Conceptions

For 2,000 years the story of the conception and birth of Jesus has fascinated believers and nonbelievers alike. What we now call the Christmas story has been painted and sculpted by artists, set in music and poetry, and embellished with all manner of legend and fantasy, so much so that it’s hard to separate the Bible’s actual Christmas story from all that we’ve made of it. One question will suffice as an illustration. How many wise men were there? Ask 100 people at random and unless some of those are smart-alecky preachers you’ll get a 100 answers of “There were THREE wise men.”

The problem is that the Bible doesn’t actually tell us there were three. It mentions three gifts — gold, frankincense, and myrrh — but never how many wise men gave them.[1] It could have been two or fifty! We don’t really know, but legend supplies us the number and even gives us names: (in the Western tradition) Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The embellishments of the Christmas story sometimes seem far better than the barebones story in the Bible!

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Mark’s Gospel doesn’t even have a Christmas story; it begins with Jesus as an adult. John’s Gospel begins not with a birth story but with a reflection upon the meaning of the Incarnation: the Word of God, with God from the beginning, becoming flesh and entering into human life. Only Matthew and Luke have birth stories. Matthew’s Gospel tells it mostly from the viewpoint of Joseph and Matthew alone tells us about the visit of the two or fifty or three or however many wise men. Luke’s Gospel, which has our text for today, gives us the familiar story of the journey to Bethlehem, the heavenly host of angels announcing the birth to the shepherds, and Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in the manger. But before that, Luke’s Gospel tells us about an amazing conception and that will be our focus this morning.

But before Luke tells about Mary, he tells about Zechariah and Elizabeth, both of whom are exemplars of piety and belong to an honored priestly family. They are important people and even though Elizabeth is beyond childbearing age, an angel named Gabriel announces she will become pregnant. Elizabeth thanks God for this blessing and her child will grow up to be John the Baptizer.

Gabriel then comes to Mary. But in contrast to Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary is accorded no honorifics.[2] God’s favor comes to her for no reason except it is God’s character to bestow blessing. Mary was probably quite young, 12 or 13 was typical, and she was legally committed through an arranged marriage to a man named Joseph. She had not had sexual intercourse. When we talk about the conception of Jesus, we often focus on the miracle. But the real miracle here seems to be that God chose an ordinary person to conceive the Savior of the world. Let’s read it in Luke’s Gospel.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, 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?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

Let’s jump right in this morning with two questions and the first is quite obvious. What in the world can we make of this conception story? It’s right there in the text but in most of our talking about the Christmas story we gloss over it. We like the shepherds. We like the angels. We like however many wise men there were, and the baby Jesus lying in the manger. But all of that came from a conception and that makes us really, really uncomfortable.

We have to be honest here. Most adults find conception embarrassing and hard to talk about because it involves sexual intercourse or, as the text tells us, the lack thereof. Most parents find this difficult to talk about with their children. As children grow up and gradually become aware of their own and others’ sexuality, they become horrified one day when the thought occurs to them that their parents are sexual persons. Many families have suffered embarrassment when children or young people have “walked in” — to use a euphemism — at the “wrong time.” And I imagine that some of you are thinking how crazy this preacher is talking about this on the Sunday before Christmas! I mean, the baby Jesus, that’s okay. Babies are cute and safe to talk about. But I’m talking about where babies come from and that takes us to some uncomfortable places. What in the world can we make of this conception story?

As I studied for this sermon I discovered again the complexity of the Christmas story. If you want to study that for yourselves, I’ll loan you my copy of the book about the birth of Jesus. It’s called The Birth of the Messiah by Raymond Brown and in nearly 600 pages it will tell you more than you would ever want to know about Jesus’ birth.[3] And any serious study of Jesus’ birth will show that what is true in general about the Christmas story is also true in particular about the virgin birth or, to speak of it more accurately, the virgin conception. Legend has read all manner of things into the Christmas story so that we can read out of the story things we like. The same is true about the virgin conception. It has been “read into” in order to “read out” what certain people or groups want.

