Interestingly, the genealogies hitch Jesus to prior generations through Joseph.  But wasn't Joseph just a bystander, with no claim to paternity?  Yet the genealogy is interested in legal descent, not physiological responsibility; in their culture, the male lineage was all that mattered.  Matthew and Luke use clever grammatical devices to avoid the implication that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus.

   For both Matthew and Luke (Mark and John say nothing on the matter), Mary was a virgin.  Many modern people scoff, reckoning that "A virgin birth is scientifically impossible" or "We can identify more readily with a human Jesus with a human mother."  In a previous email series I discussed this more thoroughly, and took the angle that, in our decadent culture where virginity is ridiculously out of style, we might all benefit from having a healthier appreciation of virginity...  And at the end of this email you will find a sermon I preached on the virginity of Mary (and ethics in our own lives) entitled "Holiness is Normal."

   If Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born, did she stay a virgin afterwards?  In Mark 6:3 we read, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?"  The Greek words for "brother" and "sister" can imply cousins, or that these boys and girls were children of Joseph by a previous marriage.  Most likely (to me) is that they were children born to Joseph and Mary after Jesus was born, although this poses a problem for what many Christians have believed was the "perpetual virginity" of Mary.  The notion that Mary was always a virgin has been believed, not just by Catholics but by many Protestants, including Luther and Calvin.  Jesus' brother (via Mary or otherwise) James became a leader in the early Church; perhaps he is the author of the New Testament book, James - and the alleged discovery of his burial ossuary touched off a firestorm of archaeological debate.

James
james@mpumc.org

Coming up:
eBibleQuestions28 - Are angels real?
eBibleQuestions29 - Did Jesus' miracles really happen?
The full eBibleQuestions series may be viewed online by clicking here.
Sunday's sermon on Jacob's wrestling in Genesis 32 may be heard here.
And here is the sermon on the virginity of Mary:  "Holiness is Normal"

   Never have I been asked, "Pastor, do you really believe in Jesus?" or "Do you really believe that he will come to judge?" or "Do you honestly believe in the Communion of Saints or the Forgiveness of sins?"  Yet frequently I have fielded the question, "Do you really believe in the virgin birth?"  A few inquirers just plain wonder, but most fall into two groups, and I wonder if both are missing something crucial.  Group One confidently declares, "We believe in the virgin birth.  It's one of the pillars of our faith.  If people don't believe it, they have no business being in the church."  But then Group Two confidently declares, "We don't believe in the virgin birth.  We've moved beyond that, it's just a myth - like God creating the world in six days.  I can identify with a Jesus born the way I was born, not by magic."  In my experience, men weigh in on these questions far more zealously than women, raising a complex issue for another day and another sermon.

   When I am pressed, I try to tell the truth that inhabits my particular soul, and with a slight shrug of the shoulders:  "I really do believe Mary was a virgin, and that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit.  I can't explain the biology of it; I'm not sure I even think of it in a gynecological way, but I do believe it."  Reactions to my belief are terribly unsatisfying, at least to me.  The adamant defender of the fundamentals of the faith hears this, licks his chops, and pronounces me "fit" to preach, and infers that I must also subscribe to some broad conservative agenda as a result; the modernist debunker of myths grins, a bit paternalistically, perhaps suggesting that "I know you have to say that to keep your job."

Forty or Fifty People
   Why do I believe Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary? and why does it matter?  My reasons may seem trivial, oddly oblique, but they are three in number.  First (and this is admittedly quirky and not logically persuasive):  I thought recently about the forty or fifty people who have lived on this earth that I admire the most, saints, heroes, people whose behavior I wish to mimic, people of whose wisdom, compassion and prayerfulness I want a small taste.  I rambled through their names in my mind, and realized that if someone had asked any one of them, "Do you believe that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived?" every one of them would have said "Absolutely."

   This seals nothing, this proves nothing - but I have inherited some kind of community with these saints and heroes.  I want a piece of the relationship they enjoyed with God.  So if the virginity of Mary mattered to them (to Francis of Assisi, to Mother Teresa, to my grandfather), then believing Mary was a virgin can't be the ruin of me, and perhaps the burden would weigh heavily upon me to dare to venture out in valiant independence from the sacred story that made these people into saints I would emulate.  Their thoughts about Mary did not earn them salvation, and not thinking those thoughts can't deprive you or me of salvation; we are saved by the grace of God in this child born to Mary, not by whether we give intellectual assent to his mother's gynecological status.  I have no desire to believe on my own.  I want to believe in company with those whose lives I would be blessed to mirror in whatever small way.  So with them, I believe:  Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.

