In all likelihood, the Apostles’ Creed was created as a simplified version of the Nicene Creed, which was composed around 325 A.D. And this makes sense because the Nicene Creed is really long and kind of complicated. So the people who wrote the Apostles’ Creed wanted something short, sweet and to the point. The Apostle’s Creed begins in Latin with the word Credo, which literally means I believe and is the name of this series.

The phrase “I believe” is a very personal statement. What you believe is specific to you and differs based on your experiences, knowledge and worldview. No two people in this church have the exact same beliefs and the great thing about being Presbyterian is that you don’t have to. You are given the freedom to disagree, which is why we’re doing this series.

Each week, we’ll start by talking about the biblical roots of a statement from the creed. I’ll explain the traditional beliefs surrounding that statement and, then, I’m going to provide a modern interpretation of that belief for those who might be a little skeptical. Whether you resonate with the traditional interpretation or with the modern interpretation, my goal is to demonstrate that the Apostles’ Creed has the flexibility to speak to both audiences.

On Ash Wednesday, we began this series with the first line of the creed, I believe in God the father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Today we move onto the second line: And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. There are three claims made about Jesus in this second statement: 1) Jesus is God’s only Son 2) Jesus is our Lord and 3) Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary.

If you don’t mind, I want to dive right into the first claim about Jesus because there’s a lot for us to unpack. Where does the idea come from the Jesus is God’s only Son? Well, in our reading from Matthew this morning, Jesus is speaking and he refers to God as Father. Now just to be clear, Jesus is not the first Jewish person to refer to God as Father. In first century Judaism, it was very common for Jewish men and women to refer to God as Father. Vice-versa it was very common for Jewish men and women to refer to themselves as sons and daughters of God. This does not make Jesus unique.

What makes Jesus unique is the way that he refers to God as Father. In the text we read from Matthew, Jesus says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” In this statement, Jesus is implying that he has a special, intimate relationship with God.

In fact, Jesus’ relationship with God is so intimate that he’s saying, “If you really want to understand God, then you need to understand me because I know God so well that God has revealed everything to me.” So the question that Christians debate is what exactly does Jesus mean by this? Well, there’s really only two options. 1) Jesus means that he’s so spiritually connected to God that he understands God’s desires and intentions for the world or 2) Jesus is saying that he is God.

Now just to be clear, Christians don’t all agree on whether it’s option one or option two. This has been debated for 2000 years and I want to give you the rationale for both sides. So, for those who argue for option one, that Jesus was spiritually in touch with God, one would have to look at the fact that Jesus was Jewish. More than anything else, the most important thing to the Jewish people are the Mizvot, otherwise known as the commandments.

There are 613 commandments in the Torah, but the most important are the first 10. And for our purposes, I want to focus on the first two. The first commandment is “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” The second commandment is “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them…”

So what does this mean? It means there’s one God and that God cannot be reduced to any one thing, whether it be in heaven above or on the earth below. And this is because the Jewish people believed that God was in everything. The impact of this belief is that God cannot be reduced to a man who would then be worshipped. That would be, from the Jewish perspective, idolatry.

Therefore, if you assume that Jesus is Jewish and you’re reading the gospel of Matthew through Jewish eyes, the natural conclusion is the reason why Jesus claims he’s the only one who can truly know God the father is because of his close, intimate spiritual connection to God. Not that Jesus is God because that would directly conflict with the second commandment. So that’s option 1.

Option 2 claims that Jesus was God in the flesh. In other words, Jesus was the embodiment of God. Why do Christians make this claim? Well, we read the opening chapter of the gospel of Luke where Mary, Jesus’ mother, is told by an angel she is pregnant. The problem is, Mary hasn’t had a sexual relationship. She is still a virgin. In other words, God is the one who makes Mary pregnant through the Holy Spirit.

Now assuming this story is true, it subverts option 1. Although the second commandment explicitly states that you should not worship idols, this story makes Jesus’ existence unique and special. It also tells us that when Jesus refers to God as his Father and that he alone knows the Father, this is because Jesus literally comes from God. Due to the virgin birth, Jesus is of the same substance as God.

Now clearly, the Apostles’ Creed comes down on the side of option 2 because it says, “Jesus Christ, God [the Father’s] only Son…who was born of the Virgin Mary.” And this makes sense that the Apostles’ Creed would come down on this side of the argument because, as I told you earlier, it is a condensed version of the Nicene Creed. And the Nicene Creed was designed to a fix a problem in the Christian faith.

The problem was that you have God the Father, God the Son [Jesus] and God the Holy Spirit. People were saying of Christians, “You say you’re monotheistic, like the Jews, but by the looks of it, you seem to be worshipping three gods, not one.” This was a problem. Christians were being accused of polytheism. So at the counsel of Nicaea, they came up with the doctrine of the Trinity, which is the idea that God is three persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), but is made of one being or substance.

Critically, the root of this belief goes back to the story of the Virgin Birth. If Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit, then Jesus is of the same substance as the Holy Spirit and if the Holy Spirit comes from God, then that is how we know that Jesus, the Holy Spirit and God the Father are all one and the same. The problem we run into with this assertion is the Virgin Birth itself.

