You’d be perplexed, too, if the angel Gabriel flew into your home one fine afternoon and told you that you had found favor with God - perplexed and perhaps just a little worried. Because exactly what does it mean to be favored by God? If you knew your Scripture you’d realize that it’s not necessarily the same as drawing the winning number of the Lotto 649. Often times the blessing is deferred so long that God’s favored ones end up scratching their heads and wondering what it must be like to be God’s enemy! Abraham and Sarah are favored ones, recipients of a different angelic greeting, for instance, but by the time Sarah gets around to conceiving she’s putting her teeth in a glass of water before she goes to bed. Elizabeth conceives John the Baptist, only to discover that her son will grow up to join some kind of desert cult and rarely make it home for Hanukkah. O sure, the nature of the blessing becomes clear in hindsight, but don’t be fooled: stepping up to play first string on the God Squad requires courage. No wonder Mary is perplexed.

 

We’re told she took a moment to “ponder” exactly what this greeting from God’s messenger is all about. No kidding! Have you been greeted by any angels lately? Once, when I was in a particularly perplexing stretch of my ministry. I needed a sign and I needed it now. That night, while I was sleeping I had a dream. A wise older woman approached me and looked carefully all around my face and then asked: “Do you know that there are angels dancing on your face?” But I wanted a big angel, like Gabriel, with wings attached to his back – not these little ones that I couldn’t even see. I think the message might have been that I wouldn’t know an angel even if an entire squadron was dancing on my face. I too pondered the meaning of this greeting by the old woman. I think the meaning was deep and metaphysical:  like, get over yourself!

 

Of course, hearing you’ve been chosen to be the mother of the “son of the Most High” takes it to a whole new level. I want to explore the spiritual layers of meaning contained in this story, and do so in a way that we can relate, even if we have never seen a winged angel in real life!

 

To do this, we’re going to assume that this story has meaning that transcends an historical event – that it has mythic layers of meaning. That doesn’t mean that it’s not true. Myth carries meanings that are not limited by history. I don’t know what might have happened to Mary historically. Nobody does. All we have is Luke’s account of what happened to Mary, and even if he got every detail absolutely right – then the only relevance this story would have for us is whether we believe it or not. Some believe it. Some don’t believe it. But believing or not doesn’t make much of a difference to my life today. That’s what myth does – it allows us to enter the story and experience it for ourselves today.

 

Mythic stories are timeless – as long as we don’t burden them with literalism. Our Christian story of a virgin birth is one of many pagan myths featuring a virgin birth. In fact, scholars are convinced that the writers of the New Testament applied the myth of the virgin birth to the story of Jesus. Don’t be alarmed. In fact, this liberates the story to speak to us today.

 

Let’s unpack of few of the subversive truths of the myth of Jesus’ birth. It becomes a story about God choosing a Jewish peasant girl from a backwater Galilean village to shape history. There is no doubt in my mind that the gospel writers were intentionally writing a subversive story about Jesus’ beginning. To make the claim that Mary was the mother of the “son of the Most High” was to effectively undermine conventional wisdom – namely that the son of the Most High was Caesar, the emperor of Rome, and the emperor of Rome certainly didn’t come into the world through a peasant woman! It is to make the claim that God is shaping history through a bunch of powerless people – virtual nobodies in the empire. What does this say about God? Power and status aren’t so important to this God. What does it say about the 90% of the population who were lower class? This story is lifting up the whole lot of them in 1^st century Mediterranean culture – and by extension it’s lifting up the forgotten ones of the 21^st century. 

 

This story is so radical that it’s taken 2000 years to catch up. The angel came with news of a possible future scenario, you see. The four major revolutions of the modern era were all about the invisible classes, those relegated to the “dustbin” of history, rising up. Gandhi’s empowerment of the Indian lower classes is a realization of this story of Mary’s conception. A whole new era, marked by the dignity of the forgotten ones, was inaugurated by the consent of a Jewish peasant girl to the promptings of Spirit. History can be interpreted as the slow evolution of humanity agreeing with Mary’s “yes” to the angel Gabriel. 

 

What about the virgin birth? One of the most subversive meanings of this detail is captured in a single line from a Bruce Cockburn Christmas song: “Mary has a child without the help of a man”. The assumptions of patriarchy – that men, not women are the favoured ones, that all good things must happen through the male gender, that men should hold all the power, and that women are naturally subservient, are overturned in this single detail. The virgin birth has nothing to do with concern over sexual impurity – the Jewish tradition affirms the body and sexuality as a gift of God. The myth of the virgin birth is announcing the end of one age – patriarchy – and the beginning of a new creation in Christ, an era of equality. We are now certain that one of the most radical features of the early Christian church was that women enjoyed equal status with men – unheard of anywhere in the world in the 1^st century. It took men in the church a couple of centuries to wrest control back and exclude women. But the story stands in its affirmation that the world can run just fine without the illusion of the necessity of male dominance.  In this story, Spirit bypasses patriarchy in the conception and birth of a new humanity – symbolized by the birth of Christ. 