Flatlanders
My second reason will appear as ridiculously uncompelling as the first.  I asked a friend, who seemed to wave off belief in Mary's virginity as antiquated craziness, "Why don't you believe this?"  He said, "There is so much hocus-pocus in the Bible; those miracles worked for pre-scientific people.  But we have science now, we understand how things happen.  Humanity has arisen from its pre-scientific slumbers, and applying our God-given minds to the linkages of cause and effect is our only hope in battling disease and the evils we face.  We are responsible for what happens down here."  I was tempted to holler "Amen" to that.  Carlyle Marney used to say that to be a Christian, you don't have to undergo a lobotomy.  God gave us minds, and we barely use a fraction of the cerebral power we might.  Or we exercise our brilliance and fritter it away on foolhardy endeavors...

   But is everything in our universe simple cause and effect, measurable, manipulate-able?  Are we entirely responsible for everything that goes on down here?  Hearing his words made me shudder, and I stammered after a reply.  In college, my dormitory friends and I all read and discussed One, Two, Three... Infinity, and were intrigued by the notion of "flatlanders."  Imagine people who know only two dimensions, left or right, north or south, but were unable to conceive of up and down.  If everything is chalked up to human cause and effect, don't we become like flatlanders? and would we not therefore be pitiable creatures?  How would we explain the depths, yearnings, resilience and passion of the people we know and love, much less the complexities of our own souls?  Hearing "It's all up to us down here" shoves me into a defensive mode, and I cannot help standing up and declaring that I refuse to live that way.

   In hope, I believe there is another dimension, that there is a God, that God loves me and you and the world enough that God gets involved, that God lifts a gentle, powerful finger and dips down into our limited perspective, and does some good.  God intervenes.  God does things we are not capable of doing.  And if God did not do them, we would be lost, we would be lonely, depressive creatures - so I believe in something light years above and around cause and effect, and I pray that somewhere under the encrustations of our modern mindset that every person really does carry around some faint recollection of humanity's pure, original state in the Garden of Eden.  I prefer not to be the kind of person who says Mary couldn't have been a virgin because we are so smart and we grasp cause and effect regarding how all babies find their way into the world.  Maybe Jesus' birth is the exception that proves the rule.  Or perhaps it is the author of this child Jesus' birth that secretly sets in motion the cause and effect that wrought you and me, who are thus not stuck with the fate of the flatlanders.

Does Virginity Matter?
My third reason, I am discovering, is even more important to me at a level I'd have to call "visceral."  Someone told me, "The virginity of Mary doesn't matter in modern times," and I found myself responding, "In my opinion, the virginity of Mary matters more in modern times than at any other point in history."  I find myself hoping valiantly, pleadingly that Mary was a virgin.  Here's why:  when Mary bore Jesus, mostly likely she was fourteen or fifteen years old.  And she was not a fourteen or fifteen year old girl in our culture.  She was fourteen or fifteen in a culture that attached great shame to having premarital sex.  We, however, live in a society that attaches no shame to anything at all.  Having sex is mere recreation.  Someone spoke of the "normalization" of sex.  Someone else spoke of the "McDonalidization of sex": it's like fast food, no big deal.  David Brooks trenchantly described life for the young nowadays, who "have no time for serious relationships.  They are more likely to go out in groups - and then they hook up for occasional sex."  Students he interviewed spoke of having sex "in the tone one might use to describe commuting routes," as the young glibly speak of "buddy sex" among students who distinguish "friendships" from "friendships with privileges."  More than half of 11^th graders have had sex with a casual acquaintance.  Middle-aged adults seem equally unable to restrain themselves; marriages bust up (or live on) in the face of what we once called "adultery."  Turn on the television:  people watch as a woman gets sexually involved with ten different guys, and picks the one she likes the most - or a guy does the same with a dozen women.  How pathetic.  Teenagers and grownups who are not sexually active look at themselves and ask, "What is wrong with me?  Am I ugly?"  We should hang our heads in embarrassment for our species, since our sexual mores basically indicate we are no better than orangutangs or rabbits; we simply must satisfy our desires.

