The Scandal of the Virgin Birth
From the Series: Scandal
Speaker: Joel Schmidgall
Date: December 20, 2009
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Transcript
It’s good to see you! Let’s jump in and see what the Lord has for us today. I’m fascinated how Christmas evokes very different feelings and emotions in all of us. I asked some of my friends to respond via Twitter with one word that they would use to describe their Christmas experience. So I’m going to share a few of those with you today. Here’s what I got: family, airport, expectations, arguments, presence (as in being present with family), warmth, cheer, absence, stress, daughter, and memories. A wonderful eclectic grouping of words that we see that describe many of our Christmases, and in some ways, all of those words would describe a lot of our Christmases. Let me give you a few of my picks for describing my Christmas. The first and foremost word would be food! Hallelujah! Every Christmas morning, all the guys get up and we’d cook a German breakfast while all the ladies would sleep in and get up later and we’d have breakfast. Are you ladies impressed? You should be. But here’s the problem, you don’t know what a German breakfast is. A German breakfast consists of onion potatoes, liver sausage and the condiment for liver sausage is vinegar. Anytime vinegar is used to make a food better, you know you’ve got problems! So I think our idea was to get clemency for the rest of the year to keep us out of the kitchen. It was like that Christmas sweater with the moose on it that is really ugly but you wear it because it is tradition, that’s what the breakfast turned into. But food is always a great memory around Christmas time.
Another word I would use is snow. Remember that time it snowed like 14 inches outside? The people still showed up at service at NCC! Come on! You know what I’m excited about? In like 20 years when we’re talking to our kids and we’re saying that traditional line of ‘back in my day, I trounced through 20 inches to go to church,’ now we can say that. You now have stories because of today and because of your commitment.
I always think of laughter around Christmas time and one of my favorite memories is when I made my dad laugh so hard, he squirted milk out of his nose onto his presents! It was the most disgustingly hilarious thing ever. But we would enjoy one another and the laughs would be free flowing.
Food, laughs, snow, and family. The best part about being together at Christmas time is just being together. Every year my mom breaks down and cries a little bit because she is over-joyed. Every year, siblings would attack presents. Every single year, my dad would fall asleep during the gift exchange. You wouldn’t know it until you heard him start to snore. I mean, we’re all having fun and he is sleeping over there in the corner.
All these different words describe everything from snow to gifts to appreciation to absence. About 12 years ago, my dad passed away right after Christmas. We had just spent time together, then he suddenly had a heart attack. It was about 2 years ago that Nina’s grandmother, who was the matriarch of the family and the figure who brought everyone together, she passed away about 2 years ago right after Christmas. So I can’t help but when we get to Christmas time, think about the absence of some of those that we had grown to love so much.
For so many of us, we have different feelings and expectations going into Christmas, some good and some bad. A friend of mine shared with me how he couldn’t stand Christmas, and I had a hard time relating to him, so I asked him to explain it to me. He said, “Because every year when we come together for Christmas, we come together, my broken family coming together once a year to argue. So we walk in, and at some point during those couple of days, there is going to be a huge blow-up and we are all going to leave in a very awkward way.” He said, “For me, the anticipation of Christmas is not about gifts and all that other stuff, the anticipation is about family dissonance and I’m just waiting for our family to get into that argument.” So we all come into Christmas with different feelings and different emotions, and we all enter at a very different place.
For most of us, our Christmas expectations start off very good, but the reality of life usually takes a turn for the different. When we describe Christmas in a couple of words, we’re not just describing expectations, we are describing the interruption of those expectations. Laughing is a wonderful interruption to our Christmas expectations. When you think about the absence or death, it’s a horrible interruption. Think about arguments, it’s the unwanted interruption to our Christmas. Well, today I’d like to take a look at a woman who had to deal with the farthest ranging emotions that you can imagine, all because of an incredible interruption. If you’ve got your Bible, turn over to Luke Chapter One with me. We will start in verse 26, I think we’ve got it on the screen as well. We are going to plow through about 12 verses together. Luke 1:26
Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the descendants of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And coming in, he said to her, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women." But when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and considered what manner of greeting this was.
