Was Mary a Virgin? (A Reflection for the Fourth Sunday of Advent)

Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.

Luke 1:34-35

Christianity has a marketing problem.

Our most important marketing problem is that the Christian message has been hijacked by right-wing political groups.

But beyond that, we have a problem with our messaging. Christmas ought to be a slam dunk and it isn’t. In congregations that follow the lectionary, you know what I mean.

Over the first three Sundays of Advent, while the secular world is making spirits bright, we dedicate Sunday morning worship to the Apocalypse, John the Baptist, and John the Baptist.

Because apparently you can’t have too much John the Baptist.

Nothing expresses the joy of the season better than “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Finally, three paragraphs later, Luke says that “with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”

 So it is a relief on the Fourth Sunday of Advent when we finally get to Mary and Elizabeth.

But Mary brings us another problem.

In his wonderful commentary on The New Testament, William Barclay observes that in Mary’s story, “we are face to face with one of the great controversial doctrines of the Christian faith—the Virgin Birth.”

Today, when much of the Christian Church has become captive to the biblical literalism of the Religious Right, it is important to reflect on Barclay’s perspective. When he was writing, in the middle of the last century, Barclay was one of the preeminent biblical scholars, and the very embodiment of orthodox scholarship. His work defined the center of Christian biblical scholarship and theology.

In terms of the Virgin Birth, Barclay declares that “the church does not insist that we believe in this doctrine.”

We may choose to believe it, says Barclay, based on a literal reading of this passage as well as Matthew 1:18-25. And, he writes, “It is natural to argue that if Jesus was, as we believe, a very special person, he would have a very special entry into this world.”

But there are also excellent biblical reasons not to take the story literally. First, the genealogies in both Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’s ancestry through Joseph. Second, when Mary and Joseph finally find Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:48) she tells him that “Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” Third, there are other references to Jesus as Joseph’s son (Matthew 13:55, John 6:42). And finally, the rest of the New Testament (Mark, John, and Paul’s letters) knows nothing of this story.

Barclay sets the story in the context of Jewish belief. “The Jews had a saying that in the birth of every child there are three partners—the father, the mother and the Spirit of God. They believed that no child could ever be born without the Spirit.” So these stories are “lovely, poetical ways of saying that, even if he had a human father, the Holy Spirit of God was operative in his birth in a unique way.”

This is more than an academic discussion because it goes to the very heart of how we understand the Bible. The insistence of literalism in this case suggests a literalistic approach to the Bible as a whole. When Christians (especially pastors and Sunday School teachers) insist on a  belief in the Virgin Birth, they invite prioritizing literalism over religious meaning.

And when we focus on literalism, it's easy to lose the meaning altogether.

The meaning of Jesus’s birth does not depend on a DNA test.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Tax Reform (The Magnificat in Reverse)

He has brought down the powerful 

from their thrones, 

and lifted up the lowly; 

he has filled the hungry with good things, 

and sent the rich away empty.

Luke 1:52-53

The new congressional tax bill is not tax reform. It is just tax cutting. And it is not just cutting taxes; it is distributing the overwhelming majority of those cuts to the wealthiest among us.

And it is not just at all.

The wealthiest 1% of all Americans already control substantially more than the bottom 90%. Under the new tax bill that top group will gain a little bit more.

This is the Magnificat in reverse. The rich are filled with good things and the poor are sent away empty.

Of course the theory-- and we should be clear that this is a political theory without any economic evidence to back it up-- is that if the wealthiest people have more money they will invest it in enterprises that will benefit everyone. Right now the wealthiest individuals and corporations are sitting on a lot of capital. The theory is that if they had more capital they would create jobs and raise wages.

This has not worked in the past, but (apparently) hope springs eternal.

For at least four decades the American economy has been devoted to a massive redistribution of income from the bottom to the top. The gap between the richest Americans and the poorest Americans has been growing, and the middle class has been shrinking.

And let’s be clear. This gap has widened under both Republican and Democratic presidents. There have been different rates of increase but there have been no great reversals.

President Obama made income inequality a major policy priority. He was able to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while maintaining those cuts for the middle class, and he was able to expand healthcare for middle and low income families. But those modest policy changes were more than offset by the massive gains in pretax income that went to the wealthiest Americans as the economy recovered from the crash of 2008.

The new tax bill will deal a possibly fatal blow to the Affordable Care Act. By repealing the individual mandate, the bill will result in 13 million more Americans without health insurance. That number could rise if the increase in premiums caused by the repeal of the individual mandate causes premium costs to rise dramatically. We know that premiums will go up. We don’t know how much they will go up. 

This is not unintended. 

In a celebratory gathering on the White House lawn, Mr. Trump deviated from his prepared remarks to offer a candid assessment: “I shouldn’t say this, but we essentially repealed Obamacare.”

As Dana Milbank reported in the Washington Post:

“Trump, in a Cabinet meeting earlier Wednesday, let his fleeting encounter with honesty get the better of him when he read aloud the stage directions that called for Republicans not to advertise that they were killing Obamacare. ‘Obamacare has been repealed in this bill. We didn’t want to bring it up,’ he said. ‘I told people specifically, "'Be quiet with the fake-news media because I don’t want them talking too much about it.”’ Because I didn’t know how people would —.’ Trump didn’t finish that thought, but he said he could admit what had been done ‘now that it’s approved.’”

Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act may not be the only casualty.

When the deficit increases, and we know it will, lawmakers will be “forced” to “reform entitlements.”  By “entitlements,” they mean Social Security and Medicare. And by “reform,” they mean cut.

So the rich will have their taxes cut and the poor and the middle class will have their Social Security and Medicare cut. 

Merry Christmas.