Sermon for December 14th

If you haven’t noticed, I have printed out next week’s gospel lesson and placed it in your bulletin this week. Next week is our Christmas Pageant and, so, I won’t be giving a sermon. But, next week’s reading is a very important one as we get ready for Christmas day and I wanted a chance to reflect on it with you. So, turn to your insert and read along with me, from the Gospel of Luke the first chapter (Read Luke 1:26-38)

Most of us have heard this passage once or twice before, but I wonder if we realize how radical it really is. I mean, at Easter time, the drama is pretty obvious isn’t it? Jesus is dead and then, after three days, his is alive again! Raised from the dead! An amazing miracle that really gets people talking! In comparison to Easter day, this Advent text seems boring and quaint. But, in fact, this text is just as full of miracles as the text for Easter day.

The angel Gabriel says to Mary, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” That’s right! Mary, the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, was a virgin mother. How can that be? How is that possible? Well, as the angel later says, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”

Unfortunately, many people have a problem with believing that Mary was a virgin mother. They say that it’s not that important to believe; as long as you believe Jesus was born and died and was resurrected, you’ve got the gospel.” They say, “There ain’t no way you can have a baby and still be a virgin.” In fact, if you’d read much ancient history, you might notice that a lot of important and famous people were SAID to have mothers who were virgins. Egyptian Pharaohs, Roman emperors and even Alexander the Great were said to be “virgin births” to make them seem semi-divine in nature. Some would argue that that’s probably what happened in the story of Jesus’ birth as well.

Do you believe in the virgin birth of Jesus? And if not, why not? You’ve heard that Jesus walked on water, healed lepers and was raised from the dead? Why is the virgin birth such a pickle to believe?

We argue that Mary couldn’t have been a virgin. It’s impossible! We know how babies start out and that’s not how. But our real problem isn’t with Mary, it’s with Jesus. We have trouble believing that Jesus is truly God. You see, if Mary isn’t truly a virgin, then how can you believe that Jesus is truly God? If Mary is anything but a virgin when Jesus born, you just can’t be sure who his father is, can you? And if Jesus isn’t truly God, then Christmas isn’t much of a holiday at all for you and me.

Mary is an easy scapegoat for our doubts. It’s a lot easier to try and figure out how the story might be wrong about Mary than to have to believe that the story is correct. We imagine that maybe Mary was just embarrassed by a little mistake that was made with another man while she was engaged to Joseph and made up this whole angel story. Or worse, maybe she was raped, as some people have speculated, but couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone! It’s been argued over and over that believing in the virgin birth of Jesus isn’t necessary to believe in Jesus, but I would like to know what Jesus you are referring to.

There are many people and, perhaps, many of you, who think a lot of Jesus, what he stood for and what he did, and would like to emulate him as a person. Jesus is a wonderful, powerful example of what one person can do to change the world. But, a radical social revolutionary Jesus doesn’t need to be God, does he? A Jesus who stands up to the religious and political leaders of his time and gets killed for it doesn’t need to have a mother who gave birth to him as a virgin, right? All those miracles of his are interesting stories but, when push comes to shove, you wouldn’t have to believe any of them as long as Jesus is a good example to follow in your life. You wouldn’t need a virgin birth to worship a Jesus like that.

But while Jesus was very radical and political and revolutionary in his time, and in our time, the Bible argues that he was even more than that. The Bible says that he was, in fact, God. Or, as the Lutheran Reformers put it, “Apart from this man, Jesus Christ, there is no God.” And if you miss that little detail, you’ve missed the most radical, the most political and the most revolutionary detail of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. God, the creator of your universe, became a human being and all that comes with it—even to the point that Jesus Christ, who knew no sin, was cursed on the cross and became sin itself. So that you might trust that God, the creator of your universe, isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty and has the power and the love to stick with you from your conception, to your birth, throughout your life and even in your death. God was born, died and was raised from the dead not so that you could follow him by example but so that you might worship him as your God alone.

But there is also another problem we often have with this story about Mary being the virgin mother of Jesus. This problem isn’t so much scientific or physical but theological. Even if we can accept that God can supernaturally impregnate a human being somehow, someway, isn’t it kinda disgusting and degrading for your God, the creator of the Universe, to float around in a uterus for ten months, even if it is Mary, who we assume was a nice upstanding lady. Even the best theologians throughout history have had a hard time with that one. One famous church leader named, Nestorious, even argued that while you could say that Mary was the mother of Jesus, you shouldn’t say she was the mother of God—no birth canal for my Lord, no sirreee! That would be too gross, too dirty and, to be more precise, too close for God to get to a sinner.

But God got so close to you that he experienced amniotic fluid, hiccups and active labor. God didn’t choose to create himself out of nothing as a newborn baby or even as a thirty-one year old man. He became an zygote, then an embryo and then a fetus and waited ten months to be born and breathe fresh air. How? I haven’t a clue. But, as the angel Gabriel says, with God anything is possible.

You see, Christmas day is a wonderful day full of joy and happiness, but the real miracle isn’t Jesus’ birth. It is a wonderful event, just as every birth is, but the fact that Jesus was born, after ten months gestation, isn’t the most amazing thing of all. The most amazing thing is that God chose to have the chance to be born after waiting and growing for months just like all the rest of us. In Phillipians, we hear one of the oldest Christian hymns talk about this wonderful miracle, “though Jesus was in the form of God,” the book of Phillipians says, “He did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

If God DIDN’T intend on becoming a human being, then the virgin birth would not have had to truly have happened. If God WASN’T willing to suffer life as a human being, then the virgin birth wouldn’t have had to be true. But if Mary was NOT the virgin mother of Jesus Christ, then not only do we have a problem with the words of Scripture, but we have a problem with God himself. For if God himself was not in Mary’s womb, then God himself was not truly born. And if God himself was not truly born, then God himself did not truly die. And if God himself did not truly die, then we should have all slept in this morning and enjoyed some more pillow time. For if God DID NOT truly die for your in the form of Jesus Christ, then you have no hope for eternal life.

Despite the craziness and unlikeliness of it all, I encourage you to hold onto God’s Word with joy, awe and wonder—even when you hear that Jesus was born to a virgin. Remember that Jesus was not born to the virgin Mary to make the story harder for you to believe, but so that you might more easily believe—so that you might be given faith that Jesus was born both truly human and truly God. So that you might have faith that he has truly saved you from your sins. But, in fact, the most remarkable thing is not that Jesus was born to a virgin, or that he healed thousands, or that he died, or that he was raised from the dead. The most amazing and wonderful thing of all is that he did all of this for you. For only now that you have heard that God truly became a human being to a virgin mother, can you wait expectantly not just for the story of little baby Jesus, but to hear the story that God himself was born on Christmas day. And that is worth waiting for. Amen.