Her woman’s radar is going off right here, right? Any time a guy begins to compliment you, you know something else is to follow. So she perks up and pays attention.
Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.
This happens with all of us. We believe in God, we follow God, but when He is about to invade our space and change our routine, we get a little scared and freaked out. Verse 31:
And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end.” Then Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I do not know a man?” And the angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. Now indeed, Elizabeth your relative has also conceived a son in her old age; and this is now the sixth month for her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible.” Then Mary said, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
I don’t know how she ends up with this statement right here, because if we walk through this, the array and this bag of emotions, it starts out with this incredible opportunity she has to be a part of God’s plan, but the reality is that she’s gotta go through a lot of stuff to get to that place. We almost see a progression of reactions from there, don’t we? She starts with fear early on in that verse, then it progresses to questioning or skepticism in the middle. This whole way, I’m relating with her, all of us are relating with her, but she throws us for a loop at the end of this when she says ‘let it be.’ She throws us because I think for most of us, we’d get to the end of that and the natural progression leads us to excuses or complaining or saying, ‘God maybe there is someone else out there who can do this better than me.’ But she gets to this moment and it comes full circle and she accepts the word of the Lord. It was an incredible statement of faith in the midst of a daunting reality. We love to sugar coat truth and make it sound like life will be painless if we have faith, don’t we? We love to make it something that looks so good and attractive, but the fact is that privilege leads to pain. That’s a hard truth to accept, but look at Mary’s life. The privilege that she was given led to a series of painful experiences that she had to go through. Ask Peter, when he followed Christ but also died like Christ. When we follow him, the reality is that life becomes much more uncontrollable and uncomfortable than it ever was, but let me suggest something here today. It is not our circumstances, it is not the gifts that we’ll receive, it is not the time spent that will give us joy in this Christmas season, it is humility, humility before God. What humility is saying that it is not about me, it is not about my circumstances, it is not about my family’s problems or my problems, it is not about my stuff. No, this season is not about me, and it’s so hard to get to that place, isn’t it? We go into Christmas and we think about what is going to be hard about it or what we love, but we forget sometimes that we are celebrating Christ and we forget to include Him in the process of celebration.
I was thinking this week about why God chose Mary. Out of all the women in the world, why did He choose this young girl who is so nondescript. She had nothing amazing about her. She wasn’t from royalty, she didn’t have the right family, she didn’t have the right connections, she didn’t accumulate amazing possessions, she didn’t have a great resume, she didn’t have anything on her list that made her stand out, but for some reason, God chose her. I was really grappling with this, trying to figure out if God just chooses randomly, and I’m sitting over at Union Station having some soup and this thought hit me and the dots were connected. Christ entered a state of humility and it was a simple statement that made sense in my mind. Then I started playing out the different rabbit trails of that statement: Christ entered a state of humility.
My life, when I look back on those incredible experiences with God, you know when they were? They were when I humbled myself before Him. They were when my circumstances humbled myself before Him. When I look at my friends, it is humbling circumstances that coordinate with those times that they have come to know God. Think about it in your life and those lives around you. The experiences that we have that bring us so close to God are when we humble ourselves. Let me say something, you can either get humble or you can get humbled. One way or another, God will allow you to enter his presence. That’s just the fact of the matter, the truth of our lives. If you think about those times when you grow closest to God, it’s about the moments when you can stop and humble yourself before Him. The Scriptures say that He despises the proud, that He gives grace to the humble, in Proverbs 16.
