Why I Trust the Virgin Birth”
Advent 4/B/Luke 1:26-38/12-18-2011
Rev. Phillip Fenton
Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.”
Luke 1:45
“Before you approve me for membership, Pastor, there’s something you probably ought to know. I just can’t say I believe in the Virgin Birth.”
His name was Jim, 45 years old; he was a new Christian. He had wandered off the street one day and into my office, wanting to talk about God and the meaning of life. We met several times. Eventually, he started coming to worship. He took my class: “An Introduction to the Christian Faith.” He ate it up. He loved everything about it – everything, that is, except the Virgin Birth. “I just can’t get my brain around that one,” he said.
“Well, it’s not the biggest problem,” I said. “That alone won’t disqualify you from membership. The Virgin Birth of Christ is something you can’t prove. If you believe it, it’s something you just accept in faith and move on. In a way, that in Christianity which you accept in faith is the easy part of being a Christian. There are much harder things. Believing in the Virgin Birth is not going to be the test of the authenticity of your faith. Most people won’t care. But, day in and day out, what’s going to test you and try you, what’s going to trip you up, what’s going to show the depth of spiritual roots that you have put down are the harder things - like “love your neighbor as yourself,” and “love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you”. That’s where the test comes. That’s what makes Christianity hard. Christianity has never gotten these right consistently. Christians fail on these all the time.”
An enlightened, solidly pastoral answer, I thought. I would say the same to anyone who, like Jim, just can’t get your brain around Christmas - a virgin having a baby, and the baby is God. There is much discussion amongst us these days about the Virgin Birth. In fact, none of the historic tenets of our faith is under a barrage of skepticism like these verses from the Gospel of Luke. This concerns me because, for Christians, belief or disbelief in the Virgin Birth has become a point of division and of mutual scorn that eats away at the far more fundamental imperative of Christian love.
The truth is no one really knows the how of the Virgin Birth. No one can prove it or disprove it. Only Mary and Jesus know what really happened. Only they know by what means and machinations He really came to be among us.
In time, I would take Jim to another level, but this was not the time. In time I would tell him how and why I came to trust the message of the Virgin Birth. It’s a story I have committed myself to. I promote it and contend with others over it. It was not always so. There was a time when I too didn’t like it much – it was just too far fetched for my practical mind. But it finally struck me, “What about the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not far fetched? What about Christmas makes practical, scientific, empirical sense? When you really think about it, what about God’s choosing to save a lost, sinful humanity, and the way He chose to do it, can we get our brains around? So why should I set aside just one impossible aspect out of the many to disbelieve?”
What we like is logic. And that’s precisely why Christmas happened the way it did. God had to slip in under the radar of human logic. We see the history that human logic has written for this world. God did something illogical, Luke says.
The first illogical thing God did was to make Christmas feminine. Oh yes, there are men, but only two, and their time on the stage is brief – mere supporting actors. Joseph doesn’t even have any lines - doesn’t utter a peep. And Zechariah - his lips are zipped because the first thing out of his mouth is an appeal to logic – “But….”
Logic – just another way of wanting to be in control – Luke presents as a more masculine trait. An overstatement, perhaps – indeed women can be logical – but let’s indulge Luke’s distinction for a moment. What is feminine about Christmas, he says, is receptivity. Men want to be in control, we compete, we take charge, we make things happen. It’s probably true that most men in our culture perceive becoming a Christian as somewhat feminine in nature. To open yourself to receive runs counter to the male psyche in our culture. About 60% of people in churches across America today are women. The Christian Booksellers Association assumes 80% of its readers are women. It wasn’t different in Luke’s culture. Christmas is all women – women opening themselves up to receive.
Among theologians the virgin birth has also been unpopular. They love logic too - almost more than they love God. But what they end up doing is telling us more what God is not. He is Invisible, Immortal, Infinite. But what is God? God was entering human history. He was beginning a new creation. He was going to save the world. He was going to do it His way. He had allowed human beings ample time to do it their way. Their way is always to wish for “peace on earth, good will to all”, but their practice instead is “an eye for an eye.” Luke tells the story of God doing it His way, and we hear stories about poor women, widows, unclean women, prostitutes, enemy women. In such women - poor women like Mary and Elizabeth, and the widow with her tiny offering; unclean women like the woman with the years-long flow of blood; corrupt women like the woman caught in adultery and those who openly sold their bodies; enemy women like the Samaritan woman – through these women we are shown exemplary faith.
God had to move beyond logic and theology. If I can’t believe that he came as a helpless baby, born of a poor, powerless teenager, then can I believe that He can come to me or to you?
My trust in the Virgin Birth comes from beyond logic. It’s what speaks to my heart and encourages my spirit long after logic has ceased to impress. It is consistent with the illogic of that scene to come – the cross on a hill where the abandoned one, the beaten one, the dying one says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” It is consistent with the greatest miracle of all: the amazing quality of life that the Christ has given birth to in an astonishing variety of people over an astonishingly long period of time.
I may have told this story before. If not, I wouldn’t be surprised if you heard it from another preacher. Still, it’s worthy of retelling here. There was a little girl whose mother had a baby. It was a boy, and when baby brother came home, the little girl was so excited. She asked to spend some time alone with him. The parents were fearful, thinking this could be about sibling rivalry. But they finally they gave in to their daughter. The little girl went into the nursery. The parents stood outside, peeking in, but out of their daughter’s vision. This is what they saw and heard. The little girl leaned over the crib and said, "Tell me, baby, what it's like to feel God? I'm beginning to forget."
Doctrine and distance have given us the incarnate God who is Christ – with logic and reasoning aplenty - but they have also sealed away from our hearts and from all immediacy the vulnerable human being who was the incarnation itself. Even those of us who know and walk with Jesus cannot know the inside corridors and mansions of His own interior life. They are blocked to us, they are nowhere recorded for us, and, thus, are forever a barrier between us. Only He knew them--He and Mary knew.
Centuries of logic have given Christians the divinity of Christ. Mary gives contemporary Christians a bridge of connection with His ancient and original humanity. It is a connection, an intimacy in knowing, a consoling comfort that fills the hearts of thousands today who yearn to find in the infant Jesus the heat and flesh of the God they hold in their thoughts. (Phyllis Tickle)
There is,of course, no logical answer to the mystery of the Virgin Birth. There never is to a mystery. There is no answer because an answer would only wither the elegance, the poetry, the awful beauty of faith and leave us merely human again, stripped bare of all that exceeds our knowing and controlling. In the end it’s Mary’s words that hold all the truth and beauty of faith:
“ I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word.”
Amen.