In today’s world, we are raised with a highly scientific mindset. For anyone who was born after 1980, science was a huge part of your curriculum in high school. Earth science, biology, chemistry and physics were all standard fare when I was growing up. The scientific method has inculcated students with a healthy dose of skepticism about everything. They question everything and take nothing at face value.

As a result, if you are young and educated, there is a high likelihood that you will view the Virgin Birth as a myth. This creates a bit of problem given that so much of Option 2 is riding on the Virgin Birth being a historically verifiable event. If you require young people to believe in the Virgin Birth in order to be part of the Christian faith, there is a high likelihood they will turn their back and walk away.

For proof of this, all you have to do is look around the room. Unless you’re living in the Bible Belt, where church attendance is still part of the culture, most churches have only a handful of young people invested in their communities. The rest have walked away and a good portion of those who have left the church behind have done so because the belief system feels antiquated and out of touch with their worldview.

This is why option 1 becomes a really great alternative for young people who see the Virgin Birth as a myth. Now, I want to be clear. If you believe in option 2, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, option 2 has been the majority opinion in the church for a long time. But the question is: If you believe in option 2, are you willing to make room in the church for people who might disagree? Is the tent big enough for both option 1 and option 2 and, if so, where exactly can we find common ground?

In my opinion, the common ground is found in the statement from the Apostles’ Creed that refers to Jesus as “our Lord”. If you don’t mind, let’s take a few minutes to breakdown this idea because it’s really critical to our discussion of Jesus. The premise of lordship is a very old idea. The word lord in English comes from a Germanic root that literally means bread-keeper. A lord is someone who has an enormous power over your life.

In the ancient world, it was common for peasants to work the fields of wealthy landowners. In exchange for housing and a cut of the produce from the land to feed their family, the peasant would have two primary responsibilities: 1) plant and harvest the fields and 2) the landowner could call their tenant into military service at any point and the men would have to fight in battle on behalf of the landowner.

In this way, the peasants had pledged their lives to the landowner. Whatever the landowner says, the tenet will do. Because of the subservient nature of the relationship, the landowner was considered the Lord of the tenant. Therefore, when we call Jesus our Lord, the same basic relationship is at play. We are pledging our lives to Jesus and saying we will live our lives according to his word.

The difference between Jesus’ lordship and the lordship of vassal state is one of choice. Peasants who lived on the lands of a vassal often had no choice in pledging their allegiance. If you didn’t, the vassal would have you killed. When it comes to Jesus, you are choosing to call him Lord and, therefore, you are choosing to live according to his mandates.

In my opinion, whether you believe in option 1 or option 2, to be considered a Christian, the one requirement is that you have to call Jesus your Lord. The reason why is because, in my opinion, regardless of what you believe about the Virgin Birth, the teachings of Jesus are non-negotiable. If you’re not willing to dedicate yourself to living your life according to Jesus’ teachings, then you have no business referring to yourself as a Christian.

To be a Christian is to be a disciple of Jesus. The word disciple comes from the Greek word maqhth,j (mathetes) which generally means learner or pupil. Now these words bring to mind the idea that a disciple is like a student in school, attempting to learn all the information that the teacher knows. But this picture is not entirely accurate. Yes, a disciple learns what the teacher knows, but a disciple is something much deeper in substance.

Consider when the master painter Verrocchio started teaching the teenage boy Leonardo da Vinci in his workshop during the Renaissance. Verrocchio’s goal was not simply to teach Leonardo the mechanics of painting. A master identifies your talent and then molds and nurtures you to become like him. He doesn’t just want you to know what he knows, he wants you to do what he does. In fact, he wants to set you up so that one day you might become a master in your own right.

Similarly, Jesus wants us to become masters of his craft, but what that requires is an investment on our part. We have to be willing to following Jesus’ teachings so closely that we become masters. And perhaps the best visual of what it takes to become a master of Jesus’ teachings comes from ancient Palestine. If you have had visited Jerusalem during Jesus’ day, you would have seen dozens of rabbis walking around the city with their disciples in tow.

The rabbi would be talking about some issue of scriptural interpretation and his disciples would be walking closely behind him trying to absorb every word. So just imagine this scene of a rabbis walking quickly from one place to another and groups of twelve disciples leaning in, straining to hear and absorb every word. By the end of the day, the disciples’ feet would be covered in dust from trying to keep up with their rabbi and so a saying developed among the sages of Israel, “May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.”

So what I would like to suggest this morning is this: Your perspective on the Virgin Birth and the Trinity matters far less than your perspective concerning Jesus’ lordship over your life. When you call Jesus Lord, you are making a choice. You are choosing to adopt his way of thinking. You are choosing to conform your actions to his actions. You are choosing to make Jesus the center of your life. So much so that everyday when you come home, you should have followed Jesus so closely that you look down at your feet and realize that you are covered in the dust of your rabbi. Amen.