Scripture: Isaiah 7:13-14; Judges 12:5-6 Series: 2022
Part of a series on the Apostles’ Creed, this sermon expounds the line ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary’ from Isaiah 7:13-14. Pruitt opens with the Hebrew translation debate dramatized in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, clarifies the Catholic Immaculate Conception versus Jesus’s conception, and refutes empiricist objections (Hume) by framing the virgin birth as a singular, unrepeatable miracle of God entering the world as a vulnerable infant. He defends Methodist orthodoxy via Article 2 of the Articles of Religion, argues that denying the virgin birth usually accompanies denying the resurrection, and closes on Mary’s faith: chosen not for works or status but because she said yes, modeling how ordinary, limited humans can bear God and be transformed.
Illustrations: snatch-antwerp-hebrew-translation, almah-virgin-or-young-woman, franco-harris-immaculate-reception, hume-against-miracles, 23andme-jesus-dna, shibboleth-judges-bridge, umc-clergy-group-chat-virgin-birth, faith-as-social-club
October 30
Who was conceived from the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary
Then Isaiah said, “Listen, house of David! Isn’t it enough for you to be tiresome for people that you are also tiresome before my God? Therefore, the Lord will give you a sign. The young woman is pregnant and is about to give birth to a son, and she will name him Immanuel.
- Isaiah 7:13-14
The Guy Richie movie, Snatch, is about a few small time thieves in London. They get into the big time when a diamond thief comes to town with an enormous diamond he stole from Antwerp. Now, there are not a lot of scenes from Snatch that I could show on Sunday morning. Not a lot of scenes that don’t have blood or incredibly graphic swearing going on. What is interesting is that the movie begins in Antwerp between two people whom we assume are Hasidic Jews, who are talking about what Christians get wrong about the Hebrew Bible. It is a funny conversation. It’s a conversation you might imagine that two Hasidic Jews would be having as they’re going into a diamond repository. It hinges on the translation of a Hebrew word in Isaiah seven that we have here. הָעַלְמָ֗ה Christians often translate the word as virgin. In Hebrew it could be virgin or young woman. In the movie, this ambiguous translation issue is framed as this gotcha moment. It’s like, “Oh, these incredulous Christians, they don’t even know Hebrew. They can’t translate it. What are they doing?”
The reality is that, in the ancient world, if you were a young woman who was not a virgin, you would be referred to by a different name then the one spoken of in the prophet Isaiah. Yet, even still, what’s the deal with the virgin birth? Seems a little bizarre. Why is this going on?
Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the apostles creed, the historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.
Two weeks ago, we talked about, I believe in Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord, and how the Lordship of Christ and the sonship of Christ can shape us today. Today, it is “who is conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.” So we have the conception of Jesus and the virgin birth.
Now, one of the things that a lot of Protestants get wrong about Catholic belief concerns what’s called the immaculate conception. Not the Immaculate Reception, when Franco Harris amazingly caught the game-winning touchdown in the 1972 playoffs to defeat the Raiders, the immaculate conception. it’s a high holy day for Catholics, December 8. And sometimes Protestants assume that the immaculate conception is about Jesus and the conception of Jesus. It’s not. It is the Catholic doctrine that Mary was immaculately conceived without sin or the stain of original sin, which allowed her to be the God bearer, to be the mother of Jesus. The conception of Jesus is celebrated at what is called the Annunciation of Mary, March 25, nine months before Christmas.
So we are not talking about the immaculate conception in the creed when we say: “he was conceived by the Holy Spirit”: what is going on here?
First of all, the Holy Spirit doesn’t have sperm. Just gonna lay that out there. It’s really important. The conception of Jesus Christ and the virgin birth is not this assumption that Mary had relations of a kind with a spirit or a ghost. A spirit is a nonmaterial being that cannot take up space. A spiritual conception that would be in anyway analogous to physical conception is contradictory.
Jesus doesn’t have a genetic father that is the spirit. If we did a 23andme on Jesus, it wouldn’t have any of Joseph’s DNA, nor the Spirit’s DNA. Genetics and blood relations weren’t important in the ancient world. Your name was. This is why the Gospel of Matthew starts with a genealogy of Joseph. Not because of the genetic connection, but because of the covenantal connection of the names. No man co-operates in the incarnation of Jesus. It is God through Mary.
Now, one of the ways that the virgin birth has been discounted or diminished in Christian history is because it is unlikely to have occurred naturally. The 18th century philosopher, David Hume, wrote against miracles. And one of the miracles that he wrote against was the virgin birth. And part of it is that he had never seen it happen before. It’s not empirically proven. So, okay, that is an argument that people make. To prove something empirically is to be able to repeat it. One of the claims of the virgin birth is that this is an unrepeatable event. This encounter between the Holy Spirit and humanity, this conception by the Holy Spirit of the Son of God into human form, the incarnation of God, the enfleshedness of God; it can only happen once. This isn’t Jesus shapeshifting into a human form. The Son of God, the logos of God, out of which all things were created, has no physical shape or form outside of this moment. And the quest to discover by what natural capacity Mary could conceive of a child by the third person of the trinity is impossible. Even if we had a time machine, and could go back to the moment of the Annunciation when the Angel Gabriel came to Mary. If we could just be there, have X-rays, have an ultrasound machine and watch the physical conception of the zygote of Jesus Christ within Mary’s womb, it would not answer the question of how the Holy Spirit conceives Jesus. This is an article of faith that has been revealed to us, not by empiricism, not by reason, only by God working through the scriptures to show us the reality of who Jesus is. That Jesus is not a son who was adopted but conceived from the beginning by the Holy Spirit, and then born of the Virgin Mary.
