This sermon looks at the phrase of the creed that says “From there he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” I decided to not focus on the resurrection, because while it is pivotal we just came through the Easter Season and I spent a good deal of the time dealing with the resurrection and its implications over many of those Sundays. The texts for this sermon were: Psalm 98: 4-9 & 1 Corinthians 3: 11-15

I seriously thought about starting off my sermon with a short video clip. After all we have the technology to do it. We have a computer, a projector, and a video screen.

But, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I didn’t want to give much if any air time to this particular video. Nor did I want - in anyway – to dignify its message or give it that much credence. So, instead, I decided to leave it up to you.

When you go home this afternoon, if you decide you want to see it for yourself, you can go to Google and type in the words “God Hates the World.” Yes, you heard me right; “God Hates the World.” I will warn you though this is something you might not want your young children to see.

The video is modeled after the super-group, rock anthem song some of you may remember from the mid 80’s called “We Are The World.” But, the message of this new video is much, much different from that one.

This morning, I’ll only share with you the chorus line of the song:

God hates the world and all her people.
You all face a fiery day for your proud sinning.
It’s too late to change his mind,
you’ve lived out your vain lives
storing up God’s wrath for all eternity.

This video comes to us from the fine folks of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas. I’m sure some of you have heard of this church before. These are the same folks, who led by their pastor Reverend Phelps have been staging what they call “Love Crusades.” These are demonstrations at memorial services for soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. Their point is to blame the deaths of these soldiers on our country’s immoral behavior which has angered God.

Unfortunately - for many of those outside the church - this is the only message they hear about our faith. They look at us Christians and they think we are an angry, mean, judgmental lot of people. They think we worship a God who is the same.

Today, we jump ahead a bit and look at the portion of the Apostle’s Creed that talks about God’s coming judgment, looking specifically at the phrase of the creed that says, “From there he will come to judge the quick and the dead.”

In spite of the message of hate, anger, and wrath from the folks at Westboro, we should hope that God will one day indeed judge the world. After all, think for a moment over the history of the past century. As far as we know it was one of - if not - the bloodiest centuries in human history.

It all began with the genocide of millions of Armenians in Turkey in 1915-1916. World War I was soon on its heels. Ironically dubbed the “war to end all wars” it was then quickly followed by World War II.

The 2nd World War saw the systematic execution of an estimated 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. And for the US to end its war with Japan we dropped the Atomic bomb on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The 2nd half of the century, wasn’t much better either. The cold war saw us fighting in Korea and Vietnam. And the century came to an end with the brutal genocide of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi’s at the hands of the Hutus in Rawanda.

And to think that the century started off with so much hope and promise. In the late 1800s and early 1900s popular theologians and philosophers spoke of the great hope and promise of scientific progress.

They were writing and talking about God’s Kingdom becoming a physical, tangible reality in this world. They saw the progress humanity was making and thought is was an unstoppable force that was going to change the shape of the world. They hoped it would usher in the age of God’s reign here on earth.

That was, of course, before all hell broke loose.

The world is not a fair place. All around us is pain and hurt, innocence lost, human rights denied, lives abruptly taken, force brutally applied, towers tumbled down. I don’t have to go on for you to get my point.

It’s only natural to hope that justice is served. We cry for judgment to be meted out. We desire for the guilty be punished. When we or others we know are wronged we scream; someone has got to pay for this!

Our cry for justice is important. It should not be denied, because it means we are wrestling with the reality of a world that has gone awry.

At its best it works to see that things are put back in their rightful place.

But at its worst it seeks retribution and exacts revenge.

Given the state of our world, we should hope for judgment. We should hope that one day things will be set right. We should hope that evil will be served its final ultimatum and that goodness will finally reign supreme.

But what will that judgment look like and how will it come?

Popular pictures of God’s judgment are fixed in our heads. Using images from the book of Revelation, pictures of the last judgment have portrayed Jesus coming as the Warrior Christ.

Riding and blazing in upon a White Horse wearing a robe dripped with blood; Jesus will return leading an army of angels. He will come to strike his enemies down. He will smite the nations. He will bring the wrath of God upon all who oppose him.

I think that’s often how we’d like to see it:

Christ coming in on his army tank, bearing his AK47s, his rocket launcher cocked and ready for action. We’d like to see him throwing his cluster bombs; blowing his enemies to smithereens; showing the world who the real boss is around here.

But seen in the context of the whole of scripture and the work of God in Jesus, is that really God’s way? Will Christ really come again as the Warrior Christ to blow away all his enemies?

After all, isn’t this the very same Jesus who willingly went to his death upon that cruel cross?

Isn’t he the one who cried out in anguish from there “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Isn’t he the same one who from that cross cried out, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do?”

Isn’t he the same one who could have just as well called down the host of angels from the heavens to deliver him from that horrific death and show us who was really in charge?