One of the things “read into” and “read out” is that if you don’t believe in a literal and biological virgin conception, then you cannot be a Christian. This was the viewpoint of the so-called fundamentalist movement in the early 20th century.[4] In other words, the virgin conception has sometimes been used as a weapon to defend Christianity from those who don’t truly believe everything.

Another unfortunate emphasis on the virgin conception uses it to so glorify Christ that he is no longer a real person like you and me. In other words, because of the unique circumstances of his conception, stories came to be told and written about Jesus that border on the magical and bizarre.[5] For example, in a book called the Infancy Story of Thomas, we read how when Jesus was about five years old he spoke to a little brook and it stopped flowing and formed itself into two pools. Then from the soft clay around the pools he fashioned 12 clay sparrows. He clapped his hands and said, “Off with you.” So the clay sparrows became real sparrows and flew away. We’re told this was quite troubling to Joseph because it happened on the Sabbath.

Even more troubling was when Jesus was walking away through the village, another boy was running and bumped into him. Jesus said, “You shall not go further on your way” and the boy fell down and died.[6] These are just a few examples of lots of fanciful writings. Fortunately, such things didn’t end up in the New Testament but they point to the tendency of reasoning from a unique conception to a Jesus who is a magical, perhaps divine, but not really a truly human person.

In contrast, it’s interesting that the New Testament itself places almost no emphasis on the virgin conception and when it actually talks about Jesus’ birth the emphasis is on how ordinary it was.[7] How would God chose to come into this world? If we were making up the story, do you think we would have the Son of God born to a young, teenaged girl in a stable, presumably with a few animals watching (although no animals are actually mentioned), and joined a bit later by some smelly shepherds? Do you think we would do that? I don’t think so. But that’s it. What in the world can we make of this conception story?[8]

I think that question gives way to a more important question and that is, where do we look for God? Where is God? Up there? Out there? In here? The answer that comes out of the conception story seems to be this: God is with us. God is in Mary’s pregnancy even though she is a virgin. God is in Elizabeth’s pregnancy even though she is too old to be pregnant. “For nothing will be impossible with God.” We need to quit using the virgin conception as a weapon to protect against nonbelievers. We need to quit using the virgin conception as magic so our imaginations can run wild with how special Jesus is. Instead, we need to see it for what the text tells us it is. It is God with us, for nothing will be impossible with God.

Of course, this is something we know so well that we are apt to forget that we do not really understand it at all. As Barbara Brown Taylor, one of my favorite preachers. says, if we really understood it better we would probably behave more like a five-year-old girl named Sharon. Sharon was telling her own version of the Christmas story one day and she ended up asking her listeners a question. “Then the baby was borned,” she said, “and do you know who he was?”

“The baby was God,” she whispered and leaped into the air, twirled around, and dove into the sofa, where she covered her head with pillows. It was, Taylor says, the only proper response to the good news that God is with us and those of us without pillows over our heads may wonder if we have really got it yet.[9]

There is a legend that on a Christmas Eve long ago, St. Francis and his ragged followers staged a small nativity play. They gathered materials from the garbage bins of Assisi and made costumes out of rags and hammered a small manger from some old boxes. They stuffed it with some hay they swept from the streets and into the cradle Francis placed a discarded wooden doll, some toy a child had grown tired of. Later that night, the legend goes, Francis picked up the doll and as he spoke of the mystery of God with us, the baby doll in his arms came to life.

Dive for the couch and hide in the pillows! Things that cannot be come to pass. Not wooden dolls becoming real … but something even more impossible: God with us! The real God right here in the real ordinary. Taylor says, “There is gold in the straw and myrrh in the dung on the floor, the cows smell of frankincense, the dogs bark hosanna, and the star shows seekers from every corner of the earth where to look for God — not up in the heavens, but down in the gorgeous muck and hubbub of the world.”[10]

You see, my friend, you don’t have to be anybody or go anywhere or do anything to be loved by God. God already loves you more than you can imagine. God is with us. For nothing will be impossible with God.

I’ll conclude with this. To talk about Jesus’ conception means far more than how Mary conceived. If you noticed carefully, the title of this sermon is not “Conception” but “Conceptions.” It’s not about a single conception but about the many conceptions of God in our lives. It isn’t about Mary becoming the mother of Jesus but about the Christ being born in all of us.

