Lent 2a 2026
John 3:1-17; Jack Hardaway
I Give My Heart: The Apostles Creed part 2
EMBRACING THE WORLD
Giving birth is hard work.
Being born all over again boggles the mind.
Today we hear Nicodemus and Jesus and their secret conversation, at night.
Being born in the Spirit.
Here is the thing that we often get wrong about the birth of the Spirit, it is about the Spirit entering the world, not helping us escape the world.
The Spirit is born in the flesh.
Not that we may escape the world and all its pain and disappointment, but rather that God embraces the world, embraces creation, through human flesh.
The Apostles’ Creed. That is what it is about, that birth, that embrace, and that is what we give our hearts to when we say I believe, I give my heart to that embrace.
This is the second reflection of a five part sermon series about the Apostles’ Creed.
We begin the second stanza, I believe in Jesus Christ, you can follow along the creed in the Prayer Book on page 96 if you would like.
This stanza is about that Spirit birth into the world, the embrace of the world that is the humanity of Jesus, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
The virgin birth. The true miracle of the virgin birth is not that Jesus was born of a virgin, though that is impressive and miraculous, the truly great miracle is that God would become fully human, not just the appearance, but all the way. That is The Miracle. That is The Gospel. And that is also The Scandal.
And that brings us to the original bad idea, the great heresy at the root of all heresy, the bad idea that the physical world is corrupt and evil and the spiritual world is pure, and we need to escape the clutches of the corrupt material world and be set free into a bodiless pure spiritual existence.
That bad idea even infected how the virgin birth was understood, turning it into an escape from the corruption of sex, so much so that a legend came about that Mary was born of a virgin as well, which is called the Immaculate Conception, all so that Jesus could be free of the nasty stuff of physical and sexual existence.
The Apostles’ Creed in its original understanding has no interest in sex, or the disdain of the world that the heretics were trapped in. In fact the Creed is about the exact opposite. It is about the miracle of humanity and God becoming one, the full communion, without restraint, hesitation, qualification, or excuse.
The embrace.
The embrace includes embracing all the suffering of the world, from all of history, embracing our death and our deadliness and all our bad ideas that trap us and that we can’t escape.
He embraces that death, and descends into death, into hell, into hades, all that is the power of death and all those enslaved by its power to break the chains.
The harrowing of hell is what the early believers called it. The ancient images of the church have Jesus breaking down the gates of death and hell with the cross, breaking it down from the inside out, lifting up humanity by the hand, and leading them out in the great exodus, the great prison break, leading forth the captives. That image is also called the resurrection.
But that is for next week.
For now when people ask me if I believe in hell, I say I do, and that it is empty.
To be continued next week, same grace time, same grace channel.