December 14, 2014WHEN GOD DRAWS NEAR 3. “Le Point Vierge”

Luke 1:26-38

Preface to the Word

This is the third Sunday of Advent, that four-week spiritual journey toward Christmas, designed to help us “make our heart and soul ready” for the coming of Christ into our world and into our lives. We’ve lit the Hope Candle on the Advent wreath and the Peace Candle. Today, it is the Joy Candle that is aflame.

Along the way, we’ve met some interesting characters connected to the stories of Jesus’ birth. Matthew and Luke include them in their Gospel narratives and the author, James Harnish in his book When God Came Down, has given us food for thought as we ponder the lessons that each of these Bible personalities teach us.

First it was the priest Zechariah and his barren wife Elizabeth, who got startling news that she was going to conceive and bear a son. In his bookHarnish introduces this chapter with a quote from the 20th century Catholic mystic, Thomas Merton:

It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us… Our discovery of God is, in a way, God’s discovery of us. We cannot go to heaven to find [God]… [God] comes down from heaven and finds us.

So our Advent begins with the awareness that we cannot save ourselves. None of us can give birth to the life, to the love, to the joy or the peace that God intends for this creation by our own human power. But we can train our eyes to see the light when it comes. Advent is a way to prepare our ears to hear, our eyes to see, our hearts to experience the way God draws near.

Last week we spent some time with Joseph, who was perplexed when he learned that Mary, his betrothedhadmysteriously become pregnant and he considered dismissing her “quietly.” But he heard the voice of God and obeyed by taking Mary as his wife and her child as his. We learned from Joseph, a righteous man, the difference between belief, (the accepting of a set of prepositions), and faith, (the trust we place in God’s promises and purposes, and by our obedience taking our place in God’s work of salvation in this world).

As an introduction to his chapter on Joseph, Harnish quotes E. Stanley Jones:

Jesus is God simplified. God approachable, God understandable, God loveable… Jesus is the last word that can be said about God… The Christian faith is not a set of prepositions to be accepted – it is a Person to be followed.”

Today we’ll consider for a few moments two more Bible characters who can teach us something about God drawing near. One of these characters is central to the Birth story. Her name in Hebrew was Miryam. In English, it’s Mary… the young unmarried woman, betrothed to Joseph, who learned that the child in her womb was God’s Messiah. The other character… well, he doesn’t appear in either Matthew’s or Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth. In fact, he isn’t in Matthew or Luke at all. He’s part of John’s Gospel and he also has a lot to teach us about God being born in us. But, more on that later.

We’re going to hear the reading from the first chapter of Luke. But before we do, let me share with you the quote with which James Harnish introduces his chapter on Mary. It comes from the well-known 20th century preacher and author, William Sloan Coffin, who wrote:

Advent celebrates the rebirth of hope… And Christmas celebrates the hope of rebirth, for Christ is born that we might be born anew… God comes to earth as a child so that you and I can finally grow up.”

Scripture Reading: Luke 1:26-38

SermonI.

  1. I was introduced this week to a new phrase. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk I mentioned earlier, wrote about it. It sounds better in French than it does in English… le point vierge–“the virgin point.” In “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” written in 1966, Merton definedle point viergethis way:

At the center of our being is a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lies, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, [God’s] name written in us... It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

  1. It turns out that Merton discovered this evocative little phrase in the writing of a Catholic scholar, Louis Massignon who, in the first half of the 20th century studied Islamic spirituality and discovered the metaphor in the works of a 10th century Sufi mystic, Mansur al-Hallaj. The phrase is also found in the writings of saint Theresa of Avila who lived in the 16th century. More recently, the contemporary poet and author, Kathleen Norris, refers tole point viergeas the place “where conversion begins in the human heart.”
  2. Harnish outs this spin on the phrase: “The virgin point is that place in human experience where God comes down to us and we discover God’s transforming presence in our own lives. It can be any time or place when the Spirit of God begins to do something in us that by all human expectations would be impossible. It’s the place where we acknowledge our emptiness, our absolute spiritual poverty. In this place, we know in ways that go beyond human knowing that God is with us.”
  3. Like Kathleen Norris said,le point vierge is that place in the human heart where conversion begins, where wesay“yes” to the Spirit of God and allow God’s love in Christ to reshape and redirect our lives.

It’s interesting that this place in our heart,over the centuries came to be referred to as “The virgin point.”

  1. Luke’s Gospel directs us to le point viergein the life of an otherwise ordinary, non-descript young woman named Miryam, or Mary. He wrote that Mary was a “virgin” (Greek = parthenon!) when the angel Gabriel unexpectedly appeared to her and said “Rejoice, favored one! The Lord is with you.” Gabriel surely intended that message as good news, but it scared Mary, in the same way the angel’s message scared Zechariah before her. In the Gospels, angels frighten the living daylights out of people. That’s why they always begin with “Don’t be afraid!”
  2. Gabriel continues… “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus (or Yeshua – Yahweh is salvation). And, like any reasonable, intelligent person, Mary wondered, “How will this happen since I haven’t had sexual relations with a man?” The angel explained it would be a unique work of the Holy Spirit within her because “nothing is impossible with God.”
  3. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary responds.“Let it be with me just as you have said.”

You could call this moment in Mary’s experience le point vierge, the point at which the Spirit of God began to do something in Mary that by all human expectations would have been impossible. The virgin point was when Mary said “yes” to God and became part of God’s saving work in this world.

