“The Question is Not:  How did it happen?

The Question is:  What does it mean?”

Dec. 19, 2004  Crestwood UCC 
By Pastor Marcia Sietstra

The editor of Christian Century magazine, John Buchanan is also the senior minister at a huge Presbyterian church in downtown Chicago.  He told a delightful story in his column last month.  This is what it said: 

Several years ago, early in Advent, I received an interesting note from the sixth-graders in the church school.  “Dear Mr. Buchanan:  We have some questions about Christmas.  1) Did the star stand still?  2) Were the shepherds and wise men real?  3) How was Jesus born if his parents didn’t _______?

You can fill in the blank.  The note ended like this:

Please meet us next Sunday and tell us the answers.”¹

Dr. Buchanan said that his immediate response was to think that when he was in the sixth grade he wouldn’t have dreamed of asking the minister that third question.  But he also thought these questions were pretty impressive.  So he met with the class the next week, ate one of the doughnuts the teacher had provided for the high occasion and discovered “that postmodern sixth-graders can accept ‘I don’t know’ as an answer to big questions.  They also seemed capable of understanding that in some cases ‘Did it happen?’ is not as crucial as ‘What does it mean?’ “  When Dr. Buchanan told them that he thought the virgin birth was more about Mary’s son and who he was than about Mary’s premarital behavior, they seemed to get it.

I’m going to be very honest with you this morning about the stories of Jesus’ birth.  We have good reason to believe that the birth stories that Matthew and Luke were the product of decades of oral tradition, i.e. these were stories passed down, told from one person to the next for 40-50 years before they were written down.   They were told by people who were trying to make sense of who in the world Jesus was!  It’s also worth noting that there is no mention of there being anything special about Jesus’ birth in the earliest gospel, Mark, nor in any of the books written by Paul, all of which were written before any of the gospels.  So Jesus’ birth is not even noted in Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, or any of the earlier books written in the 40 to 50 years between the time of Jesus’ death and these two gospels of Matthew and Luke, all of which suggests that it took awhile for these stories to develop. 

Now scholars will tell you that in the time of Jesus, miracles and celestial manifestations were thought to accompany the births of great people.   Plato was said to have been born of a virgin, as was Alexander the Great, and Romulus and Remus. 

When something happened in the first century, people explained it in first-century concepts.  That doesn’t mean those concepts are wrong, that just means we don’t need to literalize them.  If the same thing happened in the 21^st century, we’d explain it in a different way. I thought recently about how I might explain Jesus if I were writing a gospel story today.  It struck me—just how do you describe someone who revealed God?  How do you show to people who didn’t meet Jesus, that he was a window to God?  It’s not easy!

This was the task of Matthew and Luke!  They had to find ways to say that in Jesus people encountered someone who was a source of wonder and hope, and wisdom and peace, and power that comes from love.  Lives touched by him were never the same again!   Why it was enough to convince people he must have been connected to God in a way like no one before or since—he must be, they concluded, one sent by God to be a living word to us, in the flesh!

And so, in telling the good news about Jesus, they called him Emmanuel, which means literally “God-with-us.” They lapsed into poetry and imagery to capture their amazement and to describe this Jesus who broke the barriers of human knowledge.

They said that when he entered human history, even as a baby, surely the heavens rejoiced!  A star appeared in the sky, and led wise ones to his lowly manger bed.  Never mind that a star can hardly lead anyone to a single pinpoint on the earth below.  What they meant was that wise ones who seek the wisdom of the divine find it in Jesus the Christ-Child, who was humble as a stable bed, as approachable as a baby, and as peaceful as a star-lit night.  Ordinary people, like shepherds, and the most educated, like the magi, find through him faith that God does exist and comes to us in life.   This story is chock-full of symbols and metaphors to pry loose our grip on the present so that we might imagine the possibilities of what happens when God enters human life!

Isn’t that what we love most about Christmas? It frees us to imagine what life could be like with God in our midst.  Families reunite, armies have been known to lay down their weapons on Christmas Eve.  Reality as we know it is reshaped by a greater reality that we sense is there but which we have a hard time understanding or putting into words most of the time.  We catch a glimpse of it when we sing Silent Night by candlelight and dare to hope that there really can be peace on earth because a child named Jesus taught us what makes for peace.  We catch a glimpse of it in the face of a newborn baby, so fresh from God, so easy to love.

Have you noticed that we become our best selves at Christmas?  We’re more generous than usual; we make sure the poor have coats and meals and small gifts on Christmas, because it seems that no one should be left out in the cold or be lonely on the day God entered human life as a poor baby. The greater reality is that God enters human life every day, in every child, each one loved by God, and not one of them should ever go hungry.

We need the manger story of Christmas, because it pushes us to stand on tiptoes and engage our imaginations.  So this Christmas, imagine again the dream of Jesus the Christ-Child with me.  He imagined a world in which love is the highest good, not power.  He imagined a world in which people find purpose and deep down joy in doing good.  He imagined a world in which no one goes hungry, in which there is justice for the powerless, in which there is such goodwill and safety, it’s as if the lion can lie down with the lamb.  And we, because we have glimpsed this world in the Christ-Child, dare to believe such things are possible with the God who enters human life. Merry Christmas. Amen.