When God Cared Enough to Send the Very Best

Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 18, 2005

By

Litton Logan

        As much as Christmas is a time of celebration and joy, it is also a time of remembering.  Within the last three years, I have lost my entire birth family—Dad, mom, and my only brother, who died early this last summer.  In that same period, I also lost my only uncle, my favorite cousin, who was my age, and my favorite aunt.  This is my first Christmas without anyone to call, write to, or go home to and reminisce about family times and events.  I am sure many of you have the same situation.

        However, I do have my memories.  One memory that always comes back to me at Christmas, most recently as I went into a Hallmark Card shop to get my wife a birthday card, was a time when my dad, mom, brother, and I were watching a Hallmark Hall of Fame Special TV presentation of A Christmas Carol.  I remember so clearly the announcer talking about Hallmark Greeting Cards.  In this deep, rich baritone voice he said, “Hallmark, when you care enough to send the very best”.  For some reason, in my young mind I made a quantum leap from that commercial to an understanding of Christmas that has not left me to this day.

        Each Christmas I remember that night at home with the family and the idea that Christmas is the Hallmark of God’s love for humanity because God cared enough to send God’s very best.

        Originally, in England a hallmark was a stamp on gold and sliver articles to attest to their purity.  It further became a mark or devise placed or stamped on an article of trade to indicate, origin, purity, and genuineness.  We also understand this word hallmark to mean the defining characteristic of something or someone.

        This morning we’ve heard the very nostalgic story from Luke’s Gospel, which I am sure tapped into many of your Christmas memories.  Memories of by gone Christmas pageants you played in, your kids played in, or Christmas services and family times across the years. 

        These passages from Luke’s Gospel have become the source of many of our Christian traditions even though Luke’s Gospel appears rather late in Christianity’s emerging self-consciousness. 

        I have frequently read or heard that many modern people, including biblical scholars, see these passages as nothing more than a simply, beautiful myth that captures the imaginations of children and the child in us adults that speaks of hope in a rather hopeless world.

        I wish we could get as outraged at these people and their unthinking statements as people did over the first grade teacher in Miramar, FL this last week who told her class about Santa Claus. (CNN, Offbeat Stories, December 4, 2005)

        To those people who see Luke’s story of the annunciation of the virgin birth as a quaint tale for children or some regressive and foundational myth, I would caution them not to use the word myth too dismissively.  To do so, is not only to undermine the power of all scripture for their lives but to sabotage their own sense of every day reality.

        I tend to take the path of biblical interpretation and scholarship that affirms truths within scripture as opposed to taking either a strictly liberal or conservative, scientific or a mythological position., I do so because I want to live right more than I want to be right.  Moreover, living right is not so much about orthodoxy, rules, regulations, scientific and evidentiary proofs but rather, for me, it is living in the spirit of God.  That Spirit being--the spirit of truth and love.

        I’ve been told that this is a cop-out position.  One must make a stand on one side or the other, none of this fence straddling stuff.  Let me share with you a truism:  Any time someone tries to box you  into a false dilemma—either this or that—you are probably talking to a preacher or a used care dealer.

        To those who would force us in to such false dilemmas, I want to tell you a story from John Thomas Randolph’s book, The Best Gift, CSS, 1983, pp. 24-25.

        Randolph tells the story of a seventh grade girl named Kristin.  Kristin was a very bright and sensitive girl, but she didn’t understand everything she heard at church.  (I am sure many of us can identify with that.)

        One day when Kristin was in the cafeteria at school, one of her curious friends, curious as only a seventh-grader can be, ask Kristin if she were a virgin.  Well, Kristin was really on the spot because she didn’t really know what a virgin was.  But, being a bright kid she did some quick thinking that went something like this:  The only virgin she had heard of was Mary, and everyone knew that Mary had a baby—baby Jesus.  Therefore, a virgin must be a woman who has had a baby.

        Thus armed with this conclusion, Kristin announced loudly to her friend in the cafeteria, “No! I am not a virgin!”  As several kids nearby registered their shock, one little boy—and boys always seem to know this stuff—whispered to Kristin, “Kristin, I don’t think you know what you are talking about!”

        To those who make so called modern and enlightened appraisals of Luke’s story of the annunciation of Jesus’ birth—and I will not whisper--I don’t think you know what you are talking about!

        Luke’s story of the annunciation and birth of Jesus has very little to do with Mary physically or the angel being a supernatural being.  The crux of the story is about Jesus being the only begotten off-spring of God’s divine reason, wisdom, and love in human form.  The heart of these scriptures is about God caring enough to send the very best that God had in order to give to humankind the best that we can have.  God did this in order to bring humankind on line with the highest and best relationship possible to God, to nature, and to others so that we might have an abundance of joy in life.

        Reginald H. Fuller, the theologian, expresses it this way:  Jesus is not the product of human evolution, the highest achievement of the human race; he is the product of the intervention of a transcendent God into human history.

        The story of the annunciation of Jesus’ impending birth to a young, peasant girl of marriageable age in ancient Galilee is not a story about a gynecological miracle.  It is not an historical fact that we can prove as we prove other things, but I tell you unequivocally it is historically true.  It is a story of the Hallmark of God’s caring and concern for all humanity made manifest in the historical birth, the life, the ministry, and death of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Regardless of whether one believes this story literally, metaphorically, or mythologically, we can not deny that these scriptures possess a power within the ideas they convey to tease out the eternal awareness of God’s presence and caring for humankind.

        This story of the supernatural annunciation clearly tells us that God does not always conform to our expectations, so be careful what you minimize and dismiss as a quaint myth at your own peril.  The story tells us that God is able to do miraculous things in the lives of those who live by faith and who trust God to work in the world and in their lives in real, decisive, and miraculous ways.  And, this is something that neither science nor history can prove or disprove within their methodologies. However, you and I prove it every day of our lives, don’t we?

        There is a constant theme in scripture and in the lives of the faithful: God works in the ordinary, the common place, God’s mighty works, and wonders to behold.

        The living and ongoing miracle of Luke’s story of the annunciation of Jesus’ birth is that Luke tells us and all Christians across the ages that out of the obscurity, commonness, and the weakness of humanity God can and does bring about miraculous things.  God brings about divine things that give us hope and the power to live and to love in spite of evil in the world.  Luke’s story makes audible the ideas that our spirits have always known—God cares, God cares enough to send the very best.

        In closing, let’s look briefly at Mary’s response to the Angel:  “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word”.

        My dear friends, the Holy Spirit has come upon each one of us and has conceived a new being in each of us.  In the Spirit of the Christ, we are new creatures with miraculous possibilities for ourselves, our families, our church, our communities, our nations and for the world if we will echo Mary’s words, “let it be to me according to your word.”

        Yet, like Mary, we can say, “No”.

        She must have struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.  He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her.  “You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,” he said.  And, as he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath his great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.  (The Future of the World in the Hands of a Girl by Frederick Buechner)

        Jesus the Christ has irrevocably altered not only the future of this world but of the entire universe wherever faithful believers shall travel.

        The future of this world and of the universe hangs in the balance for good or ill on your choices and my choices in Christ.  Scary thought, isn’t it?

This ancient tale of a supernatural annunciation tells the human spirit that God cares; God cares enough to do whatever is necessary to give us the greatest possibly joy in this life and what is to come.  Our proper response to God’s caring is that we are to care enough to give our very best to the world because we bear the distinctive character, the Hallmark of God.