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Sunday "Deciphering the Christmas Mystery" Luke 1 26-38 |
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“The Coming”
by R. S. Thomas
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
The nativity stories are found in only two of the Gospels, Luke and Matthew, and the earliest Gospel, Mark, makes no mention of the birth of Jesus. Scholars suggest these stories are later additions. And the birth stories differ from each other. Matthew has the wise men and Luke has the shepherds. Matthew focuses on Joseph, Luke on Mary. Combining them makes for a crowded manger scene. And, for those of you who are interested in genealogies, it is interesting to note that Luke and Matthew each provide a list of Jesus ancestors. Matthew starts with Abraham and Luke goes all the way back to Adam. And the names on the lists are not entirely consistent when compared. But the most interesting thing is that each genealogical list traces Jesus’ ancestry back through Joseph’s side of the family. But both nativity stories say that Mary was a virgin. In Matthew, an angel says, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” But if God is really Jesus’ father, as classical Trinitarian theology comes to teach, a genealogy on Joseph’s side is irrelevant. Isn’t that curious?
The Doctrine of the Virgin Birth is central to Luke and Matthew. This morning I’d like to muse a bit on the nativity stories, with attention to the Virgin Birth. Look at the stories, if you will, from four perspectives, four levels of understanding: the literal, the psychological, the mythological, and the spiritual.First, the literal. There is no getting around what is required for a female mammal to become pregnant: two sets of chromosomes, one from the mother and one from a male. Irrespective new advances in the technology of artificial insemination or even cloning, pregnancy without a male currently is impossible. But this raises another question. Are miracles possible? Well, the Bible is full of them, of course. A miracle is, by definition, something that is impossible. The Virgin Birth is a miracle because it is impossible. So do you believe in miracles – that is, that God can make the impossible happen? Well, you’ll have to answer that for yourself. The angel says to Mary that “nothing will be impossible with God.” And the angel gives the example of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth who, in her old age, conceived a son, John. The Old Testament has many stories about women who become pregnant in old age. So for Luke, Mary’s miracle is somehow not entirely unprecedented. But our modern scientific age would see that differently.
Next the psychological level. Irrespective of its literal truth, does the nativity story say something significant to us as human beings? I think it does. Religious conservatives are intent on telling us that the nuclear family is biblically-based and essential for the survival of civilization. I believe they are wrong on both counts. Part of that understanding is that marriage involves one man and one woman, is God-ordained, and is the only correct way to bear and raise children. Gender identity is defined in terms of motherhood and fatherhood. Mother, father, baby. Women need men; men need women. But what is disorienting about the nativity stories is that to become pregnant Mary didn’t need Joseph at all. What does this say psychologically? I think two things. It says that Mary as a woman was not in any sense incomplete. Despite what her culture taught, she was a full physical and social human being, with or without a man. Her identity was not just half of a male-female equation. And you can’t simply substitute God the Father for Joseph the father, because then you are substituting a spiritual Y chromosome for a literal one (Which takes us back to the problem of miracles). So the Virgin Birth may be about the wholeness of women and their creativity as human beings. Secondly, it shows us that being a mother or a father is less about biology and more about relationship. Think of all the ways that Joseph actually was a father; in terms of his compassion and tenderness, his loving acceptance of Mary, his care for her in pregnancy and child bearing, and his concern for his family’s safety. Though he disappears from the Gospels eventually, we know he was a devout father at least until Jesus’ twelfth year when they went up as a family to Jerusalem. The nativity story can help us understand that one can be a non-biological mother or father, and be a parent in every important sense of the word. Adoptive, single or partnered, same-gendered parents are all parents. A true mother or father is one who is there, who loves, who teaches, who protects a child.Third, the mythological level. There are stories in most cultures about gods coming down to visit mortal women. Zeus, hurler of thunderbolts, fathered innumerable children who were half-divine, half-human. God coming down from heaven to Mary in this way would have been no surprise to the ancients. I think at this mythological level we are reminded that the physical world that we can see and measure is not all that there is. All the great spiritual traditions tell us, each in their own way, that we can live our lives as human beings on two levels, in two realms. One is the everyday world of mundane reality. This is the world of getting up in the morning and going to work, paying the bills, making a home, creating a career, taking out the trash. But the traditions say that there is another, equally important realm. Call it the magical, the enchanted, the intuitive, the unconscious, the world of deep dreams, heaven, Brahman, nirvana, whatever. The wisdom of East and West, tells us that these two worlds must be understood and held together. They are different, yet connected. Notice how the nativity stories exist in both the heavenly and the earthly realms, the mundane and the mysterious. On the one hand there is God, angels, the star, astrologers from the East; and on the other, shepherds, a bedraggled young couple with a donkey, lowing cattle, a smelly stable, and a crude feeding trough. It is through story that we see meaning and magic invade and transform everyday life. That is why the most humble Sunday School Christmas pageant, even with all its mishaps, charms us with its mystery.
Finally, the spiritual level. Here it is a story about how God comes to us. God comes to us by becoming us. All through the Bible, God comes to humanity - to be with us in love. God comes down and walks in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day - to be with Adam and Eve. God visits Moses in the burning bush. God leads the Hebrews through the Red Sea and in the wilderness. God comes to a discouraged Elijah hiding in a cave, as a still small voice. God comes and weeps with the Hebrew exiles in Babylon as they sadly sing their songs of Zion. So why can’t God, this time, come all the way, getting right down into a cradle – coming to us by becoming one of us. Becoming the most vulnerable of us. Loving us by becoming love in us. In the world. In the flesh.
Why would God do this? Father Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest who works with gang youth in Los Angeles. He was a parish pastor and then founded Homeboy Industries, whose mission is to find jobs for ex-gang members. Countless young lives have been reclaimed through this ministry, which operates businesses that include a silk-screening operation, a landscaping service, and a graffiti-removal project. In an interview with Terry Gross he described how the Good News is really communicated.
I try to explain the Gospel to them at their level. So I'm always telling stories about homies and parables of homies seeing the light or not seeing the light. And I primarily want to speak to them the good news that they're OK and that they're beloved. But from my own Christian perspective, Jesus isn't expecting us to be constantly talking about or announcing a message. His hope is that we become that message. God doesn't want us endlessly to praise God for being compassionate. God is hoping that we will spend our time being compassionate. So I want to live as if the truth were true, and I want to go where love has not yet arrived – and choose to stand with the folks that God chooses to stand with.
God’s message is love. But God not only talked about love. God showed us how to love by becoming the message, becoming love. And coming to us to do that. God is Emmanuel, God with us. God with us in our scorched land, with our crusted buildings, beside our rivers of slime, on our bare hills with its bare trees. The son sees our outstretched arms. The son watches us and says, “Let me go there.” AMEN.
