There is no mention of the Virgin Mary anywhere in the Bible outside of those two very strange and very different stories in the beginnings of Matthew and Luke. Mary is mentioned elsewhere, of course, but her description as Virgin is never written of again. St. Paul, the earliest of writers in the New Testament, says not one word about her virginity. Mark, the oldest of the gospels, says nothing. John seems to go in the other direction entirely with a birth story that doesn’t even mention Mary at all. Matthew and Luke never mention the miraculous events surrounding Jesus’ birth anywhere else in their gospels.

Could it be that the birth of our Lord was a little less dramatic than the fanciful tales we sing and tell at Christmas?

Could it be that the God who we claim works through the ordinary and simple ways of life did just that?

The problem is that it makes God too vulnerable, too powerless. We want a God who can zap the bad guys and make us successful, make us winners. Instead, we get a poor, itinerant wanderer who ends up dying like a common crook.

Is it any wonder we want fanciful tales of his birth?

It helps us forget that his entire ministry was spent with very ordinary people doing very ordinary things. The miracle of Christ is that in the very ordinariness of it all, God is revealed. In the simple actions of love, forgiveness and peacemaking, we enter into the kingdom of heaven. It doesn’t take guiding stars, singing shepherds or perpetual virgins to make this true. It is true and it is known as we follow Jesus into the ordinariness of our lives.

Do you find it as curious as I do that we have little trouble believing in voices coming our of the sky but enormous difficulty accepting the possibility that God can be heard in every act of kindness and grace? I wonder how many millions of gentle souls have been turned away from the church because we so often deny what Jesus’ life and death proclaimed: God comes in vulnerability, openness and love. Surely this is far more important in the story of Mary than her rather unusual biological condition.