Believing the Unbelievable

And Mary said, "Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." And the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:38 ESV)

Today we have the "War on Christmas." In this so called war, Christian extremists and non-Christian extremists fight back and forth about issues like "Merry Christmas vs Happy Holidays," was there really a virgin birth, did Jesus even exist, and if he did he wasn't actually born in December, and blah blah blah.  Everybody wants the "facts" on their side and everybody wants to be right, despite the fact that nobody is going to change anybody's mind.  Meanwhile any actual meaning in the season beyond getting that new flat screen tv is lost in the shrillness of the argument.

Let's take for example the two children whose conceptions are detailed in Luke 1.  First we have Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah, and older couple who have been trying to have a child their whole life but who have never conceived.  An angel appears to Zechariah and says 'Hey guess what, your wife is finally going to be pregnant and the child is gonna be a pretty big deal, kind of like Elijah." Well, Zechariah has a bit of a laugh to himself and asks the angel how he knows that he can trust his words since Elizabeth is thought to be barren and they're both pretty old.  The angel then strikes Zechariah dumb until the time that the baby is born.  Now it's not out of the realm of possibility that a woman in her 40s or early 50s gets pregnant.  Highly unlikely perhaps, but possible.

The second woman to conceive in Luke 1 really does conceive in impossible circumstances.  The angel Gabriel appears to a teenage Jewish girl, a virgin, and tells her that she will bear a child as well, and he's going to be a REALLY big deal, in fact, he's going to be the one spoken of by the prophet Isaiah among others.  This event is captured in a more modern setting in the painting above: "Annunciation" by John Collier.  It's also on this month's issue of "The Upper Room" and it gives a look at what Gabriel and Mary might look like if these events took place today.

Of course, you are skeptical, as is Mary, who point blank asks Gabriel how this can happen since she is a virgin.  She's engaged to a man named Joseph, but they're not married yet and haven't had sexual relations.  She knows how the birds and the bees work, so to speak, and so do we.

And that's just part of what makes the Christmas story wild, fantastical, and perhaps one might say: impossible.  We can bring in the arguments and the debaters from both sides and argue for hours over stuff like this.  You just don't get pregnant without having sex. Period.

But if we're missing part of the point of the story....?

In chapter 15 of "We Make the Road by Walking" that's exactly what Brian McLaren suggests that we're doing.  We get so caught up in dealing with whether the events told in the Bible actually, literally happened that we miss the bigger point of the story, and the Christmas story is no different. What if God and the writer of this passage is trying to communicate a bigger point?

What if that bigger point is that maybe we should believe in the "impossible?"

The other night I was having a conversation with a coworker of mine. She's only 17 years old, a couple of years older than Mary in our story, and is just really starting to become aware of a lot of what is going on in the wider world.  Specifically we were talking about how you make a difference in the world.  She was saying that she had always wanted to make a splash, to really go out in the world and make a difference for good, but when she looks around, it seems impossible that one 17 year old girl from Utah could make a difference.

I've been there.  At one point I thought I was going to be a pastor.  I though I was going to make a splash and make a difference.  However the more I looked at what was going in the world and in my life, the more I became convinced that it was impossible.

What if Martin Luther King Jr thought that making a difference in race relations was impossible? What if we thought that traveling in space and going to the moon was impossible?  After all, it was for much of our history.  What if people like William Wilberforce and John Wesley thought that ending the slave trade was impossible?  What if people in the 1940s thought that defeating Hitler was impossible, as some actually did?

Without great people taking these great steps, it's hard to tell where our society might be.  What does that have to say to a 17 year old Utah girl, a 36 year old former-future pastor, or a young teenage virgin from Nazareth?

For McLaren one of the big points in the story is: believe in the supposed "impossible," and I agree. As Gabriel says in the story: "For nothing is impossible with God."  If we don't open our hearts and our minds to both the possible and the supposed impossible, we may very well miss our chance to make a difference for ourselves and the world around us.

For Christians this can be a central theme of Advent.  As we wait for the coming of the Lord, we can examine ourselves and open our hearts and minds to the will of God as Mary did, and indeed as her son did as well.  In the end our response should be "Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word."

What do you think?  Do you believe in the impossible?  Can you give up your longing to "know" and and dare to believe the unbelievable? That might be a tough call for you, but I think even if you can't right now, the message of this beautiful story rings true: think big and open your heart because you never know what might happen!