I was talking to a friend this week who is trying to make a major decision in his life and we were just talking through the different pieces and he began to share the story about how God has amazingly brought all these pieces of a puzzle together to go over into this opportunity and he didn’t see it on the radar, it was an interruption out of nowhere, but this set of amazing circumstances that only God could have brought together to make it clear that this was an incredible opportunity to consider. Then the flip side was the idea of how hard it was because he would be going in at ground zero, and he didn’t know any of the people there and he wasn’t prepared. He had prepared for some of these other situations, possible jobs so much more than this other one that was an interruption out of the blue. So it was hard to grapple with these two sides, so we were just talking through it and we came to a conclusion together, maybe we have turned logic upside down, maybe our paradigms of hearing and understanding God’s presence has been turned upside down. I mean that what we equate with Christ is comfort, right? If you get Christ, then your life becomes comfortable. But I wonder, could it be the opposite of that. When you look at a story like Mary, that maybe when Christ enters your situation and your life, uncomfortable should follow that. That’s what happens to Mary here, Christ enters and everything becomes uncomfortable. In so many of our lives, the same thing is true. And I don’t think we can understand what happened in her life. She starts with this amazing interruption. The announcement sounds very majestic doesn’t it? The angel coming forward and behold this thing will happen and the Son will be born and life will be great, but the reality for her is that she is a 13 or 14 year old girl who has just become pregnant. She is from a small town, from a poor family trying to raise this young child that will be born. She has the potential to lose her future husband. She has to potential to face capital punishment in that day. The situation does not sound so majestic when you begin to play it out in her life. Merry Christmas Mary. Right, here’s a gift from God, now here’s what you have to deal with.
I think we find ourselves in similar states around this season of Christmas. This is what I get out of this situation? This is what I receive from this? Why should I engage? But this is the pivotal moment for us, the pivotal moment toward the joy that God desires to put into our lives. Mary enters this season and she decides to engage, not because of what she will get out of the situation, but because of what she can give. Here is what Mary does. She embraces the interruption, and I’ll say a few phrases as we go through the message today and this is one I want to spend a little time on. She embraces the interruption.
When you follow God’s plan instead of asking Him to follow yours, then your life will be full of interruptions. Ask Moses, ask Gideon, ask the Good Samaritan, ask Mary. I read a number of studies this week that said approximately every 8 minutes, you come across an interruption, at the workplace. The interruption lasts approximately 5 minutes per interruption. So if you do the math, it works out to about between 50 and 60 interruptions a day. You multiply the time and the 5 minutes and you end up with about 4 hours out of 8 hours that are spent in interruptions. Isn’t that encouraging? But then, also, if you throw in the science of when you are interrupted, it takes x amount of time, 20 minutes seems to be the general consensus to get back to the original concentration. So you can make an argument that your day is just a series of interruptions. Fun! Doesn’t it feel like you’re just going from interruption to interruption? It’s the people who can learn how to harness interruption that really find success in life. An author named William Arthur Ward said this, “Interruptions can be viewed as sources of irritation or opportunities for service, moments lost or experiences gained, as time wasted or horizons widened, they can annoy us of enrich us, get under our skin or give us a shot in the arm, monopolize our minutes or spice our schedule, depending on our attitude towards them.”
What most people see as interruptions, God sees as intervention. Let me say that again. What most of us see as interruptions, God sees as intervention, pulling us out of a routine that we have stuck ourselves in that we shouldn’t even be involved in in the first place. We build these routines of self-service and we forget about the encounters with the Spirit of God, that He has divinely orchestrated in our lives. They are interruptions from Him determined for us, but we see them and we say, ‘God, what’s going on here? Something is throwing me off that.’ No, that’s God throwing you off path, saying this is the direction you need to go right now and this is what I have for you at this very moment.
The Christmas story is built on interruptions. Have you ever noticed that? Every single part of the story, Mary is interrupted with child, the innkeeper is interrupted by this family who has nowhere to stay, the wise men are interrupted by a star shining before them, Herod is interrupted by this young child. It is interruption after interruption after interruption that makes up the story of Christmas and the story of God incarnating into our world. Each person has a response to that interruption that allows them to become a part of God’s story.
