“Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, ‘Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let is be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.’ But Ahaz said, ‘I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.’ Then Isaiah said: ‘Hear then, O house of David! Is it to little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.” -Isaiah 7:10-17

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, and angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All of this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’ When Jospeh awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.” -Matthew 1:18-25

If you go to church on Christmas Eve and Easter you have likely heard the passages above at least once. This along with the story of the passion and the resurrection is the limited story of Christianity that a lot of folks are walking around with. It’s not the complete story and if it’s all you have to work with it seems pretty fantastical. A virgin birth and a resurrection certainly feel scientifically impossible and somewhat ridiculous in a logical mind. We can debate the original words, we can reframe much of both stories in the historical-critical context of evangelism and cultural assimilation, that can make it more palatable and comfortable, but it doesn’t address the core challenge which is that many of us think these are the two most important pieces of the story of Jesus and they seem absurd.

It is fashionable to doubt, it is more respected intellectually to be a cynic that a believer, but there is another point on this spectrum where wonder and awe live and I think we may have skipped right over that to get comfortable in one extreme or the other. The story of Jesus is not just his birth and his death, and the story of Jesus can not be told just in his birth and in his death. And yet we have something important that we need to learn in both of those points of his life. Today we focus on the birth.

For this fourth week of advent I really am not going to do any contextual study, I am going to stay just in the words as we read, or hear them from the New Revised Standard Version. What I want us to focus on we see in Isaiah and we do in reading the birth narrative of Matthew: we look to God and say, I’ll believe but I want a guarantee, I want a sign that my belief is going to pan out and that you are real. Ahaz says “I’m not going to do it, I’m not testing God,” but Isaiah knows that the masses are not so confident: you want us to change our ways, well give us a guarantee that it’s worth our time. And what do we see? Not a flaming message in the sky, not a voice booming from the heavens, I mean I would love to see a billboard that tells me exactly what to do with my life, but no we get none of that. What we get as proof of God’s presence with us is the fact of creation. A young woman giving birth which is always the beginning of every possibility for renewal, for goodness, for growth. The proof of God being with us always exists in the ability to see the promise of new life coming into the world.

Every time a baby is born every possibility for that life is born; we dream of a world that is better than where we find ourselves, we imagine the good they will do, we hope for a road less bumpy and more secure, and this possibility is the miracle that exists at the emergence of that new life every time, over and over. The miracle exists in every seed, every bud on the tree, every egg warmly protected in its nest. Every young woman bringing life that may walk with us as God does, with love, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, hope.

The miracle we need to focus on in the scripture for this week is not the how of God coming into world, but the what of God doing in our world: God is being present with us, is being available to us through the messy, vulnerable miracle of a human birth. God being with us, carried into the world by a nobody young woman who could have been cast aside as inconsequential to the powers of the day, but instead who made herself available by saying yes to being present to God. I often wonder if we would be willing to take that risk?

The miracle we should be focusing on is God being with us in a way that starts by needing us to take care of, nurture, protect, love, hold, and feed the possibility of what is contained in that baby. Do we see that miracle and gift on our children? Because my friends, this is how God came to us, as a child.

God came to us as the least of these: a woman from a poor family and a helpless baby; God came to us this way after millennia of telling us, as we see in the prophets and the Books of Moses, that the most important way we can show our love of God is by taking care of the people most vulnerable, most at risk in our world. The miracle is that then God showed up as those people.

Isaiah tells us that the sign we will get from God, the proof on which we should believe in that faith, is a young woman giving birth to a child that we are to understand is precious and who knows better than we the difference between right and wrong. If we love this child, if we recognize the miracle inherent in all our children, if we treat them as though they can be the catalyst for bringing God into the world, might that not be exactly what they do? Might they not be exactly who God wants to work through?

I’m not going to get into the historicity of Matthew’s account of the birth, we weren’t there, we don’t know and we can’t know. We can choose to be cynical and point to all the birth narratives of gods and gurus who claim miraculous begetting and we can say impossible because we trust only what we can personally control and prove. That’s fine. Or we can say, that’s not the point.

We are focusing on the wrong thing. Whether or not Jesus was born of a virgin does not diminish his presence or the miracle of his life; it does not impact the way he walked on this earth with the people of his day, as pure love among them, trying to teach them what it looks like to love God by loving your neighbors, and it should not change the wonder we ought to feel in a birth that could have been nothing because the people were nobodies but instead changed the world.

Isaiah should remind us that we don’t need to test God, we don’t need a proof point, because the proof of God being with us, being for us, exists in every moment of creation, ongoing and ever present, in the simple, the ordinary, and the extraordinary. Matthew’s narrative is not reporting on current events, he is looking back, after seeing the life of Jesus and what it meant. He is saying to us, ‘folks pay attention from day one because God did something incredible, God walked with us, was born to us, needed us, and wanted to love us.’

When we, like Mary, say ‘yes’ to the impossible, God can be born, in little ways and big ways; when we say yes to the absurd and we love without hesitation as Joseph did we make space for growing this family of goodness. When we say, ‘come Emmanuel’ we acknowledge the miracle of Jesus the man walking alongside us and showing us that God is right here, present in the world, present in the heart of every created thing, in the ordinary, extraordinary miracle of life.

Come Lord Jesus, show us your way, the world is proof enough.