Luke 1:26-28 - Nothing Is Impossible with God - December 24, 2017

In the fallen world in which we live, we know that there is no such thing as an unconditional, lifetime warranty, an unbreakable promise, a no strings attached guarantee. Anything and everything invented and constructed by man is bound to falter and fail. That’s why we go to great extremes to cover ourselves lest the “impossible” should happen. For example, I’m guessing you spent a fair amount of money on the making sure that your car is safe and reliable, but that doesn’t stop you from keeping a spare in the trunk, from paying for AAA and car insurance just in case your 80,000 mile tires go flat in 20,000 or the computer tells you that you have enough fuel to go another 100 miles as you sputter to a stop on the side of the road. As we are in the midst of marking items off of our Christmas list, one of the hazards we face, especially with buying clothes, is what size to buy? And, especially for men, you might just want to grab the whole rack of sizes, given the possibility that you might be wrong. In day to day life, we plan ahead, we save up, we put redundant safe-guards in place just in case an impossible or unlikely event should happen.

On the other hand, when it comes to entertainment, we seek out the impossible, we amuse ourselves with things that defy reality, that seem too extreme, too amazing, too incredible to be true. Hollywood capitalizes on this desire with superheroes and computer generated graphics and death defying stunts. We watch sporting events hoping to see an impossible one handed catches, impossible comeback victories, and remarkable individual efforts. In real life, we avoid the impossible by planning for every possibility. In entertainment, we seek out the impossible, seeing it as an escape from the hum-drum of everyday life.

And then we come here to church, we hear the Word of God and sing our hymns and confess our creeds and we are confronted with truly impossible things presented as historical fact; the other-worldly taking place in this world; the unimaginable becoming reality. Just to name a few examples: God spoke – and the universe came to be. (Genesis 1) Abraham and Sarah had a son even when they were both old and infertile. (Genesis 21) Moses reached out his staff – and a highway appeared in the middle of a sea. (Exodus 14) Joshua prayed – and the sun stood still. (Joshua 10) But as impossible as those things may seem, they pale in comparison to the three impossibilities Luke presents in our text this morning.

Let’s begin by first of all admitting the sad reality: many people (even many claiming to be Christian teachers and preachers) do not believe that the events of this text are true – or at best, that it’s open to personal preference. The critics and skeptics will pick out any detail, any seeming inconsistency to try to prove that this is nothing more than a fairytale. The first place Jesus’ own contemporaries looked was the setting of the entire scene: Nazareth, a town in Galilee. Nazareth was not a Madison, a McFarland, or even a Stoughton. Nazareth was more like one of those unincorporated towns on a two lane highway where if you blink, you’ve missed it. Nazareth was so insignificant that one of Jesus’ own disciples said can anything good come from Nazareth? (John 1:46) An event that would change the world forever would take place in backwoods Nazareth? No, they thought, that’s impossible.

It gets stranger. In this quiet little country village stood a house, and in that house was a young girl (13-14 years old), a virgin, and in this house to this teenage girl an angel – an angel!! – appeared and said: greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you. If you’re picturing a rather odd, even uncomfortable situation, you’re probably not too far off. Mary herself was pretty disturbed by this strange being standing in her bedroom and was having a hard time coming to terms with it.

And that was before Gabriel even got to the point of his visit. When he did, he dropped this bombshell: Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. So, reviewing the details: 1) Nazareth, no palace, no post-office, no professional sports team – site of most important event in human history; highly unlikely; 2) An angelic being appears and speaks; doubtful; 3) He claims that Mary, a teenage virgin, will give birth, 2000 years before in-vitro fertilization – now that’s where most people draw the line. Mary herself found some great difficulty with this last point. She might have been young, but even she knew that virgins don’t have babies. Maybe the skeptics and scoffers have a point; maybe this is just a nice story, a legend or myth; because this all sounds too impossible to be true.

That might be the case if this was your teenage daughter telling you this story a month after spending a long weekend with her boyfriend, but this is not the report of a teenage daughter. This is God’s Word, penned by Luke, who not only did his homework in researching his book by interviewing eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1-4), but was inspired by the infallible Holy Spirit. Is this impossible? Absolutely. That’s why it’s called a miracle. This is something that does not, cannot happen according to the laws of nature. But for the author of the laws of nature, for God, nothing is impossible – not even a virgin conceiving and giving birth to a son.

The impossibilities continue: This baby boy, named Jesus, He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end…the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 2nd to unconditional justification by grace through faith, do you know the single doctrine that sets Christianity apart from it’s false, man-made counterparts? It’s this. The incarnation: God becoming a man. It is the almighty Creator of the heavens and the earth, the one who keeps the planets in their orbits and who keeps your heart beating – it is the only true God taking on human flesh and being born of a teenage virgin. No man could have ever dreamed up such a story, such an improbable setting, such an impossible event.

