The Earthiness of Christmas John M, Buchanan

Isaiah 7:14 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Luke 1:46-55 Columbus, Ohio

December 5, 1976

Sermons on the Virgin Birth and Mary, the Mother of Jesus, are not terribly
common in Protestant churches, In fact, one can be exposed to a lot of Protestantism -
its music, art, literature, liturgy, without ever encountering anything but the most
cursory mention of the Virgin Birth, We resolve any ambiguity we feel about the idea
by pretending that it isn't there, An in-house joke among Presbyterian Seminary
students who may be asked if they believe in the Virgin Birth as part of their oral
ordination examination is the response, "On that subject I find myself in agreement
with St. Paul" who nowhere mentions the idea nor gives any indication that he ever
heard of it,

The reason for our reticence about the whole matter is 4 traditionally
Protestant reaction to Roman Catholicism at the point where it is most particularly
Roman Catholic, Mary, in Roman tradition, is perpetually a virgin, shares the reign
of Heaven with Jesus, her son, intercedes for humankind, was herself conceived im-
maculately and taken up bodily into Heaven, There is a deep and historic aversion
among Protestants to all of that which is expressed by ignoring her altogether, And
that is too bad, because if she isn't Mother of God she most certainly was the Mother
of Jesus, She was there from the beginning: she fed, weaned, bathed and taught Him,
She is a presence throughout the New Testament, She followed Him right up to the
Cross, and He expressed His love for her from the Cross by asking His disciple and
friend, John, to care for her, Her place in history is established and preserved by
the mention of her name in the oldest, popular Christian Creed - the Apostles';"T
believe in Jesus Christ our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the
Virgin Mary..."

The Virgin Birth, but more importantly the idea of the Virgin Mary, has been
powerful and compelling over the centuries. She has inspired some of the most sublime
art in all of history, I saw last year the replica of Michelangelo's Pieta in St,
Patrick's Cathedral in New York - and wondered again about the depths of emotion the $
Virgin has touched in the hearts of men, Go2det et

There have been countless attempts to explain why the Virgin struck such a
responsive chord and prompted such devotion. Ina highly acclaimed book published
this fall, Alone Of All Her Sex, Maria Warner suggests that "men who denied them-
selves women needed a woman on whom to pour out love, while women, suffering beneath
a social system which denigrated womanhood needed a women's compassion to ease
their pain,"

Psychologists have had a field day with the fact that adult men have been so
devoted to the Virgin, Margaret Mead, in a review of the book in Harpers, comments;
"It is difficult for the modern reader to recapture the extraordinary significance
which intellectuals of the Middle Ages attached to the question,,,It is necessary
to keep reminding oneself that these intellectuals were celibate, committed to a
way of life which associated sex with all that was evil," (Harpers, Oct, 16, p,88-92),

Nevertheless, people who know all that: people steeped in psychology, anthro~-
pology, history, retain and value the idea of the Virgin Mary, And before we. Prot-
estants simply ignore her, we ought really to know what we are ignoring, Malcolm
Muggeridge, a brilliant British man of letters, regards the idea of the Virgin Birth
as a judgment upon a lot of what is wrong with modern, secular society,

"In humanistic times such as ours," he writes, "a contemporary virgin -
assuming there are any - would regard a message from the Angel Gabriel that she
might expect to give birth to a Son of the Highest as ill~tidings of great sorrow
and a slur on the local family planning centre, It is, in point of fact, extremely
improbable, under existing conditions, that Jesus would have been permitted to be
born at all, Mary's pregnancy, in poor circumstances, and with the father unknown,
would have been an obvious case for an abortion; and her talk of having conceived
as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for
psychiatric treatment and made the cage for terminating her pregnancy even stronger.
Thus our generation, needing a Savior more, perhaps than any that has ever existed,
would be too humane to allow one to be born,,." (Jesus, p,19). Muggeridge embraces
the doctrine of the Virgin Birth in a way that is at once, brilliant and humble,

Part of the misunderstanding surrounding the question of the Virgin Birth
is that it has become a kind of test of orthodoxy for many people, In the early
1900's a series of books were published which set out to define the "Fundamentals of
the Christian Faith": among those fundamentals were the inerrancey of Scripture,
the Blood Atonement, and the Virgin Birth, The title "Fundamentalist" was first used
to describe adherents of these books, The effect of the project was, first - to tie
the divinity of Jesus to the Virginity of Mary in a way the New Testament does not;
i.e, Jesus was the divine Son of God because His mother was a virgin; but more to the
point, the effect was to hold up a test of the true faith: if you believed Mary was
a virgin you were a Christian: if you did not - you were not, And at this point it
is fair to say that zealous Christians have made this subject more important than
it is - even in the Bible,