Meister Eckhart, a medieval mystic and theologian, once wrote, “We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of God is begotten in us.”[11]

Friends, God is with us. May our Lord be conceived and born in us again and again and again … and again and again this Christmas and always.[12] For nothing will be impossible with God.

[1] Matthew 2.11: “On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

[2] Walter J. Harrelson, ed., The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003) 1853.

[3] Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1979).

[4] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Christianity, Internet, 24 Aug. 2005. A group of conservative Christians, in a reaction to modernism, actively affirmed a “fundamental” set of Christian beliefs: the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the authenticity of his miracles, and his literal physical return. These essential beliefs were defined in a series of publications from 1910 to 1915. Charles Colson suggests that fundamentalism is really akin to C. S. Lewis’s “mere Christianity,” that is, just the “fundamental facts of Christianity.” He says, “It is a term that was once a badge of honor, and we should reclaim it.” Charles Colson with Ellen Vaughn, The Body: Being Light in Darkness (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 1994) 93. Colson’s assessment is at best naïve, perhaps willfully so, about fundamentalism’s political or historical provenances and intentions.

[5] Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha: Gospel and Related Writings, rev. ed., trans. R. McL. Wilson (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991) 417. “The further we move in time from the beginnings, the more unrestrained becomes the application to Jesus of what is recounted about the birth and infancy of sons of gods and children of supernatural origin.… [These stories] acquire a value of their own and, quite independently of the story of Jesus itself, become the vehicles of legendary motifs.”

[6] Schneemelcher, 444. Not to mention Jesus stretching to the right length a board his dad had cut too short. Joseph then kissed Jesus and exclaimed, “Happy am I that God has given me this child.” (447).

[7] Douglas John Hall, Professing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 449. “To be sure, there is (in Luke) a virgin birth. But this is what faith says about the birth — and for subtle theological reasons. It is not a public affair, this nativity, open for all to behold. It occurs in the obscurity of Bethlehem, in a stable, in the midst of beasts of burden, and witnessed by the simplest of folk. Epiphany is, to be sure, involved: the birth is manifested also to important personages — but they are foreigners, who depart from the land immediately and without fanfare. Their adoration has theological significance for the later, gentile church; but at the time, even if it is considered in the usual sense historical, the appearance of the wise kings prevents nothing and achieves nothing of immediate worldly significance. The nativity is an entirely inconspicuous and ordinary affair, seen from the perspective of the world. ‘How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.’”

[8] While it goes well beyond he scope of this sermon, Paul Tillich has a wonderfully lucid insight into the virgin birth. Here is a portion of his analysis. “But the connotation of the term [incarnation] leads to ideas which can hardly be distinguished from pagan transmutation myths. If the egeneto in the Johannine sentence, Logos sarx egeneto, the “Word became flesh,” is pressed, we are in the midst of a mythology of metamorphosis. And it is natural that the question should arise concerning how something which becomes something else can remain at the same time what it is. Or did the Logos otherwise disappear when Jesus of Nazareth was born? Here absurdity replaces thought, and faith is called the acceptance of absurdities. The Incarnation of the Logos is not metamorphosis but his total manifestation in a personal life. But manifestation in a personal life is a dynamic process involving tensions, risks, dangers, and determination by freedom as well as by destiny. This is the adoption side, without which the Incarnation accent would make unreal the living picture of the Christ.” Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1957) 149-150.

[9] Barbara Brown Taylor, Mixed Blessings (Boston: Cowley Publications, 199) 51.

[10] Brown, Mixed Blessings, 52.

[11] Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1995) 153.

[12] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994) 319. “Essentially this spiritual reality is not dependent on whether there was male participation or not in the conception of the boy Jesus. It is enough on its own, however, to induce all Christians to show loving and reverent regard for Mary as the theotokos. Christ is to achieve form in the life of every Christian as in that of her Jesus.” Pannenberg then references Galatians 4.19 where Paul speaks also of giving birth to Christ: “My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.”