When I first read this scripture in Bible study at the beginning of the week, and heard this phrase from it, from the twentieth verse in the first chapter, “conceived by the Holy Spirit,” I thought of how this verse intersects with what you say almost every Sunday when we recite the Apostles Creed together, and we say about Jesus there, “… conceived by the Holy Spirit.” And it struck me that this is where, perhaps that in the Creed, we draw this line from, from the Gospel of Matthew, when the angel says to Joseph, “The child is conceived by the Holy Spirit.” And I found myself going out into the week looking for places where the Holy Spirit was conceiving something good and worthy and noble around me. I thought how often this is true for us, that the good gifts that come to us are conceived by the Holy Spirit. And I went looking this week.

 

Sometimes, in the stress that I was talking about with the children, it’s hard to find them. I’ve got a string of lights on my tree that had gone out. Right smack-dab in the middle. I used multiple cords. I tried to power it in such a way that this could not happen this year. I don’t know exactly how it happens, but I’m suspicious because we have an ornament on the tree that’s shaped like a mouse. And is hanging by its tail. Our Labrador retriever was just fascinated with that ornament, and would sit in front of the tree silently for long periods, just staring at it. When I came home one night, I found the ornament off the tree and crushed in the corner, the Labrador sleeping proudly by it, and that string of lights out, across the middle. Like the rabbit’s tracks in the snow, it’s indicting of her. And I thought to myself, “Conceived by the Spirit of God, this is mischief!”

 

I tried to go shopping about two-thirds of the way through the week, and it was in the middle of the day. I was on Neptune and I was going to turn right onto Dale Mabry. The traffic just came to gridlock. You know, it took me three light cycles. Three light cycles at that stop light before I could just turn right—I wasn’t even trying to go across the intersection, just to turn right onto Dale Mabry. And I said something, but it wasn’t conceived by the Holy Spirit.

 

Two days before Christmas and counting, and I’m thinking, where is the Holy Spirit in the midst of this? Whose idea was this, anyhow? Where is the Spirit?

 

And Matthew says, Jesus. Matthew and the Creed both say, Look to Jesus—that’s where you’re going to find the Holy Spirit. That’s where you’ll find the Spirit of the Living God.

 

Conceived by the Holy Spirit. We hear that phrase, as we’ve said it again and again in the Apostle’s Creed, across the centuries. As we’ve said it as a congregation in worship. As we’ve read it from the first chapter of Matthew. Conceived by the Holy Spirit. We tend to think about it in terms of human sexuality. Mostly that’s because you’re twentieth and twenty-first century Americans, and you’re idolatrous about human sexuality. You’re fascinated by it.

 

Eduard Schweizer, the great Swiss biblical scholar, says about this verse in the gospel of Matthew, “It’s interesting that over the last hundred years, it’s particularly the group of contemporary Christians who have turned their thoughts about this verse from Matthew in this direction.” For the generations before them across the years, it was very often the first part of the verse (you don’t even likely remember it’s there)…it was that part that fascinated them. Do you remember it? That an angel appeared to Joseph and said to him, “A child shall be conceived by the Holy Spirit.”

 

We’ve stopped looking for angels because we’re so interested in the mechanics of human sexuality. How could God get this thing done, we wonder, in the mechanics of it? How could that be?

 

Well I tell you, that’s not much of an issue for me at this point in my life. I’ve wondered about it enough already, I guess. I’ve been as fascinated as every other twenty-first century American. But now I find myself, when I get out of bed in the morning, looking at this hibiscus that’s blooming outside my window, which is the most beautiful shade of peach. And this morning, the bush had not only one, but three blooms on it. I figure if God can get that done, God can get the birth of Jesus done as well.

 

The point is this: Jesus came from God. Jesus was a gift from God.

 

The Apostles Creed touches it in that one line: Conceived by the Holy Spirit. But that other ancient and great creed from the Church, the Nicene Creed, which we seldom recite but is long in your heritage, going back to the earliest Christian communities, belabors the point. It’s almost the whole of the creed, for the Nicene expression. “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God.” And then it goes on at length to talk about how Jesus was from God: ”Eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father; from him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human.”

 

It’s the bulk of that creed that seeks to focus on this verse, making this point: What is significant about this verse is that God, God the Creator, made it come to pass. Not random circumstance. Not human desire or human initiative. It came from the will of God as the Creator. God initiates the life of Jesus and gives Jesus to us as Savior.

