At Countryside, we tend to say that we know and love a God who gets us, who entered the human story, embodied what it means to experience the breadth of our emotions, and in Spirit remains with us. In a season filled with such mixed emotions, as we remember loved ones who are no longer with us, as we struggle to support those who are too sick or frail to experience the joy of Christmas, as we try to navigate our own busy and burdened lives we continue to wait, longing for the magic of Christmas to be real!
On this 4th Sunday of Advent, I am tired of waiting. The baby is already here, so why are we waiting to experience the fullness of God’s love? Perhaps the most honest and direct way for us to get to the truth of these annunciation stories (& maybe our own) — or at least one we are comfortable with– is to acknowledge that maybe LOVE didn’t wait after all. Perhaps the cloud around this story— of Mary’s virginity, of Joseph’s isolation, that has been perpetuated, believed, and doubted for over a century is such an insignificant part of the story that gets in the way of the true meaning of Christmas.
In “The illegitimacy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew,” author Robert Miller explains that,
“In ancient Greek and Roman stories about miraculous births, the motif of a child fathered by a god but born to a human mother was fairly common in the pagan world and explained the extraordinary qualities of seemingly superhuman heroes. Writers of Matthew and Luke’s gospels would have been familiar with these stories, but for Matthew, whose religious sensitivities were acutely Jewish, the very idea of a virgin birth, i.e., of God fathering a child, would have seemed theologically dangerous because of its strong associations with pagan mythology.”
Thus, in Matthew’s description of the birth announcement to Joseph, he uses the Greek word “parthenos” to describe Mary. A “virgin” will conceive a child. However, A survey of Greek literature shows that “parthenos” does not by itself denote what we mean today by “virgin.” Instead, it means a sexually mature young woman who has not yet had her first child.[1]
Truth is not always as it seems.
Sex & sexuality, sexual desire, even scandal- and the mythical duality of human nature are not as powerful or capable of wrecking God’s universal LOVE (intended for all) as a large portion of the Christian Church believes. Still, we have somehow managed in Western culture to kick that can down the evolutionary mountain for far too many generations.
The Virgin Birth?
The inerrancy of scripture?
The Divinity of Christ?
The Resurrection?
Are these objective ‘points of truth’ essential for us as people of faith to prove? Does our faith hinge on the facts? Or are we more interested in trusting in God’s love and waiting, expectantly, for LOVE to be revealed in the world, no matter the vehicle of its arrival? Or, we might suggest, despite it.
Charles Wood has likened our over-simplification of divine mystery to the work of Jan Milic Lochman, the provocative Czech theologian who taught at Basel. Lochman describes our often limited understanding of revelation as one-dimensional. He noted how the Communist East and Capitalist West fostered this one-dimensional view of reality such that the broader human and scientific story of evolution was limited to an economy where truth was reduced to facts.[2] Where A + B always equals C.
We saw this same tension in North America rising during the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy of the 1920s and 30s, which split Protestantism in this country into conservative and liberal factions. Originating in the Presbyterian Church, “At issue were foundational disputes about the role of Christianity, the authority of Scripture, the death, Resurrection, and atoning sacrifice of Jesus.”[3] Modernists believed in the “God is still speaking” notion of revelation and sought to adapt religious dogma to the new scientific discoveries informing the modern age, such as post-enlightenment artistic and creative freedom of interpretation- in art, culture, and faith.
At the same time, conservatives held on to orthodoxy as a timeless revelation of God’s truth, unmoved, unchanged, without error, and in its complete form. Have you heard anyone say, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”? Well, run while you can!
Lochman taught that the Christian Faith must be liberated from this impoverished perception, from a one-dimensional, linear understanding of truth, for God’s intended purpose for the church and individuals to thrive. Think divorce, interracial marriage, being gay, or worse, a woman in ministry—outside of God’s law or even love for some.
As to the virgin birth: Lochman’s treatment of the relevant passages in the Apostles Creed — “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary”— observes how the meaning of these passages, and the Gospel text behind them, is lost when they are subjected to the reductive reading our one-dimensional worldview seems to force upon us.[4]
When we demand a literal materialization of facts out of something already beyond the walls of concrete explanation, such as the mysterious/divine- the power that exists on the margins of truth found in the human experience is lost.
When a pregnant mother’s story of conception, once housed in the tender intimacy of young love’s connection, is suddenly stolen and hidden behind the social-political system and religious ceremony, the erasure of her believed-to-be immoral act thrusts not only the community at large into a world where fake news is preferred over honest news, it convinces the players within the story, and those observing it that “one-dimensional realities” are the only realities worthy of belief or honor.