And that is exactly the point. Unbelievers scoff. Atheists laugh. Critics and scientists and historians point out that this event has never happened again in the history of the world, there is no physical evidence to prove it, no camera crews were there to record it – and therefore it must be a myth, it must be a fairytale. But isn’t that one of the biggest reasons to believe it? Isn’t that exactly why our consciences are bound by this book, why we believe that our sins are forgiven and why we have the hope that we will live forever in heaven? After all, what kind of deity would God be if he was confined to the laws of nature, if he was bound to operate the exact same way as his creatures? Why would we worship a God with whom miracles are impossible? We shouldn’t and we don’t, we worship the God who sent Gabriel to Nazareth, the God who enabled a virgin to conceive and give birth, the God who left his home in heaven to become a man on this earth to suffer, die and rise again. We worship a God who can do the inconceivable, the irrational, the supernatural. We worship a God with whom nothing is impossible.

But that doesn’t stop Satan from planting doubts in our minds, does it? That doesn’t stop us from letting our eyes and thoughts linger on documentaries and books that come from a perspective that the virgin birth of Christ is a myth. That doesn’t stop us from thinking – well, yeah, my church teaches the virgin birth, but my church teaches a lot of things I don’t agree with. That doesn’t stop us from treating the miracle of the incarnation (God becoming man), which is a fundamental doctrine of Christian faith, as a cute story that is best left here at church where we are safely surrounded by other lunatics who week after week confess in the Apostles’ Creed: I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.

We can try to rationalize our doubt: Mary herself didn’t believe it right away; Peter and John and Thomas – those very men who walked and talked with Jesus – didn’t always believe that he was God’s Son in human flesh. We can claim that if an angel appeared to us, then we would accept it. We can say that the virgin birth is a good Christmas story for children. But what we can’t do is ignore the truth as God sees it: to doubt the conception of Jesus Christ in the virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit is doubting the character, power, and truthfulness of God, and thus is nothing other than unbelief.

We know John 3:16 by heart, but do we remember what follows in verse 18: Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. The Christian faith is not a buffet where you can choose what you like and pass by the things that sound ridiculous or unreasonable. (Revelation 22:18-19) It’s all or nothing. It’s faith in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, your Savior, or unbelief. It’s eternal life or eternal death. If Jesus was not conceived by the Holy Spirit, we are just wasting our time. Maybe you are thinking that believing the virgin birth is easy for some of the Christians sitting around you or the guy standing in the pulpit in front of you – it’s not. It goes beyond my reason just like it goes beyond yours. And that’s why even on Christmas we need to fall down before God and plead for forgiveness: Lord, I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief! (Mark 9:24)

And you know what the most amazing part about this impossible story is? It’s the most impossible thing of all to those who reject it. The miracle is that God chose the backwater town of Nazareth, he sent an angelic messenger to a teenage virgin named Mary, he humbled himself to be conceived in her womb, to be born in a barn, to live on this earth as a homeless person, to suffer, die and rise again – all for us. God did all of these impossible things because He knew you and I couldn’t believe in him perfectly. He knew we would doubt and therefore be guilty of unbelief; of breaking the first and most basic commandment: we should fear, love, and trust in God above all things. God performed these miracles because his love wouldn’t let us suffer the eternal punishment for our unbelief. So he came to earth to suffer that punishment for us. This story is not a cute 2000 year old fairytale. This story is all about God’s love for you and for me. Is it irrational, inconceivable, impossible? Absolutely! It had to be. We couldn’t save ourselves, so God sent his Son to do it for us. What could be more irrational, impossible, and yet, more beautiful and necessary for sinners like us? And what could be more important this time of year than making sure we are ready to believe that God did the impossible to save us?

Now I could try to satisfy some of our curiosity by taking you through the Greek grammar of Luke 1:35. I could tell you that the Greek says that the Holy Spirit came over Mary like a shadow falling on the ground. But grammar does not create or strengthen faith. Only hearing the message creates and strengthens faith. Martin Luther said: Just how this (virgin birth) was done we will not nor can we search out, even if we study over it for a long time, we cannot get the right idea nor comprehend it. And who are we, that we dare to grasp such a high, divine work? We cannot even with our thought comprehend and grasp how a tree or fruit or a blade of grass grows out of the ground. [1]

If you still don’t understand how a virgin can conceive and give birth, that’s ok, neither did Mary, all she could manage was: I am the Lord’s servant, may it be to me as you have said. We couldn’t put it any better ourselves, could we? That’s simple, trusting, childlike faith. Tonight we will hear again the Christmas story. It won’t make any sense, we won’t be able to prove it, we won’t try to explain it – but we will receive it and believe it with child-like faith that doesn’t ask silly questions. More than that, we will rejoice and give thanks for the miracles of Christmas: a virgin can give birth, God can become flesh, and we can believe it and be saved, because nothing is impossible with God. Amen.

[1] Wenzel, F.W. The Wenzel Commentary (Bemidji, MN: Arrow Printing 1986) p 20