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!

Faith: God's Call to Adventure

Some of the most enduring stories in our culture are adventure stories.  Think about it for just a minute and I'm sure you can name at least a couple.  For me the first two that come to mind are Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings.  Both of these stories feature an individual who leaves their home and goes out on a path to fulfill their purpose in life.  In psychology and literature, there's even a name for this: it's called an "archetype," or more specifically this particular archetype is called "The Hero's Journey."  In fact, some people would day that you can boil pretty much every story down to a hero's journey.

Of course the Bible is full of these kind of stories.  One of the first ones we come across is the story of Abram in Genesis 12.  It's this story that Brian McLaren introduces us to in chapter six of "We Make the Road By Walking."  I've never given the background to this story much thought before, I mean it's one I must have heard a thousand times in Sunday School when I was a kid, but McLaren provides some insight.  Abram and Sara lived in Ur, one of the first civilizations of the Middle East. The historical city-state of Ur was located in what is today southern Iraq, and is cited in written history at least as far back as the 26th century BCE.  Cuneiform documents that have survived since the early Bronze Age talk of Ur as being the most organized and powerful city-entity that that particular area of the world had known up until that time.  They had an army, they had wealth, and they were powerful.

So it's this powerful, comfortable society that God tells Abram and Sara to leave and head out on the road, to go have an adventure.  If they do so, God makes them a promise.  He tells them that they will become a great nation and that all the nations on earth shall be blessed through them.. That's not exactly small potatoes.  Abram and Sara choose to trust in God, and they leave, taking the first steps on their "hero's journey," their journey of faith.

As McLaren says, we are also called to make that journey, to take those first steps in faith. However, this call to faith is meant to be a call to adventure, which isn't often how our culture pictures faith these days.  As Marcus Borg writes in his book "The Heart of Christianity," the modern Christian view of faith is largely a matter of the head, the mind. Faith is a checklist of things that we say that we believe are true, and a list of behaviors that we think should be avoided.  We check the appropriate boxes on our list and compare it with others, testing one another's orthodoxy. However this faith is very passive.  As long as we check off the correct things on the list, we're good!  We don't venture out, instead it gives us license to sit in our pew every Sunday and be COMFORTABLE.

But McLaren advocates a different kind of faith,  This faith is ACTIVE,  This faith is not always comfortable.  This faith calls on us to have an adventure.  To do this, we have to leave the comfort zone.  Once we do, we get out in the world and try to walk and to live the way of Christ,  We try to be peacemakers, we try to help others.  As we do this, we gain new experiences and knowledge.  We meet others on the path to share our adventures.  In short, as we walk the path of Christ, we become a blessing to others on the way.  I can tell you from first hand experience, it's richly rewarding.  I wouldn't trade my time working on an orphanage in Mexico for anything in this world or the next.

Of course if you're familiar with the story of Abram and Sara, you know that they didn't always get it right.  They screwed up a few times.  You also know that it was often far from comfortable for them even when they were on the right path.  Our pastor had an interesting quote on the church billboard last week that I think speaks to this.  It said: "God doesn't promise a smooth ride, just a safe landing." The ride isn't always going to be smooth.  The best adventure stories are never easy.  Would you want to read about Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker if they didn't encounter struggles on the way?  Of course not.  It's the overcoming of difficulty that makes an adventure an adventure.

We're all going to run in to our share of difficulties.  Some will be worse than others.  We're all going to mess things up and not get it right from time to time. However through it all God promises that he'll be with us, that he'll be there when we need him. Abram wasn't perfect, the disciples weren't perfect, and we're not going to be either.  However, when we take those first steps on our adventure in faith, we take the first steps on a road that can be richly rewarding for us, and more importantly we can be a blessing to others as they see Christ in us.