“Who Was Conceived By the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary, Suffered Under Pontius Pilate…”
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#5 Sermon in Series on the Apostle’s Creed:
As we begin the Sermon what I would like to ask you to do is let’s stand and recite the Creed and say what we believe.
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
He descended into hell.
The third day He arose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
Would you pray with me?
Father, thank you for our Lord Jesus; thank you for your work in history; thank you that ancient Christians formulated doctrinal belief and did it in such a way that we could understand, short and sweet, yet powerful. We ask you Lord today that, as we look at a part of that Creed, we would understand a little bit more of what it meant for you to go to the Cross through Jesus Christ, what it means for us and what it means for the world. Be with us Lord as we listen and here. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
The story of an older minister who had done some services at his church and right after church he went out to dinner. He had his bible in his hand as he sat down and ate. There was a man who was kind of a skeptic who observed the minister as he came in and he thought he would have a little fun with the minister. So he went up to him and he said, “Sir, do you believe that book?” The old man said, “Yes I do.” “Do you believe everything in it?” He said, “Yes, I do.” “Well, don’t you have any doubts or questions about what’s in that book?” And the older minister opened up his bible and showed the man some of the passages he had been reading that had question marks in the margin, and he said, “Yes, I have many questions.” “Well, what do you do with those questions? What do you do with your doubts?” The minister answered, “Well, it’s just like this fish I just ate. I eat all the meat and I let any fool who wants to, choke on the bones.”
I guess he had a bad night…. That is not to say that we shouldn’t have doubts. Everybody has doubts about things. As a matter of fact, doubts are pretty good, I mean, we should be skeptical about some things that we hear. I think sometimes we are not skeptical enough. Everybody has doubts. I like the old sign in the barber shop I go to up in Glen Lake. It has on the wall, it says: I’d like to be an optimist, but I doubt that it would work out. But there is kind of a problem with doubts particularly today. I don’t know about you, but when I went to college and to graduate school it was almost expected that you weren’t intellectual enough if you didn’t have doubts. As a matter of fact there was a badge of honesty: ‘I have doubts.’ And the unwritten sort of thing was, because I have doubts, I am more honest than you are if you don’t have doubts. But doubts are good in one sense and not so good in another.
Everybody has doubts, even people in the Bible. Mary had doubts. I love the passage about Mary, and here is a young girl who is told by an angel… You know at first she is awakened by this angel, or she is minding her own business, this messenger of God comes up and says, “Guess what’s going to happen to you? You are going to have a baby, out of wedlock.” Of course, back then that meant something; around here and today, not as much. “But you are not going to have the benefit of male presence in this.” Now if it had been me, I would be going, “What?” I think that was what she was doing. “What?” But then: “Well, how? This isn’t normal.” She had doubts. But Mary had something going for her that we need, as well. She believed in the God of the Bible. We have just gone through the Apostles’ Creed. What’s the thing it says about God? “I believe in God the Father, Almighty,” El Shaddai. She believed in that kind of God who could do anything, who had made the universe and all its detail, everything. She didn’t understand all of what that meant, but she really didn’t have to. Sometimes all you have to do is look at the creation around you and go, wow! That kind of God can do anything.
The rationalism that doubts the virgin birth is still alive and well, which started a couple hundred years ago. I still hear people say, “Well, I can still be a strong Christian but not believe in the virgin birth.” Well, technically that’s true. God’s grace extends to our doubts and everything else. But it says a lot about what we believe about God. The world believes in God if it believes in God at all, a god who is impersonal, a god who is not really involved, or a god who is part of nature. And if you believe all that, it’s quite logical for you to doubt that this god has anything to do with doing miracles. But if you believe in the God of the Bible, it is not a problem. You see, if you believe in the God of the Bible but don’t believe in the Resurrection or the virgin birth or whatever miracle, you have already swallowed the camel. You believe in an unseen Being who is in control of everything. You swallowed that. The virgin birth, that’s hard. So the Creed says, “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.” It isn’t so much about Mary, but it is laying a foundation, and the question for all of us is: How firm is that foundation of our faith?
It also mentions the virgin birth, again not really about Mary, and it is not just about the miracle. It is not just about that. You know sometimes it is explained in theological books, well Jesus’ birth is kind of like all the other miraculous birth stories in the Bible. It is about the miracle. It is not just about the miracle; it is a little bit, but not that much. It is really making a statement about who Jesus is and why he had to do what he had to do.