 

So for Matthew, it’s very significant that in the same verse where it says “conceived by the Holy Spirit,” it says, “The angel said to Joseph, ‘Don’t be afraid.’”

 

Don’t be afraid. This is from God. And you don’t have to be afraid of anything that comes from God.

 

The same creative initiative from God that’s present in the book of Genesis where it says, “In the beginning” is present here in the work of God with Mary, bringing Jesus into the world. And so the gospel of Matthew also says In the beginning, God. God. Conceived by the Holy Spirit. There is no portion of Jesus’ life where the initiative is not from God. Not even Jesus is saved by works, by meritorious efforts or acts. He is the supreme example of God’s grace, God’s loving us, God’s stooping to our needs. His human life is, from its very inception, God’s presence and power amongst us. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

 

Now we could spend the rest of this sermon discussing divine human biology, but I don’t want to do that. I’ve spent enough time doing that already in my life. I want to focus instead on where, near you somewhere, you see this movement happening as well. The movement of something good conceived by the Spirit, by the creative initiative of God. It’s like I thought at that moment Monday morning in the Bible study: So many good things are conceived by the Holy Spirit. Which one of them is happening near you?

 

Here’s a Bible trivia question for you. If I say the verse, “Every good and perfect gift comes from ____,” can you finish it? From above. In the book of James, “From the Father of all lights, every good and perfect gift comes from above.”

 

And you know what? I now begin to believe it’s true. I just see it happening all over, as long as I get my eyes diverted from the Labrador pulling my tree apart.

 

I’ve been looking at Metropolitan Ministries this month, as we’ve tried to pack Boxes of Hope for them, and as they’ve been seeking to help homeless families and individuals. I remember meeting with them in 1983, when their executive director, Morris Hintzman, called us together. I was part of his board in 1983. I still am. But we met in really a bedraggled house, down there on North Florida Avenue. He had a vision of building a care center. He said Tampa is a city of such character, such good character, that it ought to have a family care center in the midst of it, caring for homeless families. And so churches, a group of seven churches, started this initiative to try and reach out on behalf of the city, to people who were homeless, who were shelterless. It’s right to think of this ministry in a season when we remember how Mary and Joseph didn’t have a home and had to take shelter in a manger.

 

Across this season, they’ve been down there reaching out to homeless families again and again and again, until now they’ve fed and housed thousands of them. Thousands of them. Real people. And it started in the vision and the idea of this man, Morris Hintzman, who wanted it and tended it and spent his life caring for it, until it has grown up to be perhaps the premier family care center in the Southeast, if not the United States. And I found myself thinking, “Conceived by the Holy Spirit.”

 

Bill Wallof has been pushing this Christmas in Africa thing. It was late in November when he got the idea, and he said to me, “This year as a part of our giving program, I want to include cards where people can make a donation in honor of someone else as a gift that would go to the Papoli village in Uganda. So that if you give the money for a goat, that will supplement the herds of the poor people there; or mosquito netting so that they can cover themselves at night while they’re sleeping and help fend off malaria. They could do that as a gift in honor of someone else.”

 

I thought, Well this is a nice idea, but you’re kind of getting a late start, and how well is this going to catch on?

 

So we went to the printer together and took these cards which they had made in Africa and had them printed up. He started passing them out. And I thought, Maybe he’ll buy a goat. Maybe he’ll buy a cow. I understand now, across this month, that people seem to have delighted in buying goats and naming them in honor of someone and sending the goat to Africa. I’ve found a number of people who have named goats in honor of a neighbor, and those goats are now in a herd in Africa, as a way of saying “Merry Christmas!”

 

We got an e-mail this morning from Father George in Papoli telling us that the animals were there, that the mosquito netting has already arrived, and that people are sleeping at night, protected by your gifts. The animals are in their herds, enriching their impoverished livestock already. And I’m here to tell you that as of this morning, they have managed to raise $13,000 in Christmas gifts for those people. It’s just a side, last minute idea. And you think it’s about Bill Wallof? I’m going to tell you no. Conceived by the Holy Spirit.

