Sermon from December 19, 2004

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary.

The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you."

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God."

"I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "May it be to me as you have said." Then the angel left her.

I have fathered four children. Three are making their way in the world. The fourth did not make it down the narrow passageway to the life-sustaining womb. I believe we will see that child in heaven. It is a good thing to be a father, to carry and transmit life. But where did the life I transmitted begin? My father and mother passed it on to me, and their fathers and mothers to them, and so on back to the real life-giver. C. S. Lewis put it well: "The human father in ordinary generation is only a carrier, sometimes an unwilling carrier, always the last in a long line of carriers, of life that comes from the supreme life" (God in the Dock, "Miracles," 32).

This unbroken chain of generation was interrupted only once in humanity's long sojourn on the earth, when the "supreme life" began a new creation. A young Jewish virgin, engaged to Yosef ben Yaacov, was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit (Matt. 1:18). An angel had said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God" (Luke 1:35). Down the centuries since then the Church has confessed, "I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary."

We call this conception and birth the Incarnation. That big word simply means that God became one of us. I could be sympathetic toward a person who did not believe that. It is an astounding claim.

We believe that God became one of us. He didn't do that by magically appearing in adult form. Rather, He joined His eternal self to the genetic code and to the same process of mitosis in the secret places of a woman's body by which the rest of us got here. Biologically, Jesus Christ began as a blastocyst, acting "in a coordinated manner for the continued health and maintenance of the body as a whole." God the Creator joined His divine life to the procreative processes He had put in place.

But how does this belief fit into the Christian doctrine of creation? My hope today is to reflect on the consistency of the miraculous conception of Jesus with the Christian understanding that God created the universe and everything in it.

Miracles and the Laws of Nature
First, we should build off last Sunday's foundation. Anyone who gives Christianity serious consideration has to come to terms with miracles. They are present in the Bible - though not excessively - and Christians claim they have continued through 20 centuries of Christianity - less often than is sometimes claimed and more often than is sometimes supposed.

When Christians talk about miracles, they do not mean what are often called "the miracles of science." When, for example, a surgeon repairs a birth defect and normal function is restored, we are awed and often say, "It's a miracle." It is a wonderful achievement, but it is not a miracle in the biblical understanding of the word.

Miracles are an exercise of power that causes something to happen that might not happen at all in the normal course of nature, or would not happen as fast. We don't expect the dead to come back to life until Resurrection Day, and yet in a brief moment of time, Jesus called His friend, Lazarus, back to life four days after he had died and been buried (John 11:17, 38-44). We expect fevers to go away after a day or two, but we don't expect them to go away instantly at the touch of another person's hand, as the fever Peter's mother-in-law went away when Jesus took her by the hand and lifted her up (Mark 1:30-31). Now, a skeptical response to these biblical reports has been to say, "Miracles contradict the laws of nature."

But do they? Or is there a lot about creation that we just don't know? Is there a lot about God that we just don't know? The Scottish writer, George Macdonald, said one time, "What stupidity of perfection would that be which left no margin about God's work, no room for change of plan upon change of fact... I may move my arm as I please: shall God be unable so to move His?" (quoted in C. S. Lewis, George Macdonald, 53).

I appreciate the sentiment, but we still have to ask the question: does a Christian doctrine of creation do justice to the laws of physical creation and still permit miracles? Last week, we said that it does justice to those laws by allowing the physical world to behave according to its own laws. "We can take with all seriousness all that science tells us about the workings of the world." (Polkinghorne, Christian Belief in a Scientific Age, 84). But science cannot tell us all there is about the workings of the world.

A Christian doctrine of creation, on the other hand, does justice to the biblical claim to miracles by leaving room for spiritual forces that lie outside the proper domain of science, but which, nevertheless, have power to act on the physical world in ways that the natural sciences may never explain or control.

Actually, there is a pretty dramatic example of these spiritual forces that we easily overlook. Dr. Terrence Deacon, a Boston University professor, called attention to it at a Boston conference called Science and the Spiritual Quest. He wrote: "From nothing, nothing comes." (That sounds like a line that Maria sings in the movie version of The Sound of Music: "Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could." But I digress.

"From nothing, nothing comes. . . . All of modern physics and chemistry are erected on this reliable foundation" [except for that one tiny exception, the Big Bang, which created the whole of the visible universe; but that's another story] (Science and the Spiritual Quest Boston Conference, "Three Levels of Emergent Phenomena," Terrence Deacon, Oct. 21-23, 2001, p. 1).