Question for you today, what interruptions do you need to pay attention to this Christmas? Every person in this place is an interruption. You were an interruption to your parents, some of you more than others. You were an interruption to a teacher, you were an interruption to a coach, you were an interruption to a mentor, you were an interruption to your family. But don’t you appreciate the people who embrace the interruption of your life? I’m so grateful for a parent who embraced every mess-up, who embraced every emergency, who embraced every conversation that they didn’t ask for, who embraced the interruption of me as a life. I’m so grateful for a youth leader who embraced the interruption of conversations that he probably didn’t have the time to have or really care about. I’m so grateful for a coach who embraced my interruption. I’m grateful for friends who, when things have gone wrong in my life that infringed upon their time but they allowed and they embraced an interruption of me. Aren’t you grateful for the people in your life who have embraced the interruption of you? Isn’t that a wonderful way to think about this idea?
Let me just ask that same question all over in light of that. What interruptions do you need to pay attention to this Christmas? The greatest Christmas gifts we can give aren’t wrapped in Christmas paper, they are wrapped in relationship. When the angel first addresses Mary, he has to reassure her. He says, “Do not be afraid,” because our natural reaction to interruption is fear, and our natural reaction to fear is either fight or flight. Many of us at Christmas time have this natural reaction of disengaging from family, and others have this natural reaction to Christmas of completely engaging in that argument and going for it. But we see in the Scripture when Mary gets to this point, the angel sees it in her face and he looks at her and says ‘behold’ which literally means to pay careful attention to, it means listen, I’m about to say something important, snap to attention. He says, ‘Mary, listen, something is about to come, an interruption is about to come that you need to hear and you need your brain to register the right way.
Part of my prayer for this message is coming into Christmas that we would just have a behold moment, where before we get so focused on ourselves and how we attack Christmas, that we would have this moment of re-centering and refocusing, a behold moment to understand that it is not about us and it is not about our stuff and our difficulties or what we will face, it is not about our interruptions, but it is about an interruption that is an incredible opportunity to engage in Christ’s plan for this season.
We pray and we ask for Christ to enter the circumstances of our lives, but when interruptions enter, isn’t it completely annoying? And then when our space is invaded, it drives us as my daughter would say coo-coo bananas. It drives us crazy, but that’s what we see in the Scripture. Mary embraces the interruption, but she goes further than that, she accepts the invasion of her space. What happens with us though is we end up praying that God would enter our situations but we say no, maybe we’ll pray before we do the gifts or we’ll read the Christmas story and we carve out five minutes when He can enter. We say Christ be a part of this, but we lock Him outside. It is his birthday but we don’t let Him in. We are celebrating Him but just hold on, we are doing our thing right now, as opposed to allowing Him to enter and lead us and take control of our situation. The invasion of space is one of the hardest parts about Christmas, isn’t it? Because there is no escape. I think back, we visited our aunt’s house over the past couple of years and over the past couple of years, it has gotten so full. So many people were stacked on top of each other, so we started to rent an RV and put it in the driveway. So I should say, who of all people gets the chance to sleep on the top bunk in the RV, a space that is actually smaller than my size? I get too, yeah, and it is so much fun, I love it. Then you wake up after 18 minutes of sleep a night, and you walk into Bran Flakes, my favorite cereal, and you sit down to watch some good Sports Center, but I forget that QVC is what Grandma loves. So we are watching some home shopping network, isn’t that awesome! Ha ha, then there are so many people there and there is no privacy and you go and find a room and one of the kids is going to find and search you out. Uncle Dan is going to have a conversation that he’s always got to have with you, and you find yourself in the place where you are looking forward to going to the restroom because that is the only two minutes of the day that you will have privacy. It’s a complete invasion of your space and it is hard to deal with. But for us, we wouldn’t trade that time for anything because those are the things we remember, the things we look back on and you remember fondly. We wouldn’t trade it because we dealt with the annoying situations so that we could spend time with Grandma before she went on to a better place, so we appreciate those things.
