December 18, Advent 4, "Hail, Mary, Full of Grace"

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16, Magnificat, Romans 16:25-27, Luke 1:26-38



(NB: This sermon draws from Heidelberg Catechism 88-90 and the Canons of Dort III/IV 10-13.)

You could take the story of the Virgin Mary as a fairy tale, a Cinderella tale. A lowly servant girl gets lifted up to royalty. Cinderella has a fairy godmother, Mary has an angel. Could this one fairy tale be true? St. Luke reports it as history and invites you to believe that it is true.

Many Christians have doubted it. They believe that it’s a made up story, and they don’t believe the miracle that’s at the center of the story, they don’t believe that a virgin can conceive, that a woman can generate a child in her womb without the sexual participation of a man. Well, Mary didn’t believe it either. She said, “How can this be, if I’m a virgin?”

If it’s hard for us to believe today, it was even harder to believe back then — it was less conceivable. In Bible times they did not understand what we take for granted in reproduction. We know that conception requires the contributions of both a father and a mother: the sperm cells from the father and the egg cell from the mother. They didn’t know that. They knew about the seed from the father, but they did not understand that a woman has eggs in her ovary. They believed that the woman was like the soil in a garden, and only the passive receiver of the seed from the man planted in her.

Today we also understand that the majority of living organisms reproduce asexually. But not the so-called higher animals. Certainly not mammals. But recently biologists have discovered that the “whiptail” lizards of the Southwest desert have only females. There are no males. The females generate new lives inside their ovaries without the need for males. So, from what we now know about biology, we can conceive of a virgin birth easier than Mary could.

But we are not lizards, and conceiving it is not necessarily believing it. It remains a miracle. It took the power of the Holy Spirit to conceive a life in her, and it was unique. It did not happen again to Mary. The younger brothers of Jesus were conceived in the normal way, with Joseph as their father. It did not happen to Elizabeth. Her miracle was different, because she and her husband still were lovers, even in their old age.

Conceiving it also needs believing it. Believing it depends on how you take the promises of God. Can you trust the promises of God even when those promises seem impossible? How big is your God, how powerful? How active is your God in the world, how passionate, how loving, how present, how personally invested? Mary was able to believe it. First she doubted it, but then she believed, and I think that was only because the Holy Spirit conceived belief in her. The Spirit conceived belief in her no less than it conceived the child in her. Her believing opened her conceiving.

Not that it was ever easy to believe. Once she believed, there were whole new difficulties. Her belief would cost her very much. Oh yes, she recognized the privilege of bearing the future King of Israel, but she would also recognize how much she’d have to sacrifice to bear this blessing. Her right to her own body, her right to her own life, her sweet young life. Her right to her husband Joseph, and his right to her. She would never have a normal life. If we find it difficult to believe in the Virgin Birth, it was especially difficult for Mary.

Why should we even try to believe in it? What’s the point of it, what does it mean for us, what promise does it carry? It has both a negative and a positive.

The negative is the contradiction of the rights of man and the power of man. I use the word “man” advisedly, for mankind and for manhood. Everything masculine is excluded. This miracle is feminist!  No thanks to anything we celebrate in manliness. No thanks to strength or to authority, no thanks to honor or mastery or leadership, no thanks to the courage of David or the wisdom of Solomon. What a relief, what a gift, what a turn in human history this contradiction is, and it’s taking millennia to embrace it.

The contradiction of manhood is the symbol of the more inclusive contradiction of mankind, of humankind, including women, a contradiction of the rights of man, and human self-reliance, and on all our efforts to solve the deepest problems of the world, whether those problems are public or private, from the international to the personal. The Virgin Birth is the contradiction of our power to achieve salvation, from the salvation of our banking system to the salvation of our culture to the salvation of our souls.

But there also is a positive, and the positive is an invitation, and the invitation to comfort and to joy. The positive promise is that the Holy Spirit does conceive in you the salvation that you cannot generate yourself. The Holy Spirit does it working silently inside you as you listen to the spoken Word of God outside you. You believe the promise of God, and as you believe it the Holy Spirit conceives it. Indeed, you won’t believe it unless the Holy Spirit first conceives the seed of faith within you. It’s the Spirit’s gift of your salvation, from the salvation of your soul to the salvation of your mind for what you have to do next week to the salvation of your emotions to be able to love your loved ones. It’s an invitation to comfort and to joy. And it’s an invitation to hope.

I was talking to a Christian friend this week who was discouraged in his life. Let’s call him Kevin. Kevin asked me if he would ever be truly happy. “Why am I always so critical of other people? Why do I so seem to get people mad at me? Why are friendships hard for me? Why am I afraid? Why can’t I get over this?” He was feeling powerless to solve the problems of his personality.

I found myself saying to him,“But I can see the New Kevin in you. I have been seeing the New Kevin inside you for a long time now. Yeah, you’re down right now because you’re feeling your Old Kevin so much. Well, sorry, you’ll never be free of that Old Kevin till you die. That’s how it works, that’s why we have to die. But death is a relief, because when you die you slough off your our old nature and what’s left is only your new nature. And I can see that New Kevin in you now.”

  I told him not to try to conquer his old nature or try to master it. I told him that the joyful way was rather keep his mind on his new nature. I told him to imagine his own virgin birth, that his old self was always giving birth to his new self, the new self which the Holy Spirit had conceived in him. I encouraged him to believe that it was true. I encouraged him to believe it about himself, by believing in the promises of God, maybe not as spoken by an angel privately, but as spoken in the congregation every week.

And you have to hear it again each week, like news, because there is cost and sacrifice along the way, and because of the noisy gossip of your old nature, you have to hear the real news again each week. You need to keep listening to God’s promises and challenges in order to imagine your new nature, in order to conceive of the growth and development and even the education of the child of your new self. So I told him to keep believing in the child of his new self, instead of trying to master his old nature. And his believing would be conceiving. They’re both a receiving of the gift, the gift of the Spirit within you, the gift of the love of God. I told him all this to give him hope, and comfort, and point to the way of joy instead of mastery.

So when you hear it said that people cannot really change, that we really cannot change our personalities, that once a drunk always a drunk, that really changing your personality is a fairy tale, you can agree. We can’t. We are powerless. But there is another fairy tale that’s true, and it’s tidings of comfort and joy, and it’s meant to give you hope.

This is why we love the Virgin Mary. She is you, you are she. You are a Virgin Mary. The Holy Spirit has come upon you, and the power of the Most High has overshadowed you, and the new you born in you is holy, and you will be called the Child of God. For nothing is impossible with God. And every week you say, “Here am I, the handmaid of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word.”

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.