II.

What do we do with a story like this?

  1. First thing I would say is that we are going to miss the main point of the story if we spend all our time debating the biological details of virgin conception. Remember, Luke is teaching the theology of salvation here, not a science class about human conception.

The Gospels and the early creeds of the church all looked back on the entire story of Jesus’ life from the other side of Resurrection. The virgin birth is Luke’s way of saying that in Jesus, we see the essential character and nature of God squeezed into human flesh. It’s the gospel way of saying that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we encounter Emmanuel, God with us – womb to tomb, birth to earth, the cradle to the grave, as they say.

The story we tell from Christmas to Easter is the life-transforming story of the way the self-giving love (agape) that is the essence of God’s character, invaded every corner of human experience. That story begins here at “the virgin point” in Mary’s life, a “point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lies, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, [God’s] name written in us... And at this point in her heart, which belongs entirely to God,Mary says, “I am the Lord’s servant. Let it be with me just as you have said.”

It’s the point at which Mary allowed the love of God to become a tangible reality in and through her life.

  1. This seems like a good point to introduce that other gospel character I mentioned in the Preface to the Word. He’s not in the cast of any Christmas pageants. Nor does he appear on any Christmas cards. I guess we could say that he did show up like an unexpected guest at Christmas dinner! We first meet him in the early chapters of John’s Gospel and his name is Nicodemus.

Unlike Mary who was a nobody, Nicodemus was a somebody – a Pharisee, a member of the ruling party in the synagogue. He had education, position, and power. But in spite of everything he had, he came to Jesus in the cover of darkness because he longed for something more. He was weary of his old life and he came to Jesus searching for a new one.

He was at that point that Merton described as “emptiness” and “absolute spiritual poverty” – le point vierge.

  1. In the third chapter of John, we can read how Jesus explained to Nicodemus that the only way to experience new life in the kingdom of God is to be “born anew,” or “born from above,”or “born again.” The Greek word can be translated all three ways.
  2. Being born “anew” or “again” seemed as preposterous to Nicodemus as Gabriel’s words seemed to Mary. In fact, he asked the same question that Mary asked – “How is it possible?” While Mary’s question was based on her lack of sexual relations with a man, Nicodemus’ question came from his own misunderstanding. He was thinking of physical birth when he asked “How is it possible for an adult to be born again? It’s impossible to enter the mother’s womb for a second time and be born.”

For being as an important of a man as he was, Nicodemus was a literalist with little imagination. He missed the point of Jesus’ metaphor. Jesus was talking spirit; Nicodemus was thinking gynecology. Jesus was describing the kingdom of God, the Pharisee was picturing maternity wards. Jesus was speaking figuratively about being born from above or born anew, and old Nicodemus could only think literally about getting born once again.

  1. The answer Jesus gave to Nicodemus is similar in nature to the answer the angel Gabriel gave to Mary, namely that it’s all an invasive, intrusive work of the Spirit of God.

I assure you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. Don’t be surprised that I said to you, “You must be born anew.” God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. It’s the same with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:5-8)

Thismoment represents“the virgin point” in Nicodemus’ life, a point at which the Spirit of God began to do something in him that by all human expectations would have otherwise seemed impossible. Le point vierge was when Nicodemus said “yes” to God in Jesus Christ and became part of God’s saving work in this world.

  1. How do we know Nicodemus experienced a conversion? Well, something changed the direction of his life because we see him again later in the story, toward the end, when he assisted Joseph of Arimathea in preparing the naked, broken body of Jesus for burial, a very risky thing for a Pharisee of Nicodemus’ caliber to do. John records in 19:39 that “Nicodemus, the one who at first had come to Jesus at night, was there too.”

III.

  1. Le point vierge. What is“the virgin point” for us?
  2. I think of this time of the year. And the truth is, no matter how hard we try to crank up whatever people mean by “the Christmas spirit,” none of us is capable by our own power of giving birth to the life, to the love, to the joy, to the peaceof God in Jesus Christ. It is always a work of the Holy Spirit that goes beyond our explanation… but not beyond our believing.

Le point viergeis that place in our heart that haunts us with thehope of new birth by the radical invasion of the Spirit of God. The only thing we can contribute to that new life is our absolute poverty of soul… and our availability, like that of a young girl named Mary, who heard the angel’s message and said “yes.”

  1. Le point viergeis sometimes a quiet, solitary place in our own souls. Sometimes we experience it in relationship with others. It surprises us sometimes in the middle of our hectic and chaotic lives. And sometimes it just sneaks up on us when we are confronted with an act of compassion, or grace, or peace in this world that can only be explained as a work of God’s love becoming flesh among us.

It’s present in moments of gratitude, awe, and reverence that connect us to something beyond the circumstances of that moment. Recall that first day you held and looked into the face of your newborn child. Maybe it was sitting next to the one you love, looking back over the years of life together. Perhaps it was sitting in silence and hearing nothing but the voice of God claiming you as a beloved child. Maybe it was the day you really trusted and experienced the forgiveness that set you free and offered a second chance.

These are just a few of the moments when new life, new meaning, new hope, and ultimately, God’s presence are revealed in the ordinary circumstances of our lives.

  1. Wherever and whenever it happens,le point viergeis an invitation for us, like Mary, to say “yes.” It’s the invitation for us and,in fact, for our world to be born anew, to be born from above, to be born again…and again…and again!