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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church People Moving Power. This tape includes the reading of scripture and a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman titled "Bud of a Virgin Flower." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn immediately to side number two for the remainder of the message. This tape is copyrighted and all rights are

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reserved. Any public or commercial use, in full or in part, requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of yourselves or others is heartily encouraged. Meet little Jesus boy, they made you be born in a manger. Sweet little holy child, didn't

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know who you was. Didn't know you'd come to save us Lord, to take our sins away. Our eyes was blind, we couldn't see. We didn't know who you was. Long time ago, you was born, born in a manger Lord. Sweet little Jesus boy, the world treat you mean Lord, treat me mean too. But that's how things is down here. We don't know who you is. You done told

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us how. We is trying, master you done showed us how. Even when you's dying. Just seem like we can't do right. Look how we treated you. But please sir, forgive us Lord. We didn't know it was you. Sweet little Jesus boy, born long time ago. Sweet little holy child, and we didn't know who you was.

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Hear the word of God. Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man, and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered this, behold

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an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Behold,

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a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had born a son, and he called his name Jesus. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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About a year ago, indeed exactly a year ago tonight, I was in the middle of a sermon. A year ago tonight, I was sitting talking with one of our college young people, one who holds a rather special place in my heart. This collegian said to me that this night, Christmas Eve, was the most wonderful night of the year, and in describing it, used two

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phrases I have not forgotten. The first, that it was a night of misty mystery. The second, that it was a night of deep, deep silence. Now Shakespeare, speaking of this night, said, so hallowed and so gracious is this time. But I will confess to you tonight that as much as I revere the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon, I am more reached by the Bard of Glendale.

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I like that phrase, "misty mystery," and those words, "deep, deep silence." It is, of course, a night like other nights. Did you watch the sunset this evening? It was like a globe of flame as it settled into the Pacific. And then there was a bar of gold across all the horizon, which turned pink, and then blood red, till it touched all the earth and made

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it crimson. And then in the last minutes, as the red somehow softened, it became rose colored, like the petals of a flower folding about all the earth. The night came down like flowers. And as I saw that, and thought of all this evening means in terms of memories and hopes and dreams, my mind went back to the first Christmas Eve and to what a Scottish

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poet said of it, "More lovely than the rose, the fragrance that this night of nights is poured on earth. No noontide sun so bright e'er shown as one clear star that led the wise men's way before God's wisdom hid in babyhood to pray. More lovely than the rose, the rose of Sharon lay, bud of a virgin flower cradled in oxen's hay." Bud of a virgin

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flower. We of course do not know how that can be. The creed says that he was born of a virgin, and there is no one to explain that to us. It is of course a matter of debate. There are those who hold to him as Savior and Lord, who do not believe he was born of a virgin. And there are those who hold him as Savior and Lord, and believe that he was

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so born. And on the face of the evidence that is available, it seems to me you cannot decide which side is right. There is, you see, almost equal evidence. Those who say he was born of a virgin argue that two of the gospel writers say this was so, but those who say he was not born of a virgin argue that two of the gospel writers don't mention anything about

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it. Those who say he was born of a virgin assert that Isaiah prophesied it, and those who deny the doctrine point out that Paul never mentioned it. Those who are for it say he must be born of a virgin to be fully God, and those who are against it say he can't be born of a virgin and be fully man. The creeds announce it, but the best manuscripts

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exclude it. Matthew and Luke say it's so in two places, but Matthew and Luke and John in six places say that Mary and Joseph were his parents. So stack up the evidence as you will. In the end, I don't think if there is in you any objectivity or honesty at all, but you can on the base of the evidence resolve the question. And so there are those who have

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tried to make it the touchstone of all theology and are ready to read and to exclude from the Church, sometimes at the cost of their own heart's blood, those who would deny the doctrine. There are those who assert that if you do not hold it, heaven cannot be yours, and they build their case on such intangibles as these. And there are those, on the other

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hand, who say that there is no point to even thinking about it. It is something dragged in from other cultures, not important to us now and in this time, and casually, as if they capture within the finite smallness of their own mind a learning beyond the studies of two thousand years. They just lay it aside, thinking somehow that it's only recently that