Do not think, though, that God is a stiff, anti-pleasure deity.  Rather, God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, wired us for even higher pleasures, and for deeper joy.  God created sex as the most scintillating gift to us, most richly understood when we embrace sex in a lifelong, committed relationship.  Regularly, I counsel people whose most gut-wrenching wounds in life have arisen because they frittered away that most precious, intimate part of themselves, squandering their glory with someone who didn't stick around, who didn't love "for better or worse, in sickness and in health."  I married a couple last year who had never had sex with anyone:  they were virgins.  No damage had been done! and they entered their marriage with a profound delight, a sense of pride and integrity, honoring each other (and God!).  The Church still has something to say about sexual ethics, not so we might condemn, but because we love people and want only the finest for them.  Virginity is not a lack, the missing out on something.  Virginity is good.

   Sex is not the only holiness issue in our day:  we are far more attached to the indulgences of our lifestyle than we are to God.  Honesty has slipped under the radar screen in politics, business and social life.  War is an entirely politicized issue, and no one asks much about Jesus or holiness on the international policy stage.  But sex may be the vanguard issue with which we must grapple if we would recover a deep relationship with God in the Church; Russ Reno may be right when he says that for modern people who keep their distance from God, "sexual freedom is the crucial line of defense against spiritual demands...  It always distracts us from ourselves; modern sexual freedom insists we should do absolutely nothing except to satisfy the immediate demands of our lust."

The Question of Virtue

   My hopeful belief that Mary was a virgin is all about my craving for goodness in a sophomoric, hedonistic world.  A reporter once pushed his microphone toward Mother Teresa and asked, "Mother, why are you so holy?"  She responded, "You talk as if holiness were abnormal.  Holiness is normal.  To be anything else is to be abnormal.  Why aren't you asking unholy people why they are unholy?"  Indeed - and can you imagine:  "Excuse me, Miss Brittany Spears: why are you so unholy?"  Good question.

   I believe that Mary was a virgin.  I hope that that's right.  Parenthetically, I suppose some day in God's future we will know for sure.  When we talked about God as "maker of heaven and earth," I declared we need not believe God hurled the whole universe and earth into finished form in just six days.  Should I die and get to heaven, and God says, "Hey, I really did do it in just six days," I will merely say, "Sorry - but it sure looked like you took longer."  If I get to heaven and God says, "Mary really wasn't a virgin," I'll apologize again, but I am going to be very disappointed, and frankly, stunned.  For now, down here, we in the Church believe there is still such a thing as goodness, as virginity, as holiness.  And to recover the virtues of renunciation, to remember the wonder of the ethical life, like recovering alcoholics our dependence on a higher power, on a power beyond us, is our last best hope.  Everything is not up to us down here.  On our own we have that monstrous capacity to be unholy.  But we aren't alone down here.  God reaches a loving hand down into our lives, into our hearts.  God is merciful, and God empowers us to live differently.  People say, "Oh, Mary, she's just like everyone else, and Jesus is like everyone else, too."  But don't we need a savior who's a little bit different from us? who can show us we don't have to be the way we are, that we can be different? that we can be better?

   It helps me in my life to think about Mary.  She was a young girl, maturing, full of love and devotion for God.  She had plans, a young man, dreams of a home, a family.  Then one day in Nazareth, something happened.  Did she hear thunder? or was there light? a shadow? or was it the wind?  She heard God say, "I have a special task for you.  It's going to disrupt your whole life, but you're the one.  I need you."  And Mary said "Yes."  Time passed.  Inside herself, she began to feel a stirring, something growing.  She didn't understand it, but she knew it was from God.  And knowing it was from God enabled her to cope with the rest of her life, for she raised this boy who walked around and spoke of goodness; he was holy.  In him, holiness came down here, so we could be holy.  People hated him for being holy, and they hurt him - and when they hurt him, his mother's heart was shattered.  She watched her holy son's gruesome execution.  The only thread you can hang on to in such a moment is to know the child is from God.  He was God's Son, he was holy, he was good.  When I think about her, and him, they help me to be good.  And I need that.  We need them.  We believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.