Fourth Sunday of Advent. Year B. December 18, 2011.

Text: Luke 1:26-38.

Mary's question to Gabriel echoes that of many other people, especially in modern times: "How can this be?"

Let me put this as clearly as I can. The stories about Jesus' birth are part of the Gospel proclamation: they are confessions of faith written to explain the message of salvation. They are confessions of faith. They are not historical, biographical fact. On the other hand, they are not fanciful mythology, either. They are saving truth.

What do I mean by this paradox? I mean that historians can't document the virgin birth. You're not going to find a birth certificate that says that the Holy Spirit was the father of Jesus. You're probably not going to find a birth certificate at all. On the other hand, the Church came to confess that Jesus was "conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary" because something important theologically was at stake.

In the entire New Testament there is no mention of a Virgin Birth except in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The earliest Christian writer, St. Paul, never mentions a Virgin Birth. The Gospels of Mark and John never once mention a Virgin Birth. If all we had of the Bible were the letters of Paul, and the Gospels of Mark and John, the report of Christ's death and resurrection would still be intact. We would still, with every confidence and with every hope, proclaim Jesus as the Messiah of God. But we might have a bit of a problem understanding in what sense Jesus was "the Son of God."

So there you have it: the Virgin Birth serves to assert the divinity of Jesus. Or, at least that seems to be the use Luke made of this story. There were plenty of pagan tales of half-gods, goddesses and gods with divine fathers and human mothers. Pagans would understand this.

But these half-gods were going around disguised as humans, pretending humanity. As we will hear the fourth evangelist declare on Christmas morning, "The Word became flesh." The Christians wanted to affirm that Jesus was truly human, "born of a woman."  The affirmation of esus' humanity is as important as the affirmation of his divinity. The genes of Mary were in the biological make-up of Jesus. She is, as the ancient Church professed, theotokos - the God-bearer, the Mother as well as the Virgin.

Matthew's take on the Virgin Birth may be somewhat different. He wasn't writing a gospel that reached out to gentile culture as much as to Jewish Christians. His concern was prophecy fulfillment. He read in the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) Isaiah's prophecy, "a virgin shall conceive and bear a son." Now in the Hebrew, that text simply said that "a young woman shall conceive." But the Greek parthenos can be understood as a virgin. Matthew further appealed to Isaiah's words that he shall be called "Immanuel," "God with us."

So the real issue for the gospel writers and the early Christians was: Has God has made his dwelling place within humanity as a human being? This was in response to another issue: Has God acted for us? The answer to that question is the answer of faith - yes. God has acted for humanity and he did it in Jesus the Messiah. How did he act to save us? Like a life guard acting to save a drowning person, he jumped into the pool - even into the gene pool.

But that, of course, does nothing to solve the problem of an uncommon pregnancy. Non-believers see it as a major chink in the Christian armor, clearly a biological impossibility. Which is a way of saying, isn't it, that it is impossible for God to assume humanity? That's what the ancient gnostics said.Infinite God cannot become finite man. But the church fathers from Irenaeus to Athanasius responded, "what has not been assumed has not been redeemed."

How do we understand what the Gospels say to us? Well, stop thinking of the story as some kind of fairy tale mythology. And stop thinking of the story as hard and accurate history.

These stories are not fanciful or mythological because Matthew and Luke knew that a child born to a Virgin is strange, to say the least. But we must assume they had crucial reasons - good theological reasons - for including these stories, impossible though they are to human reason.

But they cannot be actual history either, as if anyone who saw it would recognize it and newscasters could tell us, "Oh, look. A virgin birth." As I said, you won't find a birth certificate claiming the Holy Spirit as the father. If there were birth certificates in those days it might say, born of an unwed mother. And there might be adoption papers making Joseph the adopted, though not the biological, father (since Joseph never claimed paternity).

No, I'm sorry to say, there's no historical record. The intervention of God into the affairs of human history is hidden from the eyes of all - except those who see with the eyes of faith. Early theologians, early Christians, the earliest disciples - lived in the life of Jesus. They walked with him, were taught by him, ate with him, knew him as a man, heard his humor and experienced his temper. And they saw his death, and they experienced the shock of his Resurrection - they lived through it.

And they had to think backwards - they had to think back to the beginning - if they were to ever understand the meaning of the present and what God has brought about in Christ Jesus. If God was acting in Jesus' resurrection, and in his death, and in his teaching - then God was acting in his birth. And St. John's Gospel thinks backward even further, back to the very beginning of creation, when the Word was spoken, when the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The birth of Jesus (actually his conception that we celebrate in the event of the Annunciation) is the particular intersection between heaven and earth - between eternity and human history. The stories of Christ's birth are a way of explaining what that means for us and for our world and for our future. If you take them as just flat fact - "Oh, look, a virgin birth." - you will miss the point. The point is that God has entered into our human history, in our lives, in order to save us. It is faith which says that the birth of the one called the Christ is a holy birth. It is faith that says that God has done a new thing in the history of the world. We are asked to believe that life - with all the uneasiness we know in this life - is not without hope.

How shall the child come to us this Christmas? He shall come to us in the same way as he came to Mary.

This annoyingly cheerful angel makes his announcement to a young girl and she punctures his pretentiousness with a dead-serious question: "How?" Like I said, that's our question too. The angel clearly wasn't prepared for it. (Angels, remember, aren't God. They're just messengers, and sometimes they have to think on their feet...or wings.) Gabriel is forced to reason it through, maybe the same way we all must.

The angel comes up with three quick answers right off the top of his head. I can see him ticking them off on his fingers:The Holy Spirit...And there's the example of Cousin Elizabeth...And, last, that old standby when no other argument will do: besides, God can do anything.

Gabriel should have stopped with the first point. That's the only one that gives a real answer. "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you."

How do any of us believe anything except the Holy Spirit overshadows us with the power of the Most High? And so we come to declare, as Luther taught us in his Catechism: "I believe that of my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel." How shall we ever believe anything at all, except that the Holy Spirit shall call each of us to the Gospel? Then, and only then, like Mary, may we say with her, "Let it be as you have said." Amen.

- Frank C. Senn, STS, Pastor, Immanuel Lutheran Church, Evanston, IL