Does Professor Deacon's "one tiny exception" mean that everything material once came from something that was not material? On the Christian view spiritual forces that lie outside the proper domain of science not only have the power to act on the physical world; they had power to bring the physical world into being. Genesis 1:1 says it so nicely: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The power of Spirit to create matter allows us to look with new appreciation at what happened in the town of Nazareth that first Christmas. On one hand, what happened in Mary's body was the predictable course of things for a human embryo.

A New Look at Christmas
The tiny, sphere-shaped embryo that was Jesus moved down the oviduct as the gently waving cilia of the epithelium propelled it into (Mary's) womb. "The surface of the sphere is made up of a layer of specialized cells... (that is) coated with a protein known as L-selectin. The wall of the (womb) is coated with carbohydrate molecules." The embryo's protein "binds to the carbohydrates on the uterine wall, until the (embryo) gradually slows to a complete stop, as a rolling tennis ball would come to a stop as it rolled across a sticky surface.

"The placental tissue from the (embryo) then invades the (womb's) wall by sending finger-like extensions into it. These projections make contact with the maternal blood supply, becoming the pipeline through which the (embryo) derives nutrients and oxygen, and rids itself of carbon dioxide and wastes" (Taken from http://sheknows.com/about/look/853.htm).

Some people say that process is a miracle, but it happens in every pregnant woman. It is the predictable course of things for a human embryo. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that process; it was the initial generative act that was out of the ordinary and prompted Mary's self-possessed and pointed question to the angel: "How will this be, since I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:34). Mary didn't know science, but she knew where babies came from, and she knew it wasn't possible for her to be pregnant.

The Author of life had acted again in the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4) as He had once acted at the beginning of human life. He had created something new. Only this time, He did not begin with a full-grown man; He began with an embryo and joined it to His eternal life and, in the words of a favorite Christmas carol, "was pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus. our Immanuel."

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Have you ever watched a child meet his teacher outside their classroom? The child can grow extremely shy and uncomfortable, hiding behind his mother, tongue-tied, never looking the teacher in the eye. Children think their teachers live at school; they have no existence outside that classroom. So to see the almighty teacher in the mall befuddles many children into silence. The teacher is a real person after all.

Have you ever had an important person come to your home? If the visit was expected, a lot of preparation made the home lovely and inviting. If it was unexpected, grown-ups, if only for a moment, feel a little like children seeing their teacher in the mall. The person's presence honors your home.

Have you ever found yourself close to someone - politician, athlete, CEO - who seemed inaccessible to you? And lo! there the person was a handshake or a photo op away. Moments like that stay in the memory for a long time. The closeness makes you feel good about the day.

But in Bethlehem it is the Creator of heaven and earth who came close. The sense that He might be aloof disappeared. The sense that our earthy surroundings might be beneath Him disappeared. God, who is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, put on humanity as a garment. He put it on permanently. As 1 Timothy 2:5 says: there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Often to express our equal dignity with other people we say, "He puts his pants on just like I do, one leg at a time." We might with reverence say of Jesus, growing in Mary's womb: He put on His humanity just like we did, one cell at a time. And thus in a new way the Creator saw it all and said once again of His creation, "It is very good."

The second foundational statement in our Christian doctrine of creation says this: the Bible views the heavens and the earth as the setting in which God seeks to establish a covenant relationship with mankind. When God became a man in Bethlehem of Judea, the divine purpose took the decisive step in realizing that relationship.

He could not demonstrate His intention any more decisively than by taking our humanity into the divine life. People sometimes ask me what heaven is like, and I tell them, "I don't know." I know only two things for sure about heaven. We will be with Christ, and we will be like Christ.

We will be with Him, because He is the representative of humanity before the face of God. Humanity has a permanent place at the divine table.

That's why we sing at Christmas time, "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." He has not held Himself aloof from us. He has taken us into covenant relationship with Himself under conditions we can understand. As He stands in solidarity with us, He holds out to us hope that life as we know it does not have the last word. The Wedding Supper of the Lamb is being prepared in the festive halls of the New Jerusalem. All over the earth, little knots of loyal Christians, like this one, gather in hope, week by week, as tangible expressions of our faith that we have entered into God's permanent covenant relationship with humanity.

That's the meaning of Christmas. Hold on to that amid the general roar of buying, giving and crowds. That's where hope comes from. That's where joy comes from. That's where salvation comes from.