 

Do you see what we miss when we literalize this story, and take it at its face value as the historical account of the birth of Christ?

 

 But let’s drill down and get a little more personal, shall we? I want you to identify with Mary. Think about the angel in the story as the presence of The Future – capital “F”. Catholic theologian, John Haught, thinks about God in precisely this way. All the as-of-yet unrealized possibilities of the future come to greet us in our present circumstances – much like the angel greets Mary.

 

The angels of the Future sometime greet us as the presence of a deep intuition of what we want to be – I tell the story in my book of sneaking off on a Sunday afternoon when I was a teenager to listen to William F. Buckley Jr. talk on a TV show. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but I loved his use of words and the way he spoke. Is it surprising that I have ended up in a vocation that involves writing and speaking? An angel of The Future visited me.

 

 The other day I received an email from somebody I didn’t even know who had a deep desire to do something for the people of Africa. While I didn’t know her, she represented an organization I trusted. She wanted to build 40 schools and she was inviting me to donate $100.00 toward this end. I had never met or heard of this woman, so this was indeed a strange greeting – the Future was speaking to me in the form of an inner allurement to her cause. What fascinated me about this stranger was that she not only felt compassion for Africa, she had an inner sense that she could make a real difference. A new future could be born through her. She had a Mary-moment and she wanted me to catch the spirit of that moment.

 

As a species, we are on the edge of the birth of something new. There is a dawning of consciousness that the Future is being born through us. I call it evolutionary consciousness. Andrew Cohen calls it evolutionary enlightenment. Evolution is no longer merely a biological phenomena that we study at school. It is the presence of the Future that desires to be born through us. We are an instance of that sacred evolutionary thrust – and when we get this we have a Mary moment. We discover our deep purpose. Our “yes” to having the Future be born through us was captured and anticipated by this story of Mary’s consent.

 

That “yes” is the most powerful word in the human language. It possesses the power to shape the future. Think for a moment about what brought this universe into being 14 billion years ago. God/Spirit/The Future consented to being involved in time and space. The Big Bang or the Great Radiance is the outer expression of the interiority of God saying “yes” to becoming. And that is why Mary’s “yes” and our own is so powerful. To be made in God’s image is to want to express this sacred word as an act of creation. It brings forth new worlds. Our consent issues in an inner radiance that far outshines that first Big Bang, because our yes creates a future of far greater complexity than atoms and molecules. In the realm of social and political systems it brings forth God’s dream – what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. In the interior realm of our spiritual life, it births the Christ.

 

Here’s what I’m saying: this Christmas tale is your story. It is my story. It is not confined to 2000 years ago. We are all greeted by the presence of the Future, and yes, it’s as strange today as it ever was – it’s perplexing as hell. The future being born through me? Through us? Can God mean this?

 

The beautiful thing about these angels of the Future coming to us with this strange and perplexing announcement is how elegant the arrangement is: just pay attention to what you deeply, authentically love, and follow it. That’s how The Future is realized. As we evolve the scale may increase, from personal interests, hobbies, and careers to being allured by the possibilities of the future of the church, the community, the city, the province, the nation, the global community, the entire planet. It doesn’t matter what the scale is – we’re all at different places – but what matters, especially for followers of the Christ, is that we discover what lights us up. Follow the love, in other words.

 

Now imagine us joining Mary to take time to ponder this mystery I am describing. The only mystery we can seem to ponder these days is how quickly our financial portfolios can tank. I don’t want to diminish the seriousness of the economic situation – it is serious – but there are other mysteries to ponder. And I suspect that if we spent as much time pondering the Mystery of Christmas in the way I’m describing – as a personal journey – we’d set the other in sacred context and be able to breathe a bit easier.

 

I read the other day about a man who had a recurrent dream of these huge rats and these tiny little cats. All he could see was how huge the rats were, and he felt terrified and powerless. He realized that the dream was about how his chronic focus on the problems of his life – the rats – just made the problems grow bigger. And the more powerless he became. He decided to focus on the cats – his own inner resilience and power. He said “yes” to the cats and the rats grew smaller and smaller.

 

We’re going to be entering into a Visioning Process in the New Year as a congregation – we’re calling it Imagine Canadian Memorial. We’re already a pretty fabulous community. But imagine if each one of us and all of us together began to focus on the cats – on the Future that sends messenger to greet us with good news of great joy. The Christ is going to be born through us – not once and for all time – but over and over again. Nobody else but us can birth this distinctive version of the future. Imagine, imagine what’s coming through us when we say with Mary, “Let it be to us, according to your word!”  Merry Christmas.