We read the Christmas story this year in the midst of a year marked by Isil beheadings, CIA torture, abuse of police authority, largely along racial lines, and an ever growing gap between the workers and the super wealthy. The birth narrative says that God enters the world where the big messes remain unsolved. The gospel writers were not ignorant about where babies come from. It is not just modern Bible scholars and progressive thinkers who realize that the virgin birth accounts are not historical. The gospel writers were familiar with myths of virgin births, divine parentage, and incarnation from the culture’s praises heaped up on the pharoses, kings, and generals of their age. So they took the titles and the stories usually used to prop up the reputation of violent, abusive, political figures and creatively “plagiarized” them into a different context. For Luke (1:26-38), the Divine enters the world of the poor, of political refugees, where there is manure on the ground and where people give birth in the back seat of a car with no working heater….because these things cannot be ignored or accepted as a permanent state of affairs.