This morning I want to launch us into the message with a reading from one of the great minds in theology, Dr. Seuss. I have here a copy of On Beyond Zebra, a favorite Dr. Seuss book. I want to read a portion of it, so be sure to listen closely, because this is the key to everything I want to say.

"Said Conrad Cornelius O'Donnell O'Dell, my very young friend who was learning to spell, 'The A is for Ape, the B is for Bear, the C is for Camel, the H is for Hair, the M is for Mouse, the R is for Rat ... I know all letters like that. Through to Z is for Zebra, I know them all well,' said Conrad Cornelius O'Donnell O'Dell. 'Now I know everything anyone knows from beginning to end, from the start to the close, because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.'

"Then he almost fell flat on his face on the floor when I picked up the chalk and drew one letter more. A letter he had never dreamed of before. And I said, 'You can stop if you want with the Z, and most people stop with the Z, but not me. In the places I go, there are things that I see that I never could spell if I stopped with a Z.

" 'I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends, my alphabet starts where your alphabet ends. My alphabet starts with this letter called yezz, it's the letter I use to spell yezzametezz. You'll be sort of surprised what there is to be found, once you go beyond Z and start poking around. So on beyond zebra explore like Columbus, discover new letters like wum, which is for wumbus, my whale who lives high on a hill and who never comes down till it's time to refill. So on beyond Z, it's high time you were shown that you really don't know all there is to be known.' " If you want to hear the rest of it, see me afterward, and I'll arrange a private reading for you.

This morning would you join me on a journey on beyond zebra, because that's where you find Christmas. On the first Christmas, God added a new letter to our alphabet in the Virgin Birth. Why? Because we need that letter in order to spell Immanuel, which means "God with us." So if you're looking for Christmas, I invite you to join me on a journey on beyond zebra.

The birth of Christ is without a category into which we sort life's experiences.

What is it Dr. Seuss means when he says "on beyond zebra"? I think he means that just as you and I have been given 26 letters in the alphabet with which to spell our words, we also have certain mental categories that we've developed through the years into which we fit the experiences of life. For example, we all have a category in our minds for dogs. When we see dogs, we fit them into that category. Sometimes, however, we find that we have a category without any real instances. For example, unicorns and Big Foot and fairy tales are flights into fantasy where we have these delightful images but no experiences. But what's really shocking is when we find a real event or experience that just doesn't fit any category we've ever seen before. That's on beyond zebra.

A woman told me a while back of having such an experience. She was driving down the street with her daughter, and as they sat at a stoplight, they looked over to one side. There on the street corner was a mother hen and her baby chicks, just standing there. And when the light changed, the mother hen jumped off the curb and walked across the street with the light in the crosswalk, and those baby chickens followed along right behind her. This woman said that as they watched this happen, her daughter turned to her and said, "This is not normal." It was not normal; it was beyond zebra. It was an instance without a category.

The birth of Jesus Christ was like that; an instance without a category. Oh, it started out as just the opposite. It was your classic boy meets girl. The young carpenter may have carved "Joe loves Mary" in the tree in the back yard. Then they were engaged. It was that delightful, magical time when a young couple could hardly wait. At long last, they were finally to be united in marriage. I don't know if you've been through that, but I remember it. Four months Becky and I were engaged when we were seniors in college, and during that time I had all the symptoms of a man in love: a silly grin, bad grades, an overdrawn checking account. I'd drive to the store, and when I got there, for the life of me I could not remember why I had driven there in the first place. Maybe Joseph was that way about Mary. He may have been so over her that he kept hitting his thumb when he was working in the carpenter shop because he was distracted with thoughts of her. Such were his hopes and dreams of the happiness to come.

But then it happened. Mary turned up pregnant. All of a sudden, Joseph's garden of love dissolved into a world of hurt and a living hell. Mary tried to explain what had happened, and Joseph yearned to believe her, but there was no way that even a heart full of love could dispel all those nagging suspicions in his mind. What Mary was saying was just beyond belief. W. H. Auden has Joseph's own soul taunting him in a poem:

Joseph, have you heard what Mary said occurred? Yes, it may be so. Is it likely? No. Mary may be pure, but Joseph, are you sure? How is one to tell? Suppose, for instance, well, maybe, maybe not. But Joseph, you know what your world will say about you anyway.

Wanting to believe Mary but unable, unwilling to marry her and yet wanting to spare her as much pain as possible, Joseph decides to divorce her on the QT. I think you would agree with me that Joseph's reaction was just as normal as can be. According to his range of experiences, there was only one way a woman gets pregnant, and he knew he could not be the father, so of course he was angry and hurt and betrayed. Yet as you look at verse 20, you see that the angel said to Joseph something that suggests the deepest feeling inside Joseph was not those things, but fear. He was afraid to believe Mary.