: What does the Bible say? There are problems with the doctrine in the context
of the Bible and they begin with the Isaiah 7 sentence which was part of the Old
Testament Lesson this morning, In Matthew's account of the annunciation Isaiah is
quoted: "Behold a virgin shall conceive," William Barclay calls it the "strangest
problem in Biblical interpretation," Ahaz was king, and Judah was, as usual, in
trouble, The prophet, Isaiah, promised that God would deliver the nation: the king
would be given a sign of God's good faith: "Behold a virgin - or young woman ~ shall
conceive and bear a son, and the name shall be called Immanuel," The strangeness is
precisely in the translation of the word designating the person doing the conceiving.
The Hebrew word in the text is "almah": it means a young woman of marriageable age,
There is a good Hebrew word for virgin - Bethulah - which the writer surely would
have used if he wanted to emphasize the young woman's virginity. How then, did the
word "virgin" get in the pyssage? It occurred in a translation of the Hebrew
scripture into Greek, in the third century B,C, That translation is called the
Septuagent, and it was the authorized, oldest text for research until the modern eva,
The Septuagent translates the Hebrew almah - young woman ~ with the Greek parthenos -
virgin, Why - no one knows,

Careful study of the New Testament turns up some equally perplexing problems,
In the first chapter of Matthew, Mary is described as "betrothed" to Joseph in
Verse 18: in the very next verse, however, Joseph is called her husband and is con-
templating divorce, and in Verse 20 Mary is called his wife, The complexity is a
result of the peculiar marriage customs in Palestine at the time, Actually it was
a three stage process, An engagement was an agreement between parents when their
children were quite young, Betrothal was the confirmation of the engagement agree~
ment by the couple for a period of one year, When betrothed they were referred to
as man and wife and betrothal could be broken only by divorce, Marriage came at the
end of the year of betrothal, The birth of Jesus occurred during that time in Mary
and Joseph's relationship.

-3-

The rest of the New Testament offers no heip at all. The Gospels of Mark
and John do not mention it, nor does St, Paul, However, all the Gospel writers seem
to assume the normality of the relationship between Mary, Joseph and Jesus, In
Luke 2 they are called His parents, Matthew 13:35 asks, "Is this the carpenter's
Son?" (See William Barclay, The Apostles’ Creed for Everyman),

Now this has been unusually pedantic, Like the little girl who thanked her
grandmother for a book, in a note which read, "Dear Grandma, Thank you for the book
about penguins. I now know more about them than I ever wanted to know, " you may
now know more about the scriptural problems surrounding the Virgin Birth than you
ever wanted to know. The reason I have done it, frankly, is because I think it needs
doing, There is a very important idea in here, one that is obscured by our mis~
understanding of what the New Testament and the Creed intends,

It is helpful to attempt to think like the First Century Jews who wrote and
read the Gospels, Their particular approach to religious stories was not as analyti-
cal. as ours, They did not know about the scientific method, In xegard to this, or
any story, it would not occur to them to ask, "Did it really happen?" Rather they
would ask, "What does this mean?"

Let's try, The Creed says, first - "Conceived by the Holy Ghost", What is
meant by that phrase? They understood some elementary biology, They knew what caused
conception, What they did not know was why some acts of sexual intimacy resulted in
pregnancy and others did not, They knew that in the creation story the Spirit of
God is associated with the beginning of life. Their word for "breath" and "spirit"
was the same, When God breathed Life into man - His spirit was creating life, So
when a woman conceived, the Spirit of God was involved, There are ancient Jewish
sayings which express this lovely idea -

"Man will not be able to come into being without woman, nor
woman without man, nor both without the glory of God."

"When husband and wife are worthy the Glory of God is with them,"

"There are three partners in the production of any human being -
the Holy one, blessed be he, the father and the mother,"

For the ancient Jew a miracle of God's life-giving spirit occurred whenever
a child was conceived, Surely that is at least part of what is intended here: the
Son of God was created out of the same life-giving love which is always operative
when human life is conceived, It is always an incredible miracle.

fhe intent of the creecal assertion is obscurred because we have insisted on
expressing it nezatively - that Joseph had nothing to do with the conception, Tf am
suggesting that the negative inference is not as important as what the Creed is
affirming. It is saying, first, that God was responsible for this life: His Spirit
gave the gift of Life and that Jesus, the man, was one with God, as no other person
ever was, In the man Jesus, we believe, there was no gap between self and God; no
estrangement, no alienation, which is to say, no sin, He and the Father were one,
That's what the Creed intends in "conceived by the Holy Ghost”,

~4-

“Born of the Virgin Mary": the early Christians would not have been bothered
by a Virgin Birth, Nor would they have made much of it. The emphasis - the inered-
ible assertion - in the phrase is not in the assignment of virginity to Mary, but in
the claim that He was born - just like everyone else, +f