In opposition to folks like Hume, some Christians use the virgin birth is kind of this litmus test to see whether or not you believe in the supernatural activity of God. This is honestly where I mostly see it or hear it discussed. In videos or articles shared about how the methodist church doesn’t believe in the virgin birth anymore. This is a disprovable lie. Our doctrinal Articles of Religion, which cannot be changed, says in Article 2 that
The Son, who is the Word of the Father, the very and eternal God, of one substance with the Father, took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin;
The virgin birth is used as a shibboleth like in the Book of Judges where it was tested at bridge crossing to see if people were from the right tribe.
The virgin birth is much more than a litmus test or a shibboleth. I don’t personally know any pastors who deny it. I was in a group chat on my birthday with a bunch of UMC clergy talking about how awesome the virgin birth is. There are 30,000 methodist churches in the US, I’m sure you can find someone who does deny it, but I don’t know them.
Even still, people who don’t believe in the virgin birth, usually also don’t believe in the resurrection. Ultimately, in a crass way, for them, faith is a social club. It is nice to be together and do kind things and sing lovely songs, but if Jesus isn’t the son of God, why are we here? If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, we all have a lot of better things we could do with our time. Let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. But if you believe in the resurrection, what really is keeping you from believing in the virgin birth? The internal logic of empiricism already denies the possibility of this event. But the internal logic of empiricism denies a lot of human activity. It denies the actual love between you and your children, between you and your spouse.
I’ve shared a little about why I think arguments against the virgin birth don’t hold water. But I wanna say as well, why it’s important and why we should believe that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin married in the first place.
If Jesus really is God, if Jesus really is the second person of the Trinity, the son of God, and he really takes the form of human flesh in the incarnation, that cannot occur by normal means. God doesn’t enter the world by fiat, by just saying this is so. In fact, God enters the world, the creator of everything enters the world as a vulnerable mass of needs. This is the miracle of Christmas
And to make this possible itself is a miracle. God becoming human is a miracle. It is the cracking of the fabric of the natural world through which God enters. To say I believe in Jesus Christ who is conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary is to make a claim about who God is and to make the claim laid out in Isaiah seven that God is for us in Jesus Christ. The angel gabriel doesn’t highlight Mary’s virginity but her belief. She is chosen because she says yes to God. She is who she, a virgin betrothed to Joseph, but it is not by works that she is chosen but by faith. God entered the world of the flesh, this world of sin, this world in need, in the only way that would allow us to be saved from our sins. God entered into the world in the fullness of human freedom, and in the limitations of human freedom. It is the freedom of the gracious God. “The flesh, what is human, becomes free to be assumed into that unity with the Son of God only through the Holy Spirit, not through its own capacity.”1 We cannot, on our own, unite with God and be healed of sin. We need grace to enter the world in a particular way, at a particular time, with a particular person. Ultimately, to claim that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary is to claim that Jesus actually has the power to save us. That Jesus is worthy of worship, that Jesus is not like just another wise teacher and that encountering Jesus Christ, whether on the mountain top, on Sunday morning or in the dark night of the soul, encountering Jesus Christ is going to change your life.
And the question always comes back to: do you want to change your life? Are you satisfied with where you are? Are you satisfied with your needs, with your expectations, with the easygoing nature of the usual thing? Or are you ready to respond to the same Holy Spirit which conceived Jesus? That spirit is with us today and that spirit is with you and for you this day. One of the most powerful things about Mary bearing Christ is that it shows us that we humans, we non-divine humans, like Mary, can also bear God, even with our limitations. God saw us as worthy of salvation. God saw our flesh as capable of bearing Jesus. To claim, “I believe in Jesus Christ who is conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary” is a radical claim about the possible transformation of each of our lives.
That we can become finished in Christ, we can become complete in Christ.
Mary was beloved by God not because of any great physical attributes, but because she believed. She was chosen by God and she said yes. The angel did not come at a convenient time or to a convenient person. The paragon of human perfection is not a great warrior or king or politician or entrepreneur, but a young woman, a virgin. She is not an influencer or a celebrity but a child from a podunk town who received the call of God and said, Yes.
We can all hope and strive to be like Mary and have the courage and faith to say a radical Yes to God that changes everything in our life and everything in the world.
The all powerful God, who created heaven and earth, did not see our weakness as something to be avoided, but instead became weak and human like us because we are worthy of it. You are worthy of it. And so God is worthy of praise. We thank God for this miracle of the conception of Jesus Christ. We thank God for this miracle of the virgin birth that shows us that even I, even you are loved, are forgiven, are offered new life and a chance to say Yes.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, in the midst of so much confusion in this world, you offer us hope. You offer us hope and yourself and in your son Jesus Christ, whose entry into the world through Mary saves us and gives us life.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Footnotes
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Barth, Credo, 70. ↩