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we have become sophisticated enough to know that people are not born of virgins. Do they really believe that those in the first century were so naive as to believe that people could be born of virgins? It is a measure of their absurdity that they would so think. I say again, on the basis of the evidence, one cannot determine it. So I will not argue with you

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about it tonight. I will not be forced by any fundamentalist argument, nor pushed by any liberal spleen, to fight on a night like this about a thing like the bud of a virgin flower. Oh, I believe the doctrine. I believe the doctrine with all my heart. I believe that Jesus was born of a virgin. But I believe it because of who he was, not because of any

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evidence, theory, or theology that is dragged before me. I believe it because it seems to me if you approach his life with any objectivity whatever, you must discover in it either extreme insanity or that which saves and transforms and has in fact influenced Western civilization more than any other life that was ever lived. Some are very quick to say he was a fanatic,

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but if he was a fanatic, then he was the only fanatic who was welcomed and played with children. Some are very quick to charge that he was a morbid Puritan warring against natural desires. Yet he was accused of eating too much and drinking too much and spending too much time talking with prostitutes. And some say he was a visionary who never had his feet on

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the ground. Yet he spent more time talking about love than any other one who's ever lived, and love is the most real thing in all the world. He was a megalomaniac. That's the accusation of some. Yet he girded himself with a towel and washed the feet of his disciples. He counted himself equal with God, but he forgave those who spat in his face. He was a weak and womanish

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pacifist who died like a hero. Impossible. Inevitable. Too good to be true. Too good not to be true. Only a human, at least superhuman. Man. God. You see, in a world like this, he lived like he lived. Now I know that's hard because I have tried to live that way and failed utterly. No one else has ever lived like that. And in the face of that kind of

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living, I must decide that this whole thing is a myth that has been fabricated by some, or I must fall on my face and worship him. And to believe it is a myth seems to me to posit one miracle to answer another. For who could have imagined and conceived of such a life? So I call him God, and I call him virgin-born. But notice, please, I do not

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say he is God because he was born of a virgin. I say because I know him to be God, I believe him born of a virgin. The Creed says, "Born of the Virgin Mary." Not because of history, for the evidence is scant. Not because of prophecy, because it can be interpreted legitimately in two different ways. Not because the Church was anxious to pile up miracles. The Church

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has never piled up miracles. Jesus himself forbade it. Always beware of those who try to authenticate their faith by piling up miracles. It is not the Master's way or the way of the Master's men. The Creed asserted it because those who wrote those words had beheld the purity of his living. And I say it with them tonight. And I will not argue about it. I

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just tiptoe up to the manger, look into the face of the child and say, "The holy name of God." And watch the glory light come to his eyes. And you lean over my shoulder and see it too. And how do you explain that if he was not born as he was born? And if he was not who he claimed to be? But I don't know the how of it. I don't know the when

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of it either. This bud of a virgin flower blossomed at a time I cannot identify. Oh, the simple-minded will say it was 1972 years ago tonight. But it wasn't. We know that Herod the Great died in 4 BC and was alive for at least one year after Jesus was born. That means he must have been born sometime prior to 5 BC. This isn't 1972, it's 1977

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or 8 or 9. There was a monk called Dionysius the Little who established our calendar and he made the most catastrophic mathematical error in all history. He dated Christ's birth from the time of the establishment of the city of Rome and he put down the wrong number and you and I have been out of joint ever since. We can't even determine the season

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of the year. Some say, well, just find out when the census was being taken. The difficulty was there were at least four censuses that we know of. And if in fact he was born during the one which we think was the one, it took seven months to take that census. Well then, when the star was shining, we've studied that and we've determined when the star was shining.