And that’s what we see with Mary. She understands a greater plan. When you understand a greater plan, you can go through some stuff and you can go through some hard situations. For us, it was an opportunity to come before the Lord and ask God for his strength and for his revelation in our own hearts. You can’t get any more invaded than Mary. Her body was invaded for God’s plan. He interrupts her life and completely invades her space. Her life is turned upside down. She faces embarrassment, she faces divorce, she faces isolation, she faces capital punishment, and the worst of all thing she faces is morning sickness. But she does something, and I love what she does, she turns conflict into prayer. I love that she uses this situation as stimulation to come and to pray before God. Verse 30 says: Behold the maidservant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word. I love that idea of behold. Earlier he snaps her to attention with ‘behold’ and she is engaging and critical and listening, and at the end she just launches this incredible statement of let it be, I will accept the will of God. But I love it that it is flipped, she says ‘behold’ and ‘I will accept God’s will.’ Like, listen, I am about to say something important. I wonder did she say behold for the angel or for that for the Scriptures and for us to hear at Christmas time? For us, going into our different family situations and we need to hear Mary say, ‘Listen, snap to attention, I am about to say something important.’ You need to accept the will of God in your life and obey his command and accept that those things are not going to be the easiest in front of you, but it is not about me, it is not about you, it is about accepting and allowing Christ to enter into our space and to invade our space.
Earlier I asked a question, what interruptions do you need to pay attention to this year? A simple question that we can pull out of this verse right here, what interruptions do you need to pray attention to this year? In other words, when your cousin loses her boyfriend and she is crying at Christmas time, how can you pray faith into existence into her life? How can you pray the identity of Christ into existence for her? When you are struggling with absence and loss, how can you pray into existence the promises of God? How can you pray Immanuel, God is with us, He never leaves us or forsakes us, that He is a friend that sticks closer to a brother. What interruptions do you need to pray attention to this Christmas?
A poor and simple young girl became the mediator between heaven and earth, and we see that God comes along. And it is not just God working through procreation this time, it is Him going back to the beginning of the Scriptures, to Genesis 1 and working in creation. He comes along and he takes it all on Himself, this is completely a Holy Spirit work of the virgin birth, but He comes along and He sends Gabriel to get acceptance from Mary. Human activity was totally excluded in the incarnation but here is the deal, human initiative was excluded but human response was not. Human initiative, it was Christ sending the angel to initiate the idea, but human response was not excluded and we forget about that sometimes. All of us, as we come into Christmas, we have this opportunity and that is that Christ can enter our situation but we forget that we have the choice in the matter, that we have a response in the matter, that we can take a step of faith. If we express our willingness to God, He responds.
Martin Luther saw three miracles in the Christmas story. The first miracle was that God became human. The second was of virgin conceived. The third miracle was that Mary believed, and he talked about this being the most incredible miracle.
My prayer for this Christmas is not just that you would survive, not just that you would get through it, not just that you would last or have patience to just suffer through this Christmas. My prayer is that you would believe, believe in God and his orchestration, that you would believe that every problem is an opportunity, that you would believe that every interruption is an intervention, that you would believe that every conflict is opportunity to turn into a prayer. Believe that every invasion of space is an excavation of our capacity to love. [?] said that when Christ does not assume something, He does not redeem something. In other words, when we allow Christ to interrupt us, when we allow Christ to invade our space, He assumes that and He redeems it for his purposes. So I just wanted to pray for each of us to release our expectations this Christmas, that each one of us would release our assumptions and that we would accept the interruptions and we would say let it be, that we would say I believe and that we would turn those into opportunities for his purposes to be accomplished in all of us. Pray with me.
Gracious Father, we love You and we thank You for our time here together. Father, we just pray that You would use your Word to speak to us and to challenge us as we come into Christmas season. Father, for those of us going into hard family situations, Lord I pray that your Word would overwhelm us today, that we would understand that it is not about us or about our feelings for emotions, but that this time of year is about an opportunity to enter in to your story. So Father we want to ask in obedience to that. We pray Lord that as much fear comes into our hearts, as much skepticism, as much worry and anxiousness comes into our hearts, that You would bring us full circle today God, to come before You and say we believe, we believe in your goodness and your presence, God we truth You, that we would have humility before You to say we trust You with our life more than we trust ourselves. If that can happen, then anything can happen in our lives. So we pray Father that we would allow the interruptions to occur and that we would see those as opportunities and we would take the interruptions and embrace them. Father we commit these things to You and pray them in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
