From Virgin’s Womb to Empty Tomb
Isaiah 26.16-19; Luke 1.26-38; Romans 4.16-25

Congregation of the Lord, tonight I want to remind you of the soap opera that we all believe, by which we live, and by which we will be saved.

1. Domesticity of the Gospel

If I told you that someone had “domesticated Christmas,” or that the church was guilty of “domesticating the gospel,” or that the secular world always tries to domesticate the Bible, you would understand that I was describing something really negative. The Gospel is the power of God for salvation and to speak of domesticity doesn’t refer to power but to being tamed. And we all know, at least when we are reminded, that God is not tame and so neither can be the stories about what he has done. C. S. Lewis was used by God to help us all in that way. Most of us have probably already thought of the words just now, as I have been talking, that he immortalized in his fantasy stories: “He is not a tame lion.” This was Lewis’ description of Jesus, and he was right.

But something doesn’t quite fit. The Bible is the story of rescue from slavery, from an evil tyrant. In John’s vision in revelation he sees the Devil as a great dragon. We have stories about evil tyrants bent on domination.

Darth Vader, Sauron, Lord Voldemort–someone who seems demonic or the very incarnation of death.

We have stories of great battles fought and wars and massive conflicts. You would expect the Bible to follow that pattern. It to involves a struggle with a great tyrant. Jesus came to defeat an overlord. As we read in Hebrews 2:

14 Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.

Sometimes the Bible meets these expectations. The story of the Exodus involves that sort of conflict and the stories in Joshua do too. There are other examples. David and Goliath is a classic.

But especially at the beginning, what we find are family melodramas. We find in Genesis over and over again that someone really wants to have a baby. In fact, it is not just Abraham and Sarah. If we read carefully we realize that Noah and his wife had to wait much longer than any of their contemporaries to have children, and that it took Isaac and Rebekah decades of waiting before they just had twins. And then the story of Jacob’s two wives and their quests for children read in some ways like an HBO melodrama about Mormon polygamists.

2. Long struggle to give birth

The virgin birth is another chapter in the story of the long struggle to have a baby. While the war stories are there, the baby stories come first. Everything in Exodus starts with the struggle to have a baby boy survive Egypt’s attempt to kill him. David comes on the scene as someone reached by Samuel. And Samuel too begins with the story of a woman like Rachel, with an overly fertile rival wife to her husband and a great struggle to have a baby. Even Samson’s funny war on the Philistines starts with a woman who can’t get pregnant unless God intervenes.

And Mary is just like that. We commonly think of the virgin birth as related to his deity. There may be some application to debates about Christ’s deity but the story in the Scriptures is concerned with showing that Jesus is the true new beginning–a new Adam. In Luke, Mary is compared to Elizabeth who, as an elderly barren woman with an elderly husband is obviously a new Sarah with a new Abraham.

The lesson of Mary’s pregnancy and birth to the savior is that salvation:

depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the Jew but also to any Gentile as well who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” 23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

You see, the virgin birth shows that God can make life from the dead and call into existence things that are not. And the only response is trust in God’s promise. Mary’s belief that God would keep his promise showed that she was a true daughter of Abraham.

It may seem implausible, that the salvation of the world was brought about through people trusting God for their domestic problems—for something as basic as a baby Believing in God in the melodrama of family life was the precondition to any great war victory over the” deathlord.”

3. Long wait for resurrection

The story of Christmas is a foreshadowing of the story of Easter. This is not just because we know that was Jesus’ purpose, but also because the barren womb is firmly established in the Bible as an image and sign of the problem of death. Our reading in Isaiah involves a prophecy of God’s people in exile longing to be saved. And their incapacity to escape is at once compared to the inability to conceive—they could give birth only to wind—and at the same time a corpse trapped in a tomb. But God gives babies because he can even give life to the dead.

That is why, by the way, Jesus’ title as the risen and exalted one, is “firstborn of the dead.” Paul ascribes this to him in Colossians 1.18 and Jesus himself claims the title when he appears to the Apostle John in Revelation 1.5. In fact, we see this connection in the first sermon after the giving of the Spirit in Pentecost

So the message of Christmas is the message of the Gospel. God can bring about a new creation that we are impotent to bring about ourselves, and we should therefore trust Him to keep his promises. He has revealed to us that Christ has risen from the dead and that, even now, though we don’t see it, all things are being put under Jesus’ feet.

We need to remember the manner in which salvation was brought to us on Christmas, because our tendency is only to remember the “shock and awe” of the angel’s singing to the shepherds or the star and the wise man. But many people didn’t hear the angels or see the star. Salvation started with a baby. God began intervening in the world by coming in a domestic setting.

And if we think that the struggles in our lives don’t measure up to the really important things we see in Scripture, then maybe we’re missing the point. Your soap operas, the domestic struggles of your lives—they matter to God. If you can trust him to raise you from the dead than you can trust him in these seemingly ordinary and small matters.

One of the birth stories we find in the Bible is the story of Samson’s birth at the end of Judges. That is an interesting place because Samson’s mother is not the only woman mentioned in Judges who is an instrument of salvation. Deborah is mentioned earlier as a mother to Israel and a judge. And she is tied to Jael who delivers God’s people by using household tools. Jael lives in tents and when an evil war leader asks her for shelter, she lures him to sleep and then hammers a tent peg through her head. Another woman destroys a pagan chief by breaking his head open with a millstone, a tool she would normally use for the process of making bread. And these household items are also used by men in Judges. Shamgar kills six hundred Philistines with an ox goad, not a sword or spear.

Here we have stories of God’s people torn apart by professional armies led by Darth Vader characters, and they are not destroyed by sword or bow or horse of chariot. In many cases they are the only ones who have these things. They are destroyed by domestic life. By household objects and by babies.

Sometimes we can think that domestic life is a distraction and that God wants us to do something great. I’m not going to say that can never happen, but God chose to meet the legions of Satan with a baby from a struggling family. He wants you to trust him to be spreading the kingdom even through the mundane affairs of your family life.

Postscript: While delivering a speech from the above, I couldn’t help but point out that our taste for drama is often very much like the Gospel story. The most popular action movies or TV series are the ones with a lot of family melodrama in them.