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It was shining from September to March. Well, some say the shepherds were in the fields. Now, in Palestine, the shepherds are not always out in the fields. Determine what months the shepherds are in the fields with the sheep and that will help to narrow it down. That's true. In most of Palestine, they're only out in the field certain months of the year. But

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in Judea, where Bethlehem is, they're out 12 months in the year. It doesn't help. You see, we don't even know when it happened. You know why we celebrate it tonight. It was because the Romans had a festival called the Saturnalia. It came at the end of December and it was celebrated to inaugurate the beginning of the winter solstice when the sun ceased

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its journey into the cold and reversed itself and started toward the springtime. Actually, that's December 21st, but the Romans miscounted and made it the 25th. And so the Christians, including the Roman festival, the festival of Saul Invictus, the invincible son, decided to talk instead about the invincible son of God, the son of righteousness. And they put

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their festival on this date. And there are some who are upset about that. They think it unfortunate that we should have chosen as the date a pagan holiday. Frankly, I think it was a good choice. What could be more appropriate? The time when we remember the birth of a bud of a virgin flower is the time when the sun reverses itself and begins its journey toward

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the flowers, the flowers of springtime and summer. I think that's kind of beautiful. I was told the other day that 60,000 years ago, the fourth glacial period came to an end. I didn't think that was too important when I was told it. I guess I don't think it's too important even now. Our hairy ancestors staring at woolly mammoths and we now dig

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up out of the La Brea tar pits. But I got to thinking about it tonight. Suppose the glacial period had not ended. I know that's an absurd suggestion, but this is an absurd night. There are angels in the skies and kings are in stables and babies are in mangers. Everything's out of place. So think absurdly. Suppose the glaciers had not come to an end,

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but reindeer still walked across Northern California and blizzards blew cold and stormy in this place. Think what it would be like if there were no springtime. Our ancestors would burn the yule log to warm the sun. They were afraid, you see, that it would bleed itself out in one last flaming, awful sunset. So they warmed it up in preparation for springtime.

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We bring green pine trees into our homes at Christmas for the promise of the spring, a carryover from long ago. We think in the midst of winter about summer. Why not then think about the cold of the world's soul and the warmth that the sun of righteousness brought to it?

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During the First World War in Flanders, there was an incident of which I just learned. It was new to me, perhaps will be new to some of you, yet others of you might have been there. The Germans were in conflict with the British. All the landscape was destroyed. The villages blackened and ruined, the houses turned into shells, the trees made into jagged

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silhouettes, and all about was mud. And in the mud, death. Those who had died a month ago, those who had died a week ago, those who had died yesterday, those who had died last night, they were buried in the very parapets of the trenches in which the soldiers stood. They were littered through the no-man's land and they were hanging on the barbed wire.

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There was the smell of death and the sight of death all about, and it was cold. And all you could see coming from the trenches was the frosty breath of the gray uniformed Germans on one side of the line and the khaki uniformed Tommies on the other. And it was Christmas Eve and there was no firing. And the next morning when the dawn came, they stood and

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held their icy weapons with their numb hands, waiting for the first chorus of artillery to sound. And there was no firing. And after a while, three German soldiers came without weapons out of the trenches and into the no-man's land. And three British soldiers went out to meet them. And they threw their arms around one another. And when the other soldiers saw

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it, they streamed outside of the control of their officers, streamed out of the trenches and into the no-man's land until there were hundreds of them there. And in broken German and in broken English, they wished one another Merry Christmas. And the German boys sang "Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht." And the Britishers sang "God rest ye merry gentlemen." And the

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German boys sang "Die Wacht am Rhein." And the Tommies sang "It's a long, long way to Tipperary." And they gave each other simple gifts. And when the night came, they went back to the trenches to begin the war again. I know it was just an interlude. It was only one small part on a very long front. And it lasted only for the course of one day. And

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I would not for a moment try to build a theology out of it. But doesn't it say to you that love is in the end stronger than hate? Isn't there the promise in that single instant that light is greater than darkness, that hope is greater than despair, that God is greater than evil? That moment, you see, was a sprout of green in the midst of the world's winter.

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It was a moment of scintillating starlight. It was a moment that said that the glacier will pass away and the signs of its dying are already amongst us. So as I stand on this Christmas Eve and you say to me, "This is not the night on which it first occurred," I reply, "That is probably so."