Here we come to an ageless human trait: we human beings are afraid of the unknown. Whenever we come up against the unknown, something previously unseen and unheard of, we automatically believe it's probably bad or dangerous or horrible or false. It's that tendency that keeps us from exploring new possibilities and growing in our relationship with God.

For example, in ancient days there were map makers, cartographers, who naturally used the instruments and knowledge available to make their maps of the world. Some of them did a pretty good job, but all of them had one trait in common. Whenever they came to the limits of their knowledge of the world, in the margin of the map they would write these words: "Beyond this there be dragons." They could have written there, "Beyond this is the unknown," since they knew nothing about those regions. They could even have written, "Beyond this lies something desirable and beautiful." But no, they assumed that beyond what they knew was a place of danger not just possible death by natural causes, but a grisly death of being eaten by dragons.

Friends, there are lots of people who come to the mysteries of the Bible and the miracle of the Virgin Birth with the same kind of attitude. They populate the unknown with dragons rather than saying it's a mystery beyond our knowing. They say, "It's just suspicion; it's hogwash; it's foolishness; it's a fairy tale made up by people who had such a primitive knowledge of the world that they had no idea of natural law." When someone says that, I always say, "You tell that to Joseph. He knew only too well about the natural means of conception, and that is why he resolved to divorce Mary quietly." My word to you is, if Joseph could believe in the Virgin Birth, why can't you?

Joseph was not naive, but perhaps the most naive people today are those who believe they can still live comfortably inside their Newtonian world governed by the laws of nature. I don't want to pose as an expert in an area in which I'm not an expert, yet if you do any reading in modern science, you know that the great big Newtonian closed system we've lived with for so many years is melting before our very eyes like a snowman in the spring sunshine.

The big bang theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, other developments in theoretical physics, the entropic principle of the cosmos, even evolution is under attack today, not just from the creationists, but from within their own community as well. Parthenogenesis, birth without a natural father, is something you find in nature. So we're finding that miracles are no longer the obstacle to faith they once were. We're finding that this world is just too wild and crazy and messy and terrible and wonderful a place to be shoehorned into the straitjacket of natural law. Scientists are the first to say today that there are categories beyond anything we have ever dreamed before. And our secular world is crumbling. As you look around and see people believing in Eastern religions and the occult, you realize card carrying members of the 20th century have no problem believing in miracles.

The miracle of miracles is that the baby inside of Mary was God in human flesh.

Even though the Virgin Birth is easier to believe today than it's been in years, however, people still want to know, "So what? What does it mean? If Jesus was born that way, what does it prove?" I'll tell you, it proves nothing. You and I need to realize that. A person could believe in the Virgin Birth from the top of his head to the bottom of his toes and still not be a Christian. The Virgin Birth is nothing more than a signpost pointing the way toward becoming a Christian. You find Christmas not just by moving beyond zebra; you've got to go beyond simply believing in the Virgin Birth to believing in the message the angel gave to Joseph when he said, "Not only was this baby, this fetus, miraculously conceived, but the baby growing inside Mary is none other than God in human flesh." That is the miracle of miracles.

Eavesdrop again: "All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, 'Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Immanuel.' " That's the punch line God with us, the incarnation of God in human flesh. Who is this baby? Paul tells us in Colossians 1:15, "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven."

This baby is he who, in the beginning, sent the flaming stars and suns spinning off into the limitless reaches of space in that big bang of which our solar system is nothing but a BB in a boxcar. You and I can no more grasp the totality of this baby with our minds than we can take the Milky Way and capture it in a thimble or we can put a lime in a bottle. The angel said Mary would give birth to an infinite infant, and sure enough, nine months later a tiny stable contained something bigger than this whole vast, tragic world: God in human flesh. That is the miracle of miracles. That is light years beyond zebra.

That's also further than many people are willing to go, so instead, when they come to Jesus Christ, they simply subsume him into a category they already know. Then they pay him a "compliment" by saying Jesus is the very best in that category. For example, people say, "Jesus is the greatest teacher this world has ever known." They say, "Jesus is the greatest moral exemplar the world has ever known." But at no point does Jesus ever escape the human category and become a class by himself, the unique G. We have no category for that; we've never seen one of those before, which is exactly how many people reacted when they met Jesus Christ. They ransacked the dictionary for words to describe him. To meet Jesus is like burning your hands on a star. Everywhere he went, he moved in an atmosphere of wonder and astonishment.

