"born of the virgin Mary"

You might wonder if we're serious about this: Do we believe that Jesus was BORN of a virgin? The answer is "yes." We believe that Mary became pregnant by a miracle of the Holy Spirit. 

So a baby that would be named Jesus grew in Mary's belly for nine months and was delivered in a stable on "Christmas Day" in the city of Bethlehem. There was the usual "breathe, Mary, breathe" and "push, Mary, push" and I imagine there was the usual crying when Jesus was delivered, despite what the famous hymn "Away in a Manger" says.

But Mary was not impregnated in the usual way with a man. Instead, as Luke's Gospel says: "the Holy Spirit will come upon you [i.e., Mary], and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy - the Son of God."

Along with the story of God's creation, Jesus' real presence (i.e., the physical presence of Christ's body and blood in the Lord's Supper), and the full range of Jesus' other miracles of healing and supernatural control of nature, the Virgin Birth gets a lot of skeptical attention. But all of these things hang together! Either God is able to do anything, or there's a limit to His ability to save and deliver you. And if there's a limit to His salvation, you're sunk!

So: Do you have a God who works miracles? If you do, then the "virgin birth" won't cause you any problems. If you don't, you have MUCH bigger problems to deal with (like sin, death and the power of the devil).