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But I must choose some night. And that being so, I choose this night because it is the feast of the invincible sun, the unstoppable springtime of God. But I don't know the when of it. And when you get right down to it, I don't know the why of it either. I suppose that surprises you. As a minister, I ought to at least know the why of it. Oh, I can

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quote you verses. I can say, "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life." But all I've done when I've said that is push the question back a notch. Why did God so love the world? I was in Bethlehem in September. It's an ugly place. Old beat-up buildings

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with new television aerials on them. Narrow streets with rude people driving big buses blowing their horns. Souvenir shops that try to cheat you and usually do. The oldest church in Christendom stands on the site and it's ugly. The door is very low to keep people from riding in on horseback. But other people still get in and profane the place. Broken

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Christmas decorations hang around inside. The walls are decorated with works of art that weren't artistic when they were painted and are less artistic now, being covered with dust and dirt. Israeli soldiers search you to see if you're carrying weapons. A bunch of Catholic monks went by with dirty faces, dirty hands, and dirty feet singing praise

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to Christ and swinging incense burners that were sickeningly sweet and they were followed by an Orthodox priest who had his hand out, not in prayer. And I thought to myself, "Why? Why would he come?" Bethlehem wasn't any different then. They weren't Israeli soldiers, they were Roman soldiers. They weren't crowded with buses, they were crowded with cars. And

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there were no decorations in the inn and there were no brilliant lights or sanitary conditions to be discovered in the stable. So I ask you, "Why?" I can quote the verses. I can say, "In this is love, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." But you tell me, why? They say that when he was a child, he had a garden and in the garden he grew roses.

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And when the roses were at full bloom, he planted them into garlands and invited the other children to come into the garden and he put the garlands through their hair. And they took the garlands and tore all the roses to the pieces and stomped them into the earth and through the stems there too. And they left the garden stripped and bare. And as

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they left, they turned at him and taunted him and said, "Now what will you make your garlands of?" And he picked up some of the naked stems, which now wore only their thorns, and he planted them into a crown and he put it on his head. And where the roses were, he bled instead. Why? They say that above the snoring of the animals in the stable,

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you could hear the ravens outside crying out, "Gethsemane! Gethsemane!" So why? Did he come because there are moments like that moment between the German line and the English line, when for a little while at least, we acknowledge him and in the same moment ourselves? In my hometown three years ago on Christmas Eve, a 14-year-old boy took a gun and shot

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his father. He did not die immediately. It was a little while, and then he died. And the boy said he had done it because he hated his father. He did not want to be dominated by his father. He was sick and tired of having his father look over his shoulder. He wanted nothing else to do with his father. A few months ago, a guard walking the corridor in

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the house of detention where that boy now is, heard a sound coming from his room at night. And going to the door, he listened. And he heard the boy crying, "I want my father. I want my father." So our father came, and we killed him. And he comes again and again, and we kill him again and again. But does he keep on coming? Because sometimes when

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it's very, very dark and we think nobody can hear, we go out and cry, "I want my father." I think that's the why of it. So it's Christmas Eve. And we've scrambled over the broken walls of history and climbed over all the shattered monuments of yesterday and found amongst the ruins a little niche,

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a cranny if you will, called Bethlehem. And in that cranny, we found the bud of a virgin flower. Flower in the crannied wall, we pluck you out of the cranny and we hold you here, root and all in our hands, little flower. Oh, if we could understand who you are, root and all, all in all, then we would know who God is and who we are. But we don't know the

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how of it or the when of it or the why of it. So he comes like the tiniest blossom that ever was. And if you want to get close to him tonight, you must come gently. You cannot push your way or argue it or theologize it or get there by pushing other people away who do not believe as you believe. You must come humbly. And if you want that fragrance

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which transforms, and if you want the roots of this flower to somehow capture your own heart, then you must come. You must come on your knees. Let us pray. Tenderly, Jesus, tenderly. Let our touch be sensitive. And as thou dost touch us, do it tenderly. For it's deeply silent inside of us, and we

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never know quite how to act on Christmas Eve when we come face to face with such a mystery as one born of a virgin. Tenderly, please. It's in your own name that we ask. Amen. (Pause) (cat screeching)