Sermons from the Temple

I'm going to be completely honest with all of you: I really struggle with the story of Jesus' birth. I am very open about this: I will always be the first to tell you that I believe in the foretelling, the life, crucifixion, resurrection, and coming of Jesus. But it's the birth stories that I have the most problem with submitting myself to believe in an authentic way.

It isn't that I think Jesus just descended down from heaven, just like he was taken up at the end, or that the messiah's birth was just like anyone else's; it's just that the birth stories are so complicated and so important that our churches have ë'dumbed'' them down into some sort of fairy tale which is cute to tell the kids. I could never really articulate this until I was sitting at church last Christmas Eve in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and numerous children were acting out their memorized story of Jesus. None of them were over the age of ten, and they spoke with the sort of conviction that is demanded from Methodist seminary students representing the evangelistic, fundamentalist wing of the church, like myself.

I wasn't sure what to think about these thirty or forty kids proclaiming the birth of Jesus without really understanding it beyond the face value of the story they were told to memorize. That Christmas Eve, there were only a couple of hymns, some organ music, the children's play, and an offering taken. There was no message or sermon, no explanation for the parents: our Christmas Eve service that featured the children was an opportunity for the church to bring young families in, all with their video-tape recorders in arm to see just how cute their kids are.

But, in a way, I was sickened by this representation of blind faith. In fact, 'sickened' is too light a term for the feeling I felt observing this Christmas pagent. It isn't that the kids didn't believe what they were saying--I am sure they believed it all because they were given no option but the matter-of-fact statement that "Christmas is Jesus' birthday, and since he's God, we celebrate it." But the fact is, this is all Christmas is at church, to most the people sitting in the pews watching their children and grandchildren every single year.

So, are we celebrating Christmas for the right reasons? Today I would like to offer some of my points of conviction that I hope will go beyond my cynicism towards children's Christmas pageants.

Today we unusually read two readings from the Gospels. The first is from Matthew, which is the lengthy genealogy of Jesus' birth. To me, this is the most essential element of the Christmas story, and today is the first time I have ever been in a worship service where this was actually read completely through--which is probably why I chose to read it all. It is so significant that I decided to photocopy it and give you all a copy to follow along with me as we go through this again.

Let's look at the text: "an account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham" (Mt. 1:1). In the Greek in which this statement was originally recorded in, the word "genealogy" should more appropriately be stated was "genesis": 'an account of the genesis of Jesus the Messiah.' The birth of Jesus, therefore, is not only a genesis--a beginning--of a new time, or a new era; but more importantly, a beginning which has its roots in antiquity...in the past.

This idea is nothing shocking; our Bibles are made of literature from the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, and Christian scriptures, which we call the New Testament. To understand Jesus we must look at the past, which is the purpose of Matthew here declaring a new beginning with the past.

Continuing, "Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers" (v. 2); these are all Jewish figures from the Old Testament, right? Moving along, "Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar"...does anyone know who Tamar is (v. 3)? Tamar happens to be a Gentile, not a Jew. Skipping along, in verse five, Rahab and Ruth, and in verse six, the unnamed "wife of Uriah" are all Gentiles. The Jewish Messiah is not of a pure line of Jewish descent: how scandalous!

Of course, I don't know of any conception stories that aren't scandalous, or at least interesting. You see, Matthew is showing us that Jesus, who we can call "the son of David, the son of Abraham" (v.1), the Son of God, the son of Wisdom, Son of Mary--whatever--the Jewish Messiah isn't only the Messiah to the Jews, but the Messiah to the world. Jesus the man may have been 95% Jewish by blood; however, Jesus the Christ, that is, the 'anointed one,' is 100% racially ambiguous.

Returning back to the scripture, all of these names here are ancestors of Joseph (v. 16), who, the scripture tells us, didn't impregnate Mary, but God impregnated Mary with Jesus. What about Mary's ancestors? To Matthew, who wrote this book, Mary's background is unimportant. I would assume the point is that these ancestors and genealogies are all to be taken as symbolic and metaphorical anyway, but I sometimes question this.

To this end, I preach to you today not of answers, but of questions.

Our second reading is taken from Luke and is the story of God sending an angel to Mary to talk to her. This is one of my favorite stories in the entire Bible. The angel doesn't really give Mary any choices or options; there isn't a Planned Parenthood phone number hand-written on the back of the angel's business card: he says, "you will conceive" (Lk. 1: 31), not 'would you like to conceive while you are a virgin?'

Nonetheless, Mary regards the angel's message as a convincing argument and as a question--because in many ways the angel seems to be reasoning with Mary that her pregnancy would make a lot of sense--and Mary announces, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be according to your word" (v. 38). She didn't say, 'okay, God's the boss' or 'I suppose I don't have much of a choice' but "let it be according to your word." Mary makes a choice that will effect history forever.

