Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
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"So You Think This Is Unlikely?" Dr. Julie Adkins
Text: Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)
SERMON
William Willimon,
the Methodist preacher and all-round wise curmudgeon,
shares with us a story about
one of the students he has come to know over the years.
This student made an appointment and came to see Willimon,
in some distress, apparently,
afraid that he was "losing his faith."
"Tell me," says our friend Will,
just what is this faith that you are losing?
"Well," says the student,
"I have problems with the virgin birth of Jesus.
Don’t I have to believe in the miraculous birth of Jesus
in order to believe in Jesus?"
"In one sense, no," Willimon agrees.
"Yet in another sense, yes.
We ask you to believe in the virginal conception of Jesus and,
if we can get you to swallow that without choking,
then there’s no telling what someone can get you to believe.
Come back next week and we’ll try to convince you
that the poor are royalty and the rich are in big trouble,
that God, not nations, rules the world,
and on and on.
We start you out with something fairly small, like the virgin birth,
then work you up to even more outrageous assertions."
You can call this heretical if you want,
but I don’t think it matters one way or the other
whether Jesus was or was not born to a mother
who was a virgin at the time.
I’m quite sure that God could pull a stunt like that if God wanted to …
seems like a pretty basic, intro-level-deity sort of thing!
And perhaps in this case, God did in fact want to.
But I’m not sure it matters to us, now.
It may have mattered in that first-century Palestinian context.
If you’ll think about what you might remember from
Roman mythology, or Greek mythology:
it wasn’t particularly uncommon for gods to beget children from mortal women,
but it nearly always involved rape.
So, if you’re living in the time of Jesus,
and those are the stories you know …
and remember, Luke was writing for Gentiles, not Jews …
wouldn’t this story get your attention,
in terms of how different it is?
In the first place, how powerful this God of the Christians and the Jews must be,
to create a pregnancy
without any physical contact at all.
Not unlike creating the heavens and the earth and the world
just by speaking them into being.
In the second place, this God waited
until the young woman said yes.
What would that tell you about a God who is just, and kind;
not arbitrary and capricious?
We can see that this story of a virgin birth
was important at the time when Luke was writing.
It was also important in the early centuries of the church,
though for reasons that were less good.
As the Church Fathers –
and they were all men, so we can safely call them "fathers" –
worked out what would become the church’s understanding of sin,
they got that all tangled up with their own phobias about sex,
and their own fears of sexuality and its power …
And they came up with the notion of "original sin" …
which does make some sense, but there’s no time to talk about it today! …
but they connected that with sex!
Because they believed sex to be sinful, even within marriage –
it was less sinful then, perhaps,
but they really would have preferred that everyone be celibate –
because sex was sinful,
and because sex was required in order to conceive children,
therefore, this is how original sin was passed on
from each generation to the next.
A theology of "sin as a sexually-transmitted disease."
This seems pretty outrageous to most of us, but again,
in this context, you can see why
they spilled so much ink arguing in favor of the virgin birth.
If you were going to be able to talk about a Jesus who was without sin,
you had to be sure that he was conceived without an act of sex.
Well, enough church history already.
You can see clearly, I think,
why the question of a virgin birth mattered to them …
That doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be important to us,
but I suspect that for at least some of us,
it is an obstacle to belief, or to faith, rather than a help.
And that’s one thing it was never meant to be.
Because what matters is not how Jesus came here,
but that he came here.
Not, whether he is the son of a virgin,
but that he is the son of God.
Something that his cousin John recognized
even from within the womb!…
as today’s gospel reading reminds us.
The virgin birth may be unlikely-sounding, to be sure.
But it’s nothing compared with the rest of the story,
the part that really matters.
When Mary responds to Elizabeth
after the baby-leaping-in-the-womb incident …
When she speaks the words that we call the Magnificat,
those words we sang a little while ago …
then we get to the really unlikely, unbelievable part.
When, exactly, did God scatter the proud?
When did the powerful get brought down?
When did the lowly get lifted up?
There certainly seem still to be lots of them,
sadly wandering our streets.
Since when have the hungry been filled?
And when have the rich been sent away hungry?
I haven’t seen it; have you?
Wouldn’t it be a wonderful December headline:
"Dallas Morning News Charities Disbanded
Services no longer needed;
somehow this past year all the lowly got lifted up."
Wouldn’t that be awesome?
You see, Mary doesn’t say,
"some day God will feed the hungry;
some day God will put down the powerful."
It’s not future tense.
It’s not even present-tense,
as if to say, "God is in the process of doing these things."
It’s in the perfect tense: God has done it.
That is, God acted in the past,
and the results of that action continue into the present.
God has scattered the proud;
God has lifted up the lowly.
Only problem is:
we look around us, and we don’t see it.
So, which is harder to believe?
Which is more unlikely?
That, two thousand years ago, a virgin came home pregnant?
Or that "the poor are royalty and the rich are in big trouble,
and God, not nations, rules the world,"
even though we can’t see any of that happening?
No … even though I’m pretty sure the virgin birth
doesn’t matter one way or the other,
frankly, I find it easier to believe
than that God has done all these things
for which there is no apparent evidence.
It seems easier to suppose that perhaps God
has given up on us,
or at least has stepped back to force us
to wallow in the mess we have created,
or perhaps is at least temporarily busy elsewhere,
off trying to save some other planet from self-destruction.
This is where faith gets hard.
Not in debating about miraculous things
that may or may not have happened in the past,
but in figuring out what God is up to in the present.
According to Mary, according to Luke,
God has already fed the hungry and sent the rich away empty.
I don’t see it,
but will I choose to believe it nonetheless?
God has scattered the proud, and lifted up the lowly:
Will you believe it, even though the evidence is scanty at best?
And if we believe that Christ’s coming
has in fact stood the world on its head,
what does that mean about how we choose to live our lives?
Back to our Methodist friend:
"The main truth to keep before us, in regard to Incarnation,
is not simply that ‘God is with us,’
but that God came to us as Jesus.
Of all the ways for God to enflesh,
God came as a Jewish peasant who was murdered by the authorities,
not because ot the peculiarity of his birth,
but for the revolutionary quality of hie life.
Jesus was violently tortured to death,
not because he was a baby conceived out of wedlock,
but because of what he said and what he did once he grew up.
His advent provoked a crisis in our settled intellectual and political arrangements,
unmasking the relationship between our cherished notions
of what can and can’t be
and our governmental sanctions about who is and who is not in charge."
Luke, and Mary, and Jesus,
confront us always with the question:
Whose side will we be on?
Those of us who live in the middle,
neither particularly rich nor regularly hungry;
neither proud nor lowly.
Whose side are we on?
God has acted,
even though we can’t often see it;
even though it seems unlikely;
even though the "evidence" says otherwise.
The world tells us that things are a certain way.
God tells us that things are not what they seem.
Whom do we believe?
How will we live,
in order to demonstrate whom, and what, we believe?
Christ is coming.
This changes everything.
Amen.
© 2003 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)