But if we think they have claimed too much for Mary, perhaps we have claimed too little. Our silence shows up is several troubling ways. In our terrible depictions of a Jesus who looks strikingly like an ad for some miracle shampoo or exfoliate. In seeming to believe in the Son of God as a motherless messiah, a sort of sexless savior – one who doesn’t really become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone; one far too holy and heavenly ever to go through the trauma of being born, of going through puberty or of getting mixed up in this muddy mess we call humanity. Of stumbling with incomprehension over our own pseudo-scientific will to know-it-all when we come upon that incomprehensible part of the Creed about "conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary."

Maybe you heard the news from London this week about Flora, the pregnant Komodo dragon in the Chester Zoo, who is expecting eight babies in what scientists said on Wednesday could be a Christmas virgin birth. Flora has never mated, or even mixed, with a male dragon, and fertilized all the eggs herself, a process culminating in what scientists call parthenogenesis. Other lizards do this, but scientists only recently found that Komodo dragons do too. "Nobody in their wildest dreams expected this. But you have a female dragon on her own. She produces a clutch of eggs and those eggs turn out to be fertile. It is nature finding a way," according to a zoo keeper. He said the incubating eggs probably would hatch any day now .

That’s all very interesting, and makes for fascinating conversation around the water cooler at work. But it is essential that we not get so caught up in our biology textbooks – parthenogenesis, rabbit tests and all the rest – that we forget the theological good news announced to Mary by the angel: "with God, nothing is impossible." The focus of this story is not on science or history; it is on human need and divine activity. Our desperate need for a savior and God’s miraculous providence – even when the circumstances seem hopeless and beyond comprehension. The point is that, even under difficult and seemingly impossible circumstances, God takes the initiative to save us, and calls us to respond to God’s initiative.

This Jesus whom we glorify is not like some Greek god who has only one human parent; nor is he like Superman, a cosmic refugee from some distant planet of long ago. Jesus Christ is God’s initiative, God’s gift of God’s own self. God with a human face. In the words of Mary Ellen Ashcroft "To get ready for Advent, God undressed – how embarrassing – naked on the day he was born. ... ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the incarnate deity.’ Things heavenly and earthly gathered into one: one in the naked flesh and folds of God." Fulfillment of a promise – a sign of joy -- in defiance of everything that threatens that promise. The joyful Advent hope in the face of human hopelessness.

And that is what Mary represents to us: the living impregnation of possibility in the womb of the impossible. Where human expectation and hope are threatened with defeat and despair; where cynical sophistication reigns supreme; where one is too old and barren, or too young and inexperienced, too weak or poor – here comes the miracle we call Christmas. A sign of joy.

"We who are about to die," wrote W. H. Auden, "demand a miracle." Demand? Perhaps. Need, for sure. But do we expect it? What are we really looking for right now? A sign of joy? Or just more of the same old same old?

A deep sense of pessimism permeated the Roman Empire around the time of Christ’s birth. To all appearances, that ancient, sophisticated civilization had attained its true fulfillment, and yet the people of Rome were vaguely dissatisfied. Its vital powers had begun to falter. Yet, that very same moment was a murkiness before a great new dawn.

Does that sound familiar, perhaps? We here are, for the most part, prosperous and more or less happy. But our world is terribly threatened – and to many people, threatening. There is a deep sense of dread, of pessimism, of uncertainty in our own incomparably more sophisticated technological and electronic culture. But the promise we celebrate today holds out the hope that this, too, may be the murkiness before a new dawn. A new and broader dimension urgently needed for the further realization of human hope.

Isn’t that what we feel in our own bones? That the usual, the ordinary, will no longer do? It isn’t a matter of this technological "fix" or that one. Something wholly new is needed; something beyond us, yet for us. A new being, a new creation, a new birth that only the untried and unexpected can provide.

And into that scene comes this young woman, Mary. "Behold, I am the handmaiden of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." The initiative is from God, yet – unlike the devil in the film Rosemary’s Baby – the Holy Spirit doesn’t assault Mary, but awaits her consent. God needs to hear Mary say, "Let it be..."

And so it came to be that the salvation of the world, the possibility of a new creation, rested on a young woman’s free decision – on her willingness to risk humiliation, scorn and even the possibility of being put to death – so that the world could become a different place.

Never again would we be able to use as excuses our own barrenness, my own inexperience, my lack of understanding of the ways of God, my fear of what the future might hold or of what others might think or do. Not when the Word of God touches my life and gives me work to do, faith to share, risks to take for the sake of justice, peace and wholeness in a world which is God’s good creation. A Sign of joy.

Christmas is coming. A child will be born – a sign of joy. A New Way, not by some abstract, divine fiat but with the courage and cooperation of a young peasant girl barely passed puberty. If the angels can sing her praises, can not we too applaud the extraordinary faith of this very ordinary handmaid of the Lord – even as we seek those ways we, too, might serve God’s good purposes in the world? Becoming, in our very selves, signs of joy?

Hail, Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with you:
Blessed are you among women
And blessed is the fruit of your womb, #9;Jesus.

[COPYRIGHT 2006, John C. Bush]
NOW GLORY, HONOR, WISDOM AND
THANKSGIVING BE TO OUR GOD,
AND TO GOD’S NAME BE PRAISE
THIS DAY AND FOREVER. AMEN.