To me the greatness isn't the story of Jesus at this point, because Jesus impresses me a lot more with his healing and forgiveness later on in the story, but I am extremely shocked by Mary's behavior. Here is a young Jewish woman who sacrifices everything...her reputation, her social status, her future marriage with Joseph, the welfare of any other children she might have, the next nine months of her life...all for God. Had Mary not made the decision to choose life and to continue the pregnancy of Jesus, God's plan for a Messiah at the time would probably hit a bit of a snag. The plan entirely hinged on one woman willing to carry Jesus in her belly.

We all know pregnancy can be a delicate thing. Well, I don't know first-hand, but a woman, as many of you could surely attest, is really in control of her pregnancy situation. There are certain things a pregnant woman needs to be mindful of...you don't want to smoke, you shouldn't do drugs, you shouldn't drink alcohol, you shouldn't engage in a boxing match while one is pregnant. There is a responsibility of the mother for the child's safety inside of her, and I find it hard to picture a pregnant Mary smoking a cigarette. She was a good Mother, and took these hardships on by choice.

That is what I want to preach to you about today: Mary's choice. I said a few minutes ago that I come to you preaching not answers but questions. I may even go so far to say that it would be pretentious of me, or any other preacher, to claim to have the answers, let alone any answers. I do claim to have lots of questions which we should be asking ourselves at this time of year.

But I have my doubts about the birth stories. Here's a question for you all: have any of you ever read Greek mythology? They don't teach the Greek tragedies and poetry in schools today anymore, it wasn't until I went to college that I began reading them. Many of you know the story of Hercules, for example. To make the story simple, Hercules' birth was a result of the god Zeus coming down from heaven and raping the most beautiful and virtuous woman in the land. Of course, Hercules was a tragic figure as a result, having to struggle with the problems of being half-god and half-man--whatever that meant--and died tragically as a result of his human flaws. Doesn't that sound a little like another story we talk about every Sunday?

Of course, the fact that there is a similar story in another religious tradition doesn't threaten by faith, it strengthens it...and that's a sermon for another day. The differences between the stories is where I find the conviction that leads me to Christ, and the most obvious difference is Mary's choice.

Just as Mary chose to carry Jesus in her for nine months, we also have to make a similar choice. God is already in us because God is everywhere, but we must ask Christ to enter our hearts. And once Jesus is there, we need to impregnate ourselves in every way with Christ. And once we make that choice, we can't just say, "Look, Jesus is in me and I am saved," because it isn't that easy. We need to change every habit we have: our talking, our eating, our spending, our thinking, our sleeping...until we can have more perfect pregnancies with Jesus within us.

Now I know that sounds idealistic and this "pregnancy language" isn't what we're used employing when talking about Jesus, especially around Christmas. But this way of thinking, even if only as an exercise, I believe, is an exercise of good faith, rather than blind faith. To skim over these stories as simple, empty stories to tell our children because it's cute would not only be a waste of our children's cuteness, there is nothing cute about it at all.

Jesus' birth is serious business, folks. This is the Messiah. This is a story of a king, whose name was Herod, killing many children just to get to this one. This is a story of a single mother who had to flee her region for her safety and gave birth in a smelly, dirty manger. I don't need to tell all of you ladies that they didn't use pain-killers to give birth back then. The realities of what really happened aren't what we make them out to be in our children's plays and porcelain nativity scenes...I have yet to see a baby Jesus doll in a church looking like what a child just delivered looks like. I grew up around farms, and believe me, if you're looking for something triumphant, it's not to be found in places where cows, chickens, and horses hang out, but that's how we picture our images of what Jesus' birth looks like in our minds and in our churches' Christmas pageants.

Jesus's story is not a triumphant one but one of tragedy and how tragic it is that not one of us in this room can honestly say that we have ever had perfect pregnancies with Jesus in our hearts...it's a hard goal which each of us can only do so good at. Every time I do something really stupid, I feel much more sorry for it if I think of it in terms of another failed pregnancy. I sin, and I should weep. If I don't mourn when I sin, it should be a sign that I never took my own personal pregnancy with Christ in my heart very seriously. As I said before, the story of Jesus is a new beginning, a new genesis, a new genealogy with a history that traces our struggle from Jewish and Greek roots, and our understandings in contemporary and ancient terms. While our pregnancy with Christ is inevitably tragic, it is in his resurrection and triumph over death that we have the chance to keep returning to Christ for a new genesis in our hearts, by asking God to conceive in us the hope that Jesus flows through our veins.

But know this. We have the opportunity to ask Jesus back in our hearts at every turn. I beg of you all to consider this and walk with me and with each other in our struggles with our sinful lives, as we honestly enter the Christmas season, the tragic celebration of our Lord's birth.