Did you ever wonder why they wrote these Gospels in the first place? We're told they were astonished at his doctrine. They feared exceedingly, and they said to one another, "What manner of man is this?" Even the disciples were utterly astounded. Finally the chief priests and scribes and Roman authorities couldn't take him anymore, so they took him out and nailed him to a cross.

Like Joseph, if we do not accept this baby, we will miss Christmas, because it is on beyond zebra.

Today you and I are not soldiers who nail Jesus to a cross. No, we're innkeepers who have no room for him. When Jesus makes us feel uncomfortable, we just put out the NO VACANCY sign. For this strange baby, who grew into a man who doesn't fit our preconceived notions of reality, there was and often is no room in this world. Yet Joseph knew that if he did not accept this baby, he would lose the love of a good woman. And what's more, he would miss Christmas.

So with us if we do not accept this baby, because Christmas is on beyond zebra. We're told that no new being came into existence through this virgin conception within Mary, but that the eternal Being, the second Being of the Trinity, came down into the human race and was born. As John said, Jesus was born not of the will of the flesh nor the will of man, but of God. And as C. S. Lewis put it so unforgettably, "Jesus was conceived when God took off the glove of nature and touched Mary with his naked finger. Thus, Jesus did not evolve up and out of history; he descended down and into history."

Again as C. S. Lewis put it so fantastically, "One may think of a diver first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in , then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through the increasing pressure into the deathlike region of ooze and slime and old decay, and then back up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting until suddenly he breaks the surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing he went down to recover." That dripping, precious thing is you and me, and Advent is when we celebrate his coming down to us.

Yet even this metaphor breaks down, because when God took the plunge, he didn't just get wet. He grew gills and became a fish. God became human, born in the way you and I were born, and raised in a human family as you and I were. I believe this is probably the part of the Incarnation we have the biggest problem not the deity of Christ, but his humanity.

So many of us think of the Incarnation as being like the phone booth in a Superman movie, and Jesus is like Clark Kent, who is dressed like a normal man but then goes into a phone booth and emerges as Superman. Jesus was not a Superman. Jesus did not clothe himself in his humanity in order to hide his deity. Jesus was fully human. The bullets didn't bounce off Jesus Christ. He got stickers in his toes; he blackened his finger when the hammer slipped off the nail. (He didn't say what you and I say when that happens to us, but it happened to him.) He struggled with mathematics, perhaps. He was good at some things, not so good at others. He had real hurts; he cried real tears. Why? Because only as a real man could he save us as we need to be saved. Why is that? Probably no one has said it better than, of all people, Harry Reasoner, on one of his radio commentaries. Let me read what Harry said:

"If Christmas is the anniversary of the appearance of the Lord of the universe in the form of a helpless babe, it is a very important day. It's a startling idea, of course. My guess is the whole story that a virgin was selected by God to bear his son is a way of showing his love and concern for man. It's my guess that in spite of all the lip service given to it, it's not an idea that's been popular with theologians."

He's right. It's a somewhat illogical idea, and theologians like logic almost as much as they like God. It's so revolutionary a thought that it probably could come only from a God who is beyond logic and beyond theology. Now here's the point: it has magnificent appeal. Almost nobody has seen God, and almost nobody knows what God is really like. The truth is that among human beings, the idea of seeing God suddenly standing in a very bright light is not necessarily comforting and appealing. But everyone has seen babies, and most people like them. If God wanted to be loved as well as feared, he moved correctly here. If he wanted to know people as well as rule them, he moved correctly here, for a baby growing up learns all about people. If God wanted to be intimately a part of man, he moved correctly, for the experience of birth and family life is our most precious experience. So it comes from beyond logic. It is either all falsehood or the truest thing in all the world. It's the story of the great innocence of God the baby, and it has caused such a dramatic shock to the heart that if it's not true, for Christians nothing is true.

Friend, I'm here to tell you it's true. It's all true. Immanuel, God with us. Do you know how much God wants to share his life with you? So much that he comes crawling to you on his hands and knees as a baby. Charles Wesley said, "Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man." It's incomprehensible, but it's available to anyone who will step beyond zebra. So take a new letter for your alphabet this morning. For without the Virgin Birth, you cannot spell Immanuel, and without Immanuel you cannot have Christmas. And if you don't have Christmas in your heart, there is no way you're going to find it under any tree.

At the time of this sermon, Vic Pentz was pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Yakima, Washington. He holds degrees from Pomona College and Princeton Theological Seminary. He has served as consultant for preaching in Fuller Theological Seminary's D. Min. program.

Vic Pentz

Preaching Today Tape # 63

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