Who is Jesus? Well Jesus is the Son of God. We talked about what that meant. We talked about being the Son of God and how hard that is for us in terms of, well, it sounds like he is the Son of God kind of like Hercules is the son of Zeus. That is not what is going on. He is the second person of the Trinity come to earth and took on a human nature. You know, we talked about that too, how hard that is for us. It is hard to explain the incarnation. It is impossible to explain the incarnation in ways that our small brains can understand. But we affirm that Jesus came to earth, who was God in the flesh; that is what this little phrase means: “Born of the Virgin Mary”— God who took on human nature. Therefore, pay attention, this is someone we need to pay attention to, and as Christians we celebrate. But it is more than that. It is what Jesus had to do. The Bible regards Jesus as sinless, as perfect. Now, you ladies, I have some good news for you. You know, often, Eve is blamed for everything. “It’s all her fault.” You know what the Bible really says? We have a problem called sin and it was handed down from Adam.
You know I wore a relatively new shirt last week. I like new shirts because they aren’t faded, they look really good for a little while. I liked this shirt. It was green, that is my favorite color. And you know what I did? I put a pen in my pocket without the cap on. And it was stained. You may have a secret ingredient about how to get that out but I’m skeptical. It doesn’t matter how often you wash, it’s there. That stain is there. I had to throw it out. The Bible says that you and I have a stain in our nature. We don’t like to talk about it much, but it’s there. It is not what you do. We have a congenital defect called sin: a congenital pride, a congenital selfishness, a congenital rebelliousness, a congenital lust, anger, hate. It’s there, we all know it is. The Bible explains human life very well, even though people don’t believe it. It is something we are born with. We don’t like to talk about it much. Jesus had to take on a human nature without taking out the stain because that stain is handed through Adam. It is handed through the male line.
It isn’t all Eve’s fault. So Jesus took on human nature through his mother and was therefore sinless. I know that is hard, but it is true. I know it is difficult to understand. I don’t understand it all. But that is why the Bible talks about Adam being our representative and that we needed another one named Jesus. Read 1 Corinthians, 15 and you will see it in other places as well, that Jesus was a new representative, a new man, and he is ours and we attach ourselves to him and so are forgiven. But in order to make that sacrifice, a perfect sacrifice, he had to be sinless, and he was. Tempted in everyway, as the writer to the Hebrews says, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize… we have one who has been tempted in every way –yet without sin.” Without sin.
So we believe that Jesus was born of a virgin because he is God in the flesh and because he is the perfect sacrifice to deal with this thing we have in ourselves called sin. Then the Creed moves on. Maybe one of the glaring omissions of the Apostles’ Creed is it doesn’t say much about Jesus’ life and that was very important, very important; but it wanted to get to the real important stuff. And Jesus came to die on a cross and that’s what it is about. Now, we often don’t think about it, but the cross is incredibly offensive to human beings. I mean imagine the members of a political party or a social organization, or a group of philosophers, or even a church which was constantly repeating that their founder was put to death by the government as a threat to law and order. Imagine also that that group decorated their buildings with electric chairs, or wearing hangman’s ropes as earrings or jewelry pins. What if that was a water board? An instrument of torture. We don’t think about it because we are used to it.
I read a quote from a man named Arnold Toynbee who wrote a book called Christianity Among the Religions of the World. He tells the story of an English family living in China who engaged a Chinese nurse. It was pretty apparent that she was bothered by something as she worked for them, but they couldn’t get her to say. Finally, she broke down and said, “Well, there is something I cannot understand. You are obviously good people. You obviously love your children and care for them; yet in every room in this house, and on the staircase, I see reproductions of a criminal being put by death by some horrible form of torture that we have never heard of in China. I cannot understand how you, responsible and loving parents as you obviously are, can expose your children to the dreadful effect of seeing this awful picture at this impressionable stage in their lives.” The cross, as Paul says himself, is an offense. You know, that offense is growing. We have this kind of philosophy of non-violence that is out there in our modern world and people use it to say “we don’t need the cross any more,” even people who are in the Church. There is a whole movement out there to take the cross out of Christianity because “we just don’t need that bloody thing anymore;” but as Paul says “I preach the cross of Christ constantly.”
