This is the time of year that our focus shifts to a woman named Mary, and the title Virgin that precedes her name is emphasized during the season of Advent. I think we all get a little squirmish about that description, because let’s face it, we hear the word virgin, and we immediately think of the that three letter word s-e-x. Advent after Advent, we are amazed that this “Virgin” could have given birth to a baby that was not conceived in the typical fashion. In order to really understand spiritual virginity, we must be willing to cast our nets into the deeper waters of scripture, past the shallow surface, and lowered down into waters that fill our net-minds with food-thoughts that fill our hunger and need for rich and abundant insight. Mary’s virginity is our virginity, and it has nothing to do with the act of sex, or not having sex, but has everything to do with emptiness, openness, and willingness. Mary emptied herself of every belief that wasn’t of God so she could be filled with God’s thinking, God’s activity, and God’s desire to have her feel loved, so that she could be the deliverer of love to a world desperate to feel it. Mary’s virginity was a state of mind, a state of being, a state of soul, a state of spirit, that allowed her to be touched only by the thoughts and creations of God. Her “pregnancy” had nothing to do with a physical act, but had everything to do with one of the most intimate acts of spiritual creation ever witnessed that only occurs through the intercourse of God’s thinking with our heart’s feelings and beliefs. The creation of the Christ can only happen in that virgin-state, and Advent is our time to restore, claim, and celebrate our spiritual virginity. The Christ who would teach us how to empty ourselves of beliefs that aren’t purely of God, open ourselves to the savior created by God and grown in all of us. All of creation is laboring in the manger of our hearts, for a willingness to be changed by those new beliefs, so we can give birth to a love that will truly change the world.
Each Advent, we wait for our Savior. The world was so looking forward to seeing what this miraculous child could do to change the world. Everyone was eager for world peace. Everyone wanted hunger and poverty to end. Everyone ached for a God who would do something to fix our world. Everyone believed themselves to be so bad, that only one person could make them good again. And then Christmas arrives! Our Savior is born in manger-hearts all around the world. The Great Teacher has entered into our lives to help us. Finally! Jesus will fix the world! The world was ready to sit back and watch the world change. But sitting back and watching wasn’t what Jesus had in mind. As a teacher, I have many memories of teaching children everything they needed to go on to the next grade level. I taught them everything they needed to know in order to be successful enough to change their grade level, and to be ready for new knowledge. By the time they were finished with me, they should have been able to teach someone else how to be successful in the grade they have just completed, and maybe more. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to my Father. John 14:12. But occasionally, I would run across the student who couldn’t take ownership of their education. They had the book knowledge and every tool needed to pass the test, but still expected their grade to be handed to them, even though they didn’t participate in the work required. Their lack of motivation to be a willing participant in making the change to the next grade level held them back. Most of those students could repeat back to me word for word what was in the textbooks, but because they didn’t apply that knowledge, because they didn’t turn in their work or produce the project they needed to demonstrate that their knowledge level had changed them as a student, they were unable to move forward. After all, learning means we’ve changed, we’ve grown, and we can apply what we’ve learned to our everyday life. As painful as it is, a teacher can’t do the work for the student. I can’t demonstrate the change that has occurred in the student that only the student is able to demonstrate. I empowered my student to be able to change grades and move forward in his education, but if I just gave him the grade, if I participated for that student, I would only weaken him and my “self” as a teacher. I would become part of the problem instead of part of the solution. The student is dependent upon me for the improvement and progression of his life, and absolutely nothing is gained. The student that waits on the teacher to do what he should do for himself keeps himself stuck in the same situation. There is no ownership or investment in the future. Nothing is able to change, not the student’s world or the world at large. As painful as it is, the teacher waits on the student to make the right choice to do what is required, and the student waits for anyone who might be willing to “save” them from failure. That kind of savior-thinking isn’t good for anyone. All of us can quote scripture, many of us could write the sermons we will hear during Advent and Christmas, but few of us really demonstrate what we have learned in scripture. And we still wait for our Savior to act, still believing in the sometimes over-used and misunderstood term “mystery’ as an excuse for why things aren’t changing.
We must release our false beliefs about what this word means, become virgin-like as we ask God to empty us of what isn’t working, so that we might become filled with the belief and knowledge with what will work. Advent is a time to seek and feel the intercourse of God’s thinking with our heart’s feelings. Advent is a time to move the light-knowledge we receive in our minds to our heart. It is time to light up the world with the birth of new thinking, new beliefs, and new actions. We must be open to Jesus, the Teacher, who came to teach us how to do what he did. He cannot do for us what we should be doing for ourselves and the world. While we wait for God to act, God is waiting on us to think of salvation differently, so that we can save the world from our beliefs that aren’t producing the results we say we want. God doesn’t always work in mysterious ways. He gave us Jesus, the Savior of our wrong thinking and our invalid beliefs, who taught us how to save ourselves from our own willingness to self-destruct, and there is nothing mysterious at all about what Jesus did. His teachings and his life are not hard to understand, but we have made it hard for ourselves to be changed by our lack of understanding and our denial of new beliefs and new powers that God has blessed all of us with.
There is a Savior-energy in all of us, if we will allow God to impregnate us with its creation, so that we might give birth to the kind of love that propels us into action. The kind of love that makes us willing and joyful participants in saving what is precious to us. The kind of love that moves us from dependency upon one person to do it all, to depending upon the world's collective soul to demonstrate that, finally, we have learned our Advent lesson. We have demonstrated this by our actions, and we are ready to be empowered by a fresh savior-belief that solves all problems. We have found this new savior-thinking to work for us instead of against us, and we are ready to save, ready to act, ready to work, ready to speak out, ready to move the world into a new age of peace, happiness, and richness of every kind.
Nothing about Advent makes sense, unless we are willing to be taken to the furthest edges of our beliefs. Our pregnant spirit is heavy with the flesh of new miracles, reverently and wonderfully being knit together in the wombs of our minds and hearts. The real Advent miracle we all wait for is the miraculous birth of a new and bold mindset about what we are all capable of transforming. It is the birth of a new "us" that we await. Advent is a time to reflect on those beliefs about God and life that clearly aren’t doing anything to change our world. Advent is a season for remembering that what we believe is demonstrated by how we act. Advent is a time to really question those beliefs and change those that are producing the opposite of what it is we say we really desire. God is with us! God is waiting for us! We are blessed and favored….chosen to give birth to what will change the world…We may be afraid, but the Holy Spirit will cause us to be strong, empowered, and free. Because nothing is impossible for God, we will conceive of new thoughts, new actions, and new beliefs that will bring peace to everyone.
