Sermon for Sunday, December 18th 2022 – Fourth Sunday of Advent – the virgin shall conceive and bear a son

Fourth Sunday of Advent, rcl yr a, 2022
ISAIAH 7:10-16; PSALM 80:1-7, 16-18; ROMANS 1:1-7; MATTHEW 1:18-25

the virgin shall conceive and bear a son

“… an angel of the Lord appeared to [Joseph] in a dream and said, ‘ … do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son.’”

There is a great deal here that can seem quite shocking to modern sensibilities. Angels appearing; dreams that aren’t about the subjective movement of the subconscious, but are rather about real things in the world; and above all that a person could be conceived by nothing more than God’s action through the Holy Spirit.

Angels, dreams, and the Virgin Birth? First-century foolishness, right?

Well, I’m going to take an unpopular position this morning. Not about angels appearing, though; and not about your dreams or my dreams, or Joseph’s dream for that matter. But rather about the Virgin Birth, and why it is a rather sensible doctrine, actually, because it’s not about chromosomes and copulation, divine or otherwise. Instead, the Virgin Birth is actually quite fitting if we look at it from the sweep of God’s work in creation and salvation. That’s to say, the way to imagine the Virgin Birth begins not with human making or human reproduction, but rather with the way God acts in the world. More specifically, in the way God acts in the world in two ways: firstly, the way God creates from nothing, giving life by the Holy Spirit; and secondly the way God saves, which is by grace.

The Virgin Birth of Jesus is one of those bits of Christian doctrine that really catch us out. It’s one of those things—in what is quite a vast story of God’s work in the world—that we like to pluck out and examine quite apart from the whole of Christian life and belief. But Matthew’s Gospel, even in this brief episode, does seem to want to resist this, Matthew’s Gospel tries to keep us from taking this one episode and imagining apart from creation and salvation.

So we should come to this quite short phrase—“the virgin shall conceive and bear a son”—by first doing the sort of remembering that Matthew’s Gospel is already doing. We would do well to remember God’s creation of the world when we hear that Mary is “found to be with child from the Holy Spirit,” to be reminded of the Spirit that hovers over the chaos as God begins his act of ordering nothing into the good something that we inhabit now, the creation that God continues to uphold in every moment. We would do well to call to mind the way life comes into the world—by God giving the breath of his own Spirit, thus breathing his life into that which had no life.

And then we might call to mind the whole history of God’s chosen people, Israel, when we hear the angel say that the one who is conceived by the Holy Spirit is to be named “Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Remembering that God acts in mighty ways to save his people from bondage in Egypt, guiding his people through the desert and providing for them food from heaven, and then that God would deliver Israel from the bondage of exile and restore Jerusalem.

And then remember that we hear another promise from the prophets, Matthew’s Gospel reminding us of this as we hear the angel of the Lord quoting Isaiah, saying that “‘the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’.”

That is, as we hear this quite small thing, that Jesus would be born of a virgin, Matthew’s Gospel would have us hear this as an event that does not stand alone, but rather as a single event that resides within the whole of God’s economy of salvation: in creating the world from nothing, in giving life to humankind through the Holy Spirit, and in saving God’s people from all their mistakes, all their missteps, in saving God’s people even from their unfaithfulness—and this by God’s own initiative, that is, by God’s own grace, and in the promise that in Jesus God would be taking one more step yet in the salvation of the world.

And if this is the way God already acts in the world—making something from nothing, giving us life by the breath of God’s Spirit, and saving his people by grace, then the Virgin Birth begins to make a certain kind of sense. When we look at the Virgin Birth in this way, it becomes quite a bit more easy to imagine that God again, in Mary, would make something from nothing, and quite apart from human making; that God again, in Mary, would breathe new life into the world by his Spirit, and not just apart from human making, but breathing life into something that without God has no life even to live; that God again, in Mary, would take this next step in the salvation of his people from sin and death by grace, that is, in a way that is initiated, not through any kind of human effort, but initiated fully by God, because this is how salvation works—by grace, by God’s good initiative, by God for us.

And so the Virgin Birth isn’t a miracle, at least if we think of miracles as God messing around with the way that the world operates in order to make some fantastic and novel things happen. Instead, Jesus comes into the world, by the Virgin Mary, according to the way that God already operates in the world, but now in a kind of sped up way, or perhaps in a more concentrated way, but still simply in the way we already know God operates. The child comes to be within Mary’s womb from nothing,  from that same Holy Spirit that hovers at the beginning of creation, acting now, giving life again, as God once did at the foundation of the world. And that God acts to save us, now through this child who “will save his people from their sins.” That is, this child is one in whom God acts, and this act will be by grace, the grace of reconciliation, of forgiveness, of being released from sin. And if this act of saving people from sin is to be an act of grace, we know that it is something done for us, rather than by us.

And yet, all of this, not without us, but for us and then with us, much as God doesn’t enter the world without Mary, the one who is so fully open to her maker that the Holy Spirit would be given to her in such a way that the grace of God finds a new toehold in the world within her; and that within her, Spirit and grace would flower into the one who will give life and salvation to the whole of the world, and give this life and salvation to the world in abundance.

And so this is why the Virgin Birth is a fitting teaching. Not because Matthew read Isaiah correctly rather than incorrectly; and not because this sort of teaching describes something that can be reproduced or otherwise verified according to methods suited to scientific investigation. But rather, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth makes sense, it makes sense of the God in whom we trust, the God who has already made all of this from nothing, giving life through the Holy Spirit; it makes sense of the way this God operates in the world that is, according to grace.

And not just the grace of the resurrection, nor simply in the grace of the cross, but also in the grace of Emmanuel, of God with us—God’s grace in his very entrance into the world, in the Incarnation—and not in a God made by us, but rather a God with Us, a God for us, and all in a child from God the Holy Spirit.

Thus was Mary the virgin who bears a son; thus was Mary the mother who conceives a child by the Holy Spirit; thus was Mary the mother of Jesus, the one who saves his people from their sins; thus was Mary, full of grace.

The Revd Dr Preston DS Parsons