The Annunciation

Los problemos humanos no son ni exactamente definibles, ni remotamente solubles.

El que espera que el cristianismo los resuelva dejo de ser cristiano.

The problems of humanity are not exactly definable, nor remotely solvable.

He who expects Christianity to solve them has ceased to be a Christian.

- An Aphorism of Don Colacho

This Sunday, I get to wrestle with the annunciation.  Luckily, it's the choir Cantata in our main service, so I will deal with this mess in front of a much smaller audience at our early Eucharist service.  I will admit, right at the top, that I have the utmost sympathy for Mary.  I always did, even as a child, hearing this story in the sort of glossed over, sanitized for our protection form that this whole narrative occupies in our warm fuzzy Christmas traditions.  Then I learned what a virgin was.  Then I experienced the family drama, even in the 1990's, of having a 14 year old girl show up pregnant (my sister).  I watched as my parents dealt with shame, and judgment from people in the church and the community.  I watched as a scared and off the rails teenager put her baby up for adoption.  I began to hear this story differently.

I learned later about things like honor killings, which still happen in many parts of the world, where a girl is killed for disgracing her family, sometimes even by being the victim of rape.  And I know that this sort of a fate was a very real possibility for Mary, and I know she knows it too.  This text brings all sorts of cultural hangups about sex into question, because I notice that God decidedly does not avoid the issue.  God gets involved in a very messy way, in an actual flesh and blood kind of way, and this makes us patently uncomfortable.

Thus we, the Church, have done all sorts of difficult procedural gymnastics to get around it: virgin birth, immaculate conception, perpetual virginity of Mary, all sorts of things to preserve the divinity of Jesus.  All because we think sex is dirty.

We have opened up our faith to all sorts of derision over this issue, and I'm not just talking about modern, scientific skepticism either.  Going back to the age when the Gospels were being written, this whole birth narrative was seen by some as a dangerous flirtation with pagan mythology.  Virgin birth and being sired by gods was not exactly a novel concept in the pagan stories, in fact they're about as old as stories about supernatural beings, which is to say, really old.

To a certain eye, all of this seems like Christians ripping off older ideas.  And unfortunately it can detract from the real importance of the grown up Jesus.

The Gospel according to Mark, jumps right in with grown up Jesus.  John talks about the miracle of the incarnation in highly philosophized terms: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Matthew is obligated to make the patrimonial connection to the house of David, through Joseph, and also explain a little bit about how Joseph didn't just fly into a rage and have Mary stoned to death.  Luke, as is his wont, goes further into the back story than any other Gospel.  It seems though that these stories inspire a large quantity of historical challengers, who want to explain away, or prove impossible, or at the very least unlikely, all of our nice Christmas stories.

I sometimes wonder if we wouldn't be better off not spending so much on time on this, couldn't we just have given these things the same treatment we did the Gospel according to Thomas, and declare that perhaps we're overstepping a little on the facts?

Then I actually read the story in the context of everything I have experienced, and I love this story even more, factual or not, it's deeply true.  God gets involved in our messiest messes.  God is incarnate in a situation that is highly suspicious to the skeptical mind.  God "overshadows" a frightened young girl, and God soothes a husband who has every reason to believe he has been betrayed.  God breaks these two people out of everything they think they know, and he chooses them to be his parents, to bring him into the world and protect him and raise him and teach him how to be a human being...

And that is Holy beyond anything that I can possibly imagine.  To be a follower of this Jesus is to believe that God gets involved, in this very particular and frightfully messy fashion.  God doesn't solve Mary's problem, God creates Mary's problem.  There's a very real possibility that this whole thing could end badly; she could go off the deep end, Joseph could ignore that dream, Jesus could have died as a fetus inside the corpse of a brutalized teenage girl.  Or he could have grown up being resented by his mother and despised by his father, or he could have always had people give him the stink eye because they knew there was something fishy, and no one ever would have listened to what he had to say. Those are things that could have happened if the wind blew slightly differently, and that is how precarious this story really is.

And that's also why it's wonderful.