) have been working on the same puzzle. After reading of his work, I found a workable frame to put around this story that is foundational to the Christian ethos.  I would like to share a bit of it with you.

Charles Wood, a commentator for Feasting on the Word, which is an indispensible collection of commentaries on every lesson of every week for the entire three year lectionary cycle has offered the following remarks regarding today’s gospel reading on the topic of the virgin birth.

Modern, Czech theologian Jan Milic Lochman, “frequently noted the way both the communist East and capitalist West fostered ‘one-dimensional’ views of reality.  Truth is reduced to fact, and fact denotes what fits into the reigning economy, with its ideals of production and consumption and its corresponding ways of measuring and controlling reality.  For Lockman, Christian faith involves a deliverance from that sort of impoverished perception- or rather, lack of perception… Lochman’s treatment of the relevant passages in the Apostles’s Creed – [that being,] “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary” – can be of substantial help to us as we consider Matthew’s account of the virgin birth. Lochman observed how the meaning of the Gospel text is lost when subjected to the kind of reductive reading our [modern] one-dimensional worldviews seem to force upon us. 

Many Christians, to say nothing of the wider population, seem agreed that the intent of this passage is to assert a factual claim, a biological/historical claim, about the parentage of Jesus.  That claim is as follows:  Jesus had a human mother, Mary, but no human father.  Mary was somehow impregnated (supernaturally) by God, so that the child was both divine and human. The question, then, is whether this affirmation is properly part of the Christian faith – perhaps an essential part – or rather a legend that somehow became part of the early tradition and is at best harmless. To deny the claim seems to amount to a denial of the incarnation. To deny the claim is to say that Jesus is just an ordinary human being, with two ordinary human parents . But to affirm the claim may be equally problematic.” What we end up with on the other end of the spectrum is a demigod – that is the product of the union between a human and a divine entity.

Fortunately for us, in about the fourth century, the early church worked out a solid Christology that has withstood the test of many centuries, and it did not include either of these possibilities.  Since the Council of Chalcedon, the church and its creeds has confessed Jesus to be “one person in two nature, ‘complete in his deity and complete – the very same – in his humanity.”  It is a grand statement, that makes perfect sense, but it does not tell us how to reconcile our creedal confession with the modern understanding of virgin birth narrative. We know who Jesus and what we believe about him. We’re just a bit fuzzy on how, exactly, he came into being.

So how do we post-modern Christians, who have been very much influenced by the North American Modernist-fundamentalist of a century ago, explain the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth?  Perhaps we should go back to the text.  Wood goes on to say, “When our Gospel text speaks of God’s involvement in the conception and birth of Jesus, it speaks of God not as Father but as Spirit.  Mary ‘was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” Here is our opportunity to break free of a one dimensional reading of this text and open ourselves to a fuller appreciation of Matthew’s birth narrative “by bringing the story out of the realm of Hellenistic mythology and relating is decisively to the history of God’s involvement with Israel.  Throughout that history, God’s spirit is the catalyst of the new; the Spirit is the Lord, the giver of life. [So] to say that Mary’s child is ‘from the Holy Spirit’ is to say that God is creating a radically new beginning. These reflections have followed the suggestion of Lochman that we think of the virgin birth as an ‘interpretative dogma.’ It is not an ‘article of faith’ in itself…. It is best construed as a pointer to a more central… affirmation, namely, that in Jesus, God has assumed our humanity” not through some supernatural human and divine union – rather as an act of the Holy Spirit, which is itself mysterious, but not beyond the scope of believability.  

This gives you and I something to say to people who confess to us that they are really struggling with reciting a creed they don’t believe. And the main struggle happens to be with the one part upon which all our faith hangs: the incarnation. This is because it is the incarnation that gives the resurrection its power. We cannot simply look at them and say “Where is your faith?”  Quite honestly, I need a reasoned faith too. I do not need proof positive, but certainly not something so fantastic that it too should seem to reside in the North Pole. 

 

Here’s what I can and do believe.  I believe in God, the Truine God, who is the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of the world. I believe that Jesus is the son of God, but was conceived by the Holy Spirit. I believe that having been conceived by the Holy Spirit, he was made man, fully human, and at the same time fully divine. I believe that Jesus lived as one of us and experienced the fullness of the being human.   I believe that this was done so that through him we might learn to trust, perhaps even love God.  People believe, I mean really believe, lock, stock and barrel, in all kinds of things they can’t explain:  UFO sightings, telethopy, clairvoyance, Tarot cards, horoscopes, myths and old wives tales.  I happen to think the workings of the Holy Spirit are more believable then any of those things.  So, if you happen to be struggling with the virgin birth, and it seems your puzzle is always only partially complete because you can’t get past the piece that seems to fit but actually doesn’t then reduce the story to its basic elements:  Mary and Joseph were engaged.  The Holy Spirit was present with Mary. Through the Holy Spirit God broke into the world in a way that would change history and positively affect the lives of millions upon millions of people over a span of 2000 years.  The Holy Spirit rested on Joseph as well and he accepted his role as husband to Mary and father to Jesus. 

As believers in the incarnation, that is, that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ, and through our baptism into the body of Christ the Holy Spirit rest upon each of us.  That is a mystery. A good mystery. The mystery to which I have committed my life.  A mystery that brings good news to the oppressed, widows, and orphans.  A mystery that has the power to set captives and prisoners free.  A mystery that provides all Christians with a worldview that is not narrow or one-dimensional, but full of promise and possibilities; that allows for a lot of gray area in a very black and white world.  It is a mystery that delivers on its promise of hope.  As Christians we speak in the language of hope and light and transformation; all of which are based in the mysterious workings of the blessed Holy Spirit. Most of which cannot be explained rationally.  I can live with that.