J » nbn L tai

That is the miracle and the point at which people have continued to stumble,
God's only Son was fully a homan being, The humanity of Christ which the New Testa~
ment proclaims: the fact that He shared human life totally has been the stumbling
block, It's too bad that in the midst of the Christmas celebration we don't often
ask, "What really happened here?" A baby was born: but the fourth Gospel puts it in
anothet perspective, "The word became flesh and dwelt among us,"' The Incarnation
is what happened in Bethlehem. God came among us - as one of us,

Most religion keeps God at arm's length, He is remote, distant, When He
becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ our sense of it is that Jesus is equally remote,
distant ~ precisely because He is God Incarnate, But the movement in the Creed
is in the other direction, God moves toward us, God becomes human in Christ: He was
born like every one of us, That really is quite an assertion,

Carlile Marney, a delightful Southern Baptist scholar, has written reeerxely
about his recovery of the Incarnation as the "fundament'", the center, not only of all
things Christian, but of Western Civilization as well, Marney writes that there
are two ways to deal with Life - to affirm the material world or deny it, and that
all civilizations have chosen to do one or the othet, We, in the West, have been
affirming it for two thousand years, and the reason is that God, in His art of self~
revelation chose to affirm it.

In the East, on the other hand, the direction of civilization has been away
from the material world. But Western man, Marney writes in a sparkling pardgraph,
‘literally dove into the matter, He exploded out of the Garden of Eden with a
hammer in his hand, He hammered, twisted, melted, congealed, braided, shaped,
organized, traded, harnessed, mastered the stuff of this present world, The secret
of the Western man is the passion with which he sank into the matter at whatever
risk to Spirit, The West went on a venture - fighting always its nostalgia to go
East and out of this world," (Priests to Each Other, p, 25-26).

The Incarnation ~ the assertion that Jesus the Christ was born into the
SHH -workd-of cows and-"hay and brothers and -sieker: and vegetables and grain
and an inm full of guests - is an invitation to embrace that..gama.world.. "Christianity",
William Temple once remarked, “is the most materialistic of world religions,"

There are two ways of being human: being proud of our humanity, rejoicing
in it - or being ashamed and trying to escape it. We in the West have been proud: the
Incarnation is the reason. Marney writes, "The Christian genius produces the most
amazing claim to greatness for man in world literature - God became one of us,"
(Priests to Eacn Other, p.34).

Marney was right, I believe. There are two alternatives always in front of
us, We can be world oriented: we can love the stuff of life - oY we can deny the
world and spend our years hating it, or perhaps more realistically, feeling guilty
about the fact that we want so desperately to love it,

~5«

And so there are two ways of being religious. Ministers encounter it all
too Erequently: "I'd like to be part of the Church, Reverend, but I don't feel
religious", Loosely translated that means, "I love life: I love the appetitea Ged
has given me and the senses with which He has blessed me, I don't want to deny it
and that’s what being religious means, doesn't it?" Robert F. Kennedy once said in
an interview; "Religion is so important, I want my kids to like it, You clergy
should not be talking about God up there so much, I want to know what God is like
down here," '

The Christian Religion begins, not with "God up there", nor with a phil-
osophic proposition, but with that act which, more than any other, exudes the
physical, sensual beauty of life - the birth of a baby, Christmas is very earthy,
Hollywood could have done a far more heavenly jop with the script: God Incarnate,
Savior of the world, surely should arrive to a herald of trumpets, descending through
the clouds perhaps, surrounded by a legion of angels, Our Creed says simply, "Born
of the Virgin Mary", It is not a matter finally of believing in it or rejecting it
as untrue, "Did it really happen?" is always the wrong question, What matters is
what it means,

IL chose to affirm it, I chose to affirm that God selected a humble girl to
be the mother of the Christ; a girl as innocent and pure and undefiled as any of
God's lovely creatures, I affirm in the awe of my own personal experience that
Almighty God chose to come among us in the most incredible miracle, yet the one
experience common to every person who ever lived - human birth, Tf affirm that He
chose, incredibly, the human family as the most creative environment for that baby
and Little boy and young man: that the Savior of the world prepared for His task in
the ordinary relationship between parents and child, brothers and sisters, I affirm
that the Gospel is that earthy: that God has come that close to each of us; that the
Holy you and I are given to experience in life will be found in the ordinary: that
the only religion that matters at all is one that opens my life now, in this lively
present, to the reality of God, And I affirm that when I say the words -"Conceived -
by the Holy Ghost; Born - of the Virgin Mary."I commend tham to you - anew,

Amen,

Father, our sin is in keeping you at arm's length. Help us, as we
celebrate the birth of our Lord, to know Your nearness, Enable us to rejoice

in the Good News of Immanuel, God with us,
Amen.