Begotten?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
February 3, 2008

Begotten?
Exodus 24:12-18
Matthew 17:1-9

Begotten.
It is not a word we use in regular conversation.
It’s one of those old-fashioned words that
has slipped into history,
along with words like gainsay,
or vouchsafe.
or perforce,
or forsooth.

Begotten --
from the word “beget”.
One of those uniquely “biblical” words.
Begotten: a word that sounds awkward,
and yet, there it is, at the very heart of the Nicene Creed
the affirmation of faith we used
to begin our service.
The Affirmation that is the very first
in our church’s Book of Confessions.

Using the words of the Creed
we say what we believe:
that Jesus was “eternally begotten from the Father…
begotten, not made.”

Sounds deceptively simple.
After all, we take on faith our understanding of the Trinity:
God in three persons:
God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit;
God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the Sustainer.

Yet what we take on faith,
words that we say almost by rote,
without even thinking about them,
were written only after centuries of debate and argument.
The very word “begotten” is a word that
carries with it a great deal of baggage
from the early years of the church.

Go back to the days of Jesus’ ministry
when he walked with his disciples.
Did any of them really understand who we was?
Even Peter, who had the opportunity to see the glory of God
in Jesus on that mountain top
in the story of the Transfiguration,
still denied knowing Jesus following his arrest,
and then hid with the rest of the disciples
following Jesus’ crucifixion.
They struggled to try to figure out how the man Jesus
could also be something more than a man,
the Son of God,
divine!
The question would have confounded any of us
had we seen him, heard him,
even walked with him:
how could Jesus, who was so clearly a man,
be divine as well?
And if he was divine,
did that mean there were now two gods to worship,
rather than one?

The debate grew in the years following the crucifixion
as the followers of Jesus Christ grew in number and spirit
even in the face of persecution, arrest,
and the threat of death.
The turning point came in the early years of the fourth century
when the emperor Constantine was baptized as a Christian.
He brought Christianity out of the shadows,
into the open.
But with the new openness came a torrent of questions,
which had gone for centuries
without satisfactory answers or resolutions.

Was Jesus human?
Was he human in part,
or all of him?
Was he divine?
Was he divine in part, or all of him?
Was he human for a while,
and then divine at some point in time?
If Jesus was divine
was there a danger of slipping back to polytheism,
worshiping more than one God?
Hadn’t the Lord God made clear in the Commandments,
that we were to have no other gods before him?

Constantine stepped into this fray in the year 325
when he summoned the church leaders from throughout
the Mediterranean basin to come to Nicaea,
a town in what is now Turkey.
Constantine paid the travel expenses
of more than 300 bishops and other church leaders
to come from Asia, Northern Africa,
Greece, Romae and Judah to gather
in what became known as the Council at Nicaea.

The august body of spiritual, faithful, church leaders
gathered and began their conversation and debate.
They argued: they argued loudly, vigorously, and
often with more than little anger.
But the end result was the Creed that we call
the Nicene Creed.
In the Creed, the Council agreed that Jesus and God
were one and the same, of one substance,
that Jesus was begotten,
not made, not created,
but co-eternal with God.

The Council and the Creed did not bring an end to the arguing.
Even as they agreed on God and Jesus as being
of the same substance, one substance,
church leaders and theologians still struggled
with many other issues, including
trying to figure out how to understand
the humanity and the divinity of Christ.

The transfiguration story is one of those texts
that muddles things more than it clarifies:
Did Jesus go up the mountain fully human
and come down fully divine?
The word that we translate as “transfiguration”
comes from the Greek word “metamorphosis”,
a word that suggests
a complete and total change,
from one state to another.
So that would seem to be a logical conclusion
from the Transfiguration story:
that it was at that moment,
on that mountain top,
that Jesus went from being
human to being divine.

This puzzled and baffled the best and the brightest
theologians in the second, third, fourth centuries:
“how can the immutable, eternal God
be joined to a mutable, historical man”?
(Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, 252)

The issue wasn’t resolved until half-way through
the fifth century, the year 451,
126 years after Nicaea
when yet another council of church leaders convened,
this time at Chalcedon.
At the meeting’s end they declared that Jesus was both
fully human and fully divine:
“”Our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same God,
perfect in divinity,
and perfect in humanity,
true God and true human…
of one substance with the Father in his divinity…”

No explanation, simply a statement of faith,
“this we believe”,
this we take on faith.

The very nature of faith means that there are some things
that we will simply not fully comprehend
We take things on faith, not on proof.
That’s sometimes hard to do,
but as we will say in a few minutes
in our Great Prayer of Thanksgiving
in the liturgy for the Lord’s Supper,
“great is the mystery of faith.”

What exactly happened to Jesus on that mountaintop?
We may never fully understand.
Was it the same thing as Moses’ mountain-top
experience more than a thousand years earlier?
Do you remember that when he came down from the
mountain the first time
with the Ten Commandments cradled in his arms,
his face was flush with rage
when he found the Israelites worshiping the golden idol.
He then went back up the mountain a second time
and came down with another set of Tablets
and this time, when he came back down
his face radiated with the glory of God.

We will experience a transfiguration, a transformation
in just a moment
when we gather at the Lord’s Table.
Ordinary bread and ordinary grape juice will be
transformed, transfigured,
by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The bread and the juice will look the same;
they’ll taste the same,
and yet they will not be the same.
The bread and the juice will become by the power of God
and in way known only to God,
a meal that will nourish us spiritually,
filling us in a way a table groaning with food never could.
Great is the mystery of faith!

So come to this table.
Come to this table in faith.
Come to this able in awe,
Come to this table in response to the invitation
of our Lord Jesus Christ,
our Lord begotten, not made,
the one who is the Word made flesh
the grace of God,
the one who is God, our Emmanuel.
Come to this table in the company of brothers and sisters,
in the company of all the saints,
and in the company of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Yes, great is the mystery of faith!
AMEN