River Road Church Baptist

December 18, 2005
Thanksgiving Eve Service

Dr. Michael J. Clingenpeel

“The Irrational Season”

“This is the irrational season, when love blooms bright and wild, had Mary been filled with reason, there’d have been no room for the child.” These words by Madeline L’Engle capture the mood of Christmas. Christmas is an irrational season.

This is the season when Caracas, Venezuela barricades its streets so people can roller skate to church on Christmas Eve. This is the season when in late September in Northern Michigan a farmer severs a Douglas fir tree from its roots, binds it with twine, throws it on the back of a truck which delivers it to Lowe’s, and I buy it, place it in a bucket of water in my garage, buy a chemical that you can place in the water to make the tree last longer, forget to put the chemical in the water. Eventually I set up this brittle stick of kindling in my family room, all because we want a live tree instead of an artificial one. It is an irrational season.

You laugh, but this is also the season where there is a new kind of tree; a seven foot tall artificial fir tree. You erect it upside down with the point on the ground and the branches going out because it provides more space for the presents underneath. This is the tree for the space-challenged among you and also a tree for those of you who want to spend $600 on an artificial tree. It was sold out by October.

This is the season of the year when a man purchases for his wife or significant other out of the Neiman Marcus catalogue a pink leather cell phone that costs $5,700. And the man’s wife, or significant other, purchases for him a group photo of the Chicago White Sox costing $2,600. And this man and woman together purchase for their dog an electronic collar with a GPS system called the Global Petfinder, $350, so when they let out their little Bichon Frise for a spin in the backyard they can locate him in the event he winds up in the Pyrenees.

This is the season of the year when a person can purchase from the gift shop of the Las Vegas coroner’s office a fake jawbone that serves as a business card holder, $10. Christmas is the irrational season.

The facts of Jesus’ birth from our gospel lesson are in most respects irrational facts. An angel named Gabriel announces to Mary, a 12-14-year-old virgin, that God is with her and that she will mother the Messiah. Mary wonders how this will be and Gabriel tells her that this is of God, and a trusting, obedient Mary says, “I am your servant. Let it be to me as according to your word.“ The facts defy human reason.

We live in an age more focused on reason than serendipity. It is an era which is influenced greatly by the scientific method. So pervasive is the importance of reason that people dispute the facts that Luke presents us in our text.

That has been true since the enlightenment climbed aboard a ship and sailed to the new world over 200 years ago. This month’s issue of Harper’s magazine carries an essay entitled ‘Jesus Without the Miracles.’ The author of the essay, Eric Reese, suggests that the Jesus of the four canonical gospels is not to be preferred to the Jesus who comports with human reason. In his essay, Reese reminds us of Thomas Jefferson, who you recall took a pair of scissors and snipped out every verse of the Bible that did not pass the test of human reason; a task which Jefferson said in a letter only took two or three evenings after he had already the papers of the day. Out went the miracles, Out went any claim that Jesus was divine, including the two Christological miracles, the virgin birth and the resurrection. Jefferson published his Bible under the title, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, claiming that he had extracted “the diamonds from the dunghill.”

This is an age of reason, but in many ways it is also an age of something else. The postmodern world is like the pre-modern world of Luke, Mary, and Jesus in that truth is not confined to what you and I can deduce solely by our reason. We misunderstand life if we require that all truth be accounted for or measured by the criteria of science and logic. Some truth cannot be quantified. Some truth cannot be calculated, packaged, corralled or domesticated into an intellectual pet.

Consider, if you will, a marriage that lasts 50 years. There is some biology that explains human attraction. But how do you explain patience, forgiveness, loyalty and acts of sacrifice? They comprise the two lives that are joined together as husband and wife for half a century. Such a love cannot be explained, yet such a love is infinitely true.

You see, Luke understood that there is truth in events that defy human explanation. Luke was a physician. He was a man of science and reason, but when Luke describes the encounter between the angel Gabriel and Mary, he sets aside the language of logic. His talk is not of trimesters and gestation periods. There is nothing clinical about what Luke says took place that day.

Instead, Luke substitutes the language of poetry. Listen to what Gabriel said to Mary explaining to her what is going to happen to her: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” said the angel, “and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be holy.” The language of the angels is poetry, and poetry conveys truth just as science conveys reality.

Our search for God is an effort to locate not simply the facts about God, but the truth about God that lies beyond objective fact. In order to experience this search for God, there may be necessary some event that opens you and me to be hungry for it; that makes us aware of the truth of it; an event that demands from us a response.

Brian McLaren is a Presbyterian and pastor and leader in the emergent church movement, but he started his career as a college English professor. In one of his books entitled Finding Faith, McLaren uses this analogy to describe our search for God.

Imagine that a group of physicists and astronomers are gathered in a lecture hall, and they are listening to a lecture on cosmic radiation. The lecturer drones on and on and, as he does, the listeners take notes. Some of them rub their chins as they ponder what the lecturer is saying. Some nod approvingly and other nod in sleep. Suddenly, a woman enters the lecture hall. She moves to the lecturer and whispers something in the lecturer’s ear, whereupon the lecturer takes the microphone, hands it to the woman and she announces that a fire has broken out in the lobby of the building. They are not to leave the exits in the back because they will be walking into the fire, but they are to leave the exits at the front of the room. Then she says “it is best to follow me” and she disappears out of one of the front doors.

The moment before she entered the room, the group was detached. They were living the luxury of thinking about some abstraction, cosmic radiation. Now, having heard what she said, they are dealing with a real-life situation. They are not only dealing with information, they are dealing with news. The message that they have heard demands that they respond, and that they respond immediately.

This, writes McLaren, is your situation and mine. Life is not a lecture on the history of spirituality or on the movement of cosmic radiation or religious institutions or some archaic point of theology. Life involves finding your place in the universe in which we live and discovering how you relate to the author and the finisher of the universe.

This is precisely the situation in which Mary finds herself when she meets the angel Gabriel. Mary is not faced with an intellectual quandary. She is not worried about whether angels exist or whether a virgin can conceive or bear a son. She is confronted with a call to obedience.

Commentators on this text like to point out the parallels between Mary’s call and God’s call to the Old Testament prophets. The parallels are striking. But in one very important way the annunciation of Mary and the call of the prophets is radically different. Wherein most cases the prophets said “yes” before they learned the details of God’s plan, Mary said “yes” once she knew the implications and the details of God’s plan.

Isaiah responded quickly, but when he learned details of his call he objected. Jeremiah rejected his call at first, claiming he was too young. Jonah ran in the opposite direction from his call. Mary hears the details of what God will do in her life. She believes it, offers herself over to it and acts in faithfulness and in trust.

Christmas is an irrational season because Christmas confronts you and me once again with an irrational, yet wonderful story about God becoming flesh, wearing what you and I wear, living in the situation in which you and I live and demonstrating to us in a dramatic and powerful way the very nature of God as love. Christmas demands from you and me not just an intellectual ascent, but obedience and faith, and invites you and me to open our lives to the irrational, to the surprising and wonderful visitations of God and to find in these the truth of history.

May we pray together? Gracious God, we hardly know what to do with the story of the angel’s visit to Mary, but intuitively, we appreciate the genuineness and the purity of her response to this call. So, O God, we ask that when you confront us with the irrationality of this season, that we might respond as did she long ago in faith and in trust. Through Christ we pray, Amen.


MC; lmk, mt