 

We’ve been giving out prayer shawls in the church, and it was Leisl who came to me about a year ago and said, “John, I want to encourage you to let the knitters in this congregation to make shawls, prayer shawls, which then can be taken from the church to people who are in need of them.” And I thought, How many people actually are in need of a shawl? Have you ever had a shawl need in your life? But she seemed excited about the idea, and I didn’t want to pour water on an idea that she was excited about. So I said fine. She started gathering knitters, and then Nicole has taken the shawls and blessed them in the sanctuary. We’ve been taking them out to people in the congregation as a sign of the church’s prayers and cares for the infirm, the grieving, or the needy.

 

Bill and I took one to Betty McKay when she was in the nursing home. And I sat there and I saw her put it around her shoulders, and I realized this means something to her. This is like a material sign of the care of her friends in this church.

 

Nicole took one to Jan Radke, and she took it from her home. Now she’s marched to the resurrection, but on the way, she took this shawl. She took it from her home to the hospital on her many stays, and I saw it there when I visited her. I realized I didn’t give this to her, but you gave this to her. And she cared about it enough that she had brought it with her even into her bed on the moment she died and went to glory. And I thought, You know, this is a good idea! We should have borrowed this from the Methodists a long time ago.

 

Conceived, I thought, conceived by the Holy Spirit. I’m not trying to argue that you’ll see it everywhere you look. Believe me, you’re going to get stuck in traffic. You’re going to say things that you wished you hadn’t said. I woke up this morning feeling that way. We are well aware of baser self, the part of the human self that does not respond to the initiative of the Holy Spirit.

 

Every pastor certainly sees that. I had a woman in a congregation, I’ll just say a couple of decades ago, who went off to a summer conference. When she came back she made an appointment with me and she said, “Pastor, they told us there to honor Jesus, and so I’ve determined to come back and be as ornery as I could.” She succeeded.

 

Any pastor is aware of that part of human nature, and we see it in our work with the people. But then a crisis occurs. A person who has been nothing but ornery all along, suddenly in the moment of that crisis, has their soul laid bare. You see a tenderness there, a courage, a willingness to embrace the God that makes you want to say How could this happen except conceived by the Holy Spirit. And the good pastor, the wise pastor, knows you take your shoes off at that point because you’re standing on holy ground.

 

We have a family in our congregation who, about five years ago, decided to try to adopt a child. They wanted to have a child in their family. Amongst the different options they pursued, one of the options they pursued was the foster care program of Hillsborough County. That is an option that began to look like it might bear fruition for them.

 

There are some children in that program from tough, tough circumstances. And this adoption possibility involves couples meeting with these children in small meetings, and then eventually inviting them to their homes for weekend stays as we work to see if the connection can be made. Because there’s an art to it, and you want to be sure that it’s a connection that bears fruit. So there are these visits to see if this looks like it’s going to bloom into a family.

 

With this particular family, it was in the month before Christmas. This is a true story. Somebody said to me last week, “Did you make this up?” No, this is true.

 

It was the month before Christmas. As they met with this boy who was about five years old at the time, they began to talk about what they wanted for Christmas. “What would you like to unwrap as a Christmas present?” The father talked about what he would like to unwrap. The boy, not yet adopted into the family, talked about the present that he’d like to unwrap. And then the mother said, “What I’d like to unwrap for myself is a family. I’d like to have a family in this house, and I’d like for the family to have a boy in it who could be a part of all that we do. All of our eating and our living and our life together here. That’s what I would like to unwrap.”

 

That five-year-old looked up at her and at him and said with authenticity, “I could be that boy!”

 

Now bear with me if it strains the doctrine, but I’m going to tell you, conceived by the Holy Spirit. At that moment, that family was conceived by the Holy Spirit. And that happened in your midst.

 

If time would permit, and if it didn’t violate your conscience or your sensibilities, I could tell stories about you as well. Stories out of your own lives where every believer and every child has had moments where they have been able to say about the work of the spirit of God in their lives, conceived by the Holy Spirit. You’re all in the process of becoming children of God. It is God who is seeking to bring you to the intentions that God imagines, that God desires for you, that God will bring to pass in your lives.

 

In your life too, there are things about which you can say conceived by the Holy Spirit, initiated by the grace of God.

 

This is the fourth Sunday in Advent. Soon it will be Christmas. You keep your eyes open. You keep your ears open. You look for those places where you can point and say to a weary world around you, “Conceived by the Holy Spirit. Initiated by God.” At Christmas, it is the great gift of the Savior Jesus, conceived by the Holy Spirit, where we see and realize how the good and creative God is at work in our midst once again. And you bear witness to it.

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2007