Why? Because we need to be reminded, and the world needs to be reminded, that God is also offended by us. You know there has been a reaction in the world among churches to people who preach “fire and brimstone. We can’t have that kind of judgmental preaching.” I agree with it to some degree, I really do. But in the process of simply, only talking about God’s love and God’s acceptance and all those things, we forget that God is offended by our sins and that is why there is a cross at all, because we can’t deal with that offense ourselves. God dealt with it for us. The cross is the intersection, if you will, of his judgment and his love. Indeed, it is an opportunity. There is an old, old story that I like to tell about a family that moved out to the prairie. One day the father looked up and saw in the vast distance a huge smoke column and it was a fire coming toward them. He thought very quickly and he said to his family, “Let’s start another fire,” and they did. They burned out the area around their building so they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the flames. When the fire got to them, it went around. The cross is that burned out place for you and me. You see, God judged our sin on the cross and when we stand on that we will escape the judgment that is coming, and it is coming. You know that song, the last one we just sang about the judgment. You know we don’t realize… just read the words. It is really talking about God’s judgment on the United States for slavery. “The vengeance of God,” “ the grapes of wrath,” almost every verse is about that. We don’t believe in that any more, as much. We like to put it aside. Was the Civil War God’s judgment on us? Well, that’s a debate we could have. God does judge no matter what we would think about that and will judge. Therefore the cross is necessary, is necessary. Look what Peter says in his very first sermon. “This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put Him to death by nailing Him to the cross.” (Acts 2:23) Who killed Jesus? The Church has concluded that the Jews killed Jesus, and that has resulted in terrible persecution, for which we should repent. And Certainly the Jewish leaders had a part in it; but then there was, of course, Pilate and how interesting the Apostles’ Creed only mentions Pilate. But I find it interesting in the story itself that also the crowd, and it was Passover, and there were people from all over the world there that day. Every representative of every creed and every race was there saying, “Crucify him!” And in the end, vicariously, we too, we too nailed those nails to the cross.
But in the end, the bottom line is, it was all part of God’s plan, another mystery. But you know what? It gives me hope. Here’s a wicked event, a horrible event, one of the worst of history and God in his power is able to turn that horrible thing into something that is wonderful: our salvation. Our salvation. Without the cross, there is no salvation. There is no forgiveness. Without the cross, we shouldn’t be here. We would just be another social organization. If Jesus didn’t die on the cross, and by the way, we will get to it, without the Resurrection, Jesus would have been just another Ghandi, nice guy but not able to save you.
The cross is necessary, and the cross is about love. That is really the whole message. “This is love (as John said): not that we loved God (because we didn’t), but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sin.” (1 John 4:10) He died in our place. He took the judgment we deserve and he did so out of pure unadulterated love. It is what the cross is all about. It is the heart of Christianity. J.I. Packer says this, he says, “If the incarnation is the shrine of Christianity, the Atonement is certainly its holy of holies. The reason why the Son of God became man was to shed his blood…. God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all and that was the measure of his love.”
So what are we to do with it? I will close with one more story. It is about young children who were bored until one of them suggested that they play church. They played for a while but got bored again soon and then one little boy said, “Hey, I got it, let’s play Jesus.” The other little kid said, “Well, how do you do that?” And the boy said, “First, you would be mean to me and tie me up and then you would pretend to hit me and spit on me and call me names.” And the children decided to try it for a while but they quickly got repulsed by their own actions. They stopped, uncomfortable with this game, and the boy playing Jesus called the game to a halt and said, “Let’s not play Jesus any more, let’s go back to playing church.”
So often we play church and we really are called to follow Jesus. That is what our lives are about. We are called to take up our own cross, not because it will forgive anybody of their sins, but that is because we are following our Lord. I want you to think about it as we take communion this Sunday. Are we playing church, or are we following Jesus?
Would you pray with me?
Lord God, thank you for the cross. We do not forget that the cross is followed by the Resurrection, but right now we ask you to help us to remember all that the cross means, particularly as we partake of the supper which speaks to us once again of the broken body and shed blood of our Lord Jesus for us. Bless us with your presence, with the meaning of it all. May we walk away from here stronger in our faith, stronger in our relationship with you and stronger in our willingness to follow. In Jesus’ name. Amen.