We have feared the ramifications of honesty and integrity so fiercely—for so long, that we have lost it—and our truth with it, again and again, by propping up our sacred, personal, and communal stories with false tales and lies, we abandon our dignity and lose sight of the true meaning of Christmas, Jesus’ birth would have been scandalous news born unto a teenage girl one step above being delivered in the bathroom stall at school. Vulnerability was the name of the game. But vulnerability has been flipped on its head and exploited by Empire.
We have seen this throughout civilization’s history; the exploitation of innocence is not new to Bethlehem or Mary and Joseph. This is precisely how the leaders of Empire (even our own) have turned freedoms into mockeries in this nation. Truths of kindness, benevolent compassion, dignity, and respect have been stolen in the night. They have been reduced to facts or “alternative facts” with false, linear, one-dimensional talking points in their places. Brown/black Humans like Jesus become bodies, and bodies become chalk drawings in the middle of our streets.
Church, LOVE cannot wait while we trade our integrity to buy a place in the rubber-stamped, red-lettered version of one-dimensional truth.
Now, this does not mean that we swing 180 degrees in the other direction and claim the Holy Family’s story as fake news—not the Merry Christmas that we are going for here; I would still like a job when I return after the holidays!
And that would only reinforce the one-dimensional construct Lochman criticized. If there is any encouragement or redemption found here, we must look beyond the concrete and the literal, beyond the left and right, the red and blue, the winners and losers, and let go of our attempts at reducing to facts the human and spiritual experience—on this final Sunday of Advent—the love story humanity cannot live without.
If we are to do so, we must hone in on what is expansive in this story and our own.
If LOVE didn’t wait then, maybe it doesn’t have to now.
Our gospel texts suggest that the real promise available to us in God’s LOVE —in Joseph’s revelation, in Mary’s song, in these holy annunciations—in the soon-to-be birth of Jesus is found when we “wake up from our sleeping” and realize that in fact, the one-dimensional reality that we have either been forced to live, by societal or family norms, or the one we are afraid to live without is actually opposite the road to salvation. God’s love is dynamic, all-inclusive, and multi-dimensional beyond our comprehension.
Church, LOVE Can’t Wait, and didn’t wait, and won’t wait because there is no freedom in perpetuating a one-dimensional existence. On the contrary, LOVE is the VERY Source we seek, the God we long to know, the manifestation of the holy one that dwells with and within, the HOPE for which we wait. And LOVE isn’t hung up on left/right, black/white, citizen/refugee, male/female, straight/queer, young/old, virgin/prostitute…it just isn’t.
LOVE Can’t Wait another day because the chains that we often perceive as binding us to facts of fiction (that Jews and Christians and Muslims can’t live together in the bonds of God’s love) were broken a long time ago: by Mary’s, and the Joseph’s who — despite alternative facts brought a new form of love into the world. A love born into the vulnerable, messy beauty that is the human story. A love that knows that life isn’t lived in perfect, filtered photos, edited versions of our own messy, beautiful lives.
Church, we are soon to complete this Advent journey together. We do so as our nation and our world are in turmoil— the planet is heating one day at a time, the death tolls continue to climb across our shores, guns still kill, children are still hungry, and our nation’s leaders still sit inside glass houses, deliberating another set of facts from fiction. Some have reduced the reality of our shared history, human and moral decency, and constitutional integrity to a one-dimensional, ego, and power-driven failed experiment. Others of us know that LOVE never fails…that even amidst our darkest hours, God’s light shines as an infant king lies squeaking and squirming in a humble stable, as Mary runs scared to the safety of her beloved cousin, as Joseph likes awake at night in fear of what this news would mean, love never fails.
As the chaos is swirling around us, maybe even within us, let’s take one step closer to the manger this week and open our eyes to the expansive truth of God’s in-breaking love. Perhaps our hearts and minds will be opened as well. Love didn’t wait then, and it won’t wait now. Emmanuel, God is with us. Amen.
[1] Robert Miller, “The Illegitimacy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew,” juniata.edu (Juniata), accessed December 18, 2019, https://www.juniata.edu/offices/juniata-voices/media/The Illegitimacy of Jesus in the Gospel-of-Matthew-Robert-Miller -JuniataVoices.pdf)
[2] Andrew R. Morton, After Socialism?: the Future of Radical Christianity (Edinburgh: Centre for Theology and Public Issues, New College, University of Edinburgh, 1994))
[3] “Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy,” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, December 22, 2019), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist–Modernist_controversy)
[4] Andrew R. Morton, After Socialism?: the Future of Radical Christianity (Edinburgh: Centre for Theology and Public Issues, New College, University of Edinburgh, 1994))