I firmly believe in the end God will have his way. Jesus will be revealed as King. And, at his feet every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess him as Lord. I just think God’s going to get there a totally different way than we would ever choose for him to or that we might like for him to.

Psalm 98 gives us a different picture of judgment, it is not a picture of dread, of weeping, or of gnashing of teeth, but one in which the creation sings for joy!

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who live in it.
Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.

You see God is not coming to exact revenge. God is not coming to seek retribution. God is not coming to mow down his enemies. God is coming to create and to restore justice. God is coming to set things right. God is coming to usher in the new Heaven and the new Earth. And when it happens the whole earth will rejoice.

The phrase of the creed we are looking at says he will come “from there.” So maybe we should ask; where is that exactly?

We usually think “there” is up somewhere; in the heavens, in the sky, in the clouds. We locate heaven as some place up there. So it’s only natural for us to think that Jesus will return from up there some where. But “from there” isn’t really some place you can map out on MapQuest or that you can locate on an astronomical map of the galaxy.

Immediately prior to this, the creed says that Jesus is sitting at the right hand of God the Father. Of course the question everyone – or at least wise crackers want to know - is who is sitting at the left hand of God?

But that isn’t the point. The point is that he’ll not come from the sky but rather from the very presence and heart of God. Or as another author put it, he’ll come “from the place of God’s eternal and sovereign love.”

The message Christians have for the world is not “God Hates the World.” God isn’t storing up his eternal wrath in order to blow us all up. Ask any Sunday School kid - they all know how John 3:16 begins - “God so loved the world” that he gave his only son.

Now, having said all that, the place of love of doesn’t exclude the place of judgment. Love and judgment are not mutually exclusive.

In the early history of the church, in the 2nd century, a man by the name of Marcion was declared a heretic. This was for many reasons, but one of the main reasons was because he separated judgment from love. He saw these two things as mutually exclusive.

Marcion didn’t care for any images of God’s judgment, so he got rid of the Old Testament and reduced the Bible to just a few statements from Jesus and a couple of stories about him. He argued that Yahweh - the God of the Old Testament - was a god of judgment and wrath. He liked the New Testament God better and said that Jesus came from this totally different God, one who was loving and who forgave all.

Marcion’s view was rejected by the church, but even today his thinking lingers on. The tendency to divorce God’s judgment from God’s love is strong. Some folks error on the side of Love. Others, like the folks at Westboro Baptist, error on the side of judgment.

Marcion’s teaching was rejected by the church because judgment and love are different sides of the exact same coin.

Parents who appropriately discipline their children, who set-up consequences for inappropriate behavior, who stick to their guns and enforce the rules, do not do it out of wrath. They do it out of love. It’s because they love their children. It’s because they want the best for them that they discipline them. Judgment is borne out of love. It is not rooted in hate nor in anger.

Think about what happens when someone has an ailment, maybe a recurring headache or a cough that won’t go away. They know something is wrong but they can’t quite figure out exactly what it is?

Now, if they’re the typical guy they’ll ignore their wife’s plea to go see a doctor. But eventually when the symptoms won’t go away, they relent, pick up the phone and make that appointment with the doctor. The doctor asks questions, performs an examination, runs a few tests, and eventually he comes to a diagnosis. Without that examination, nothing can be done for that patient.

We fear that examination but without it what is wrong cannot be found out. The source of the illness and the disease cannot be discovered.

The judgment of God comes in the light of God’s love. It’s in the light of the love of Christ that we are undone, that our disease is made known, that the source of our illness is revealed, that the medication is given, and finally that the cure is affected.

It is God’s love that slays us. It is God’s love that makes the diagnosis and affects the cure. It is not God’s anger. It is not God’s wrath. It is God’s love poured out for us and for our behalf in the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Karl Barth - perhaps the most influential theologian of the last century - reminded us, “the one who will come to judge is the very one who has already given himself for the salvation of the world.” Jesus Christ he said is ‘the judge, judged in our place.”

As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, it’s as if God’s love is a burning, purifying fire that tests us, that reveals in the end what we are truly made of. That fire will burn away everything within us and everything within the world that “needs to be exposed as empty and worthless.”

Writer Kathleen Norris studied the parable of the weeds and the wheat in Matthew 13, a parable of judgment, and then observed:

What I found in the story was a sense that God, knowing us better than we know ourselves, also recognizes that we are incapable of separating the wheat from the weeds in our lives ….I began to see God’s fire, like a good parent’s righteous anger, as something that can flare up, challenge and even change us, but that does not destroy the essence of who we are.
The thought of all my weeds burning off so that only the wheat remains came to seem a good thing.

God does not hate the world. God loves the world. And it’s out of that love that the entire world – both the quick and the dead - will be subjected to the burning fire of God’s love.

In the end, all that is good will be lifted up and all that is wrong, unjust, and unholy will fall away.

As Kathleen says, “The thought of all those weeds being burned off, so that only the wheat remains” certainly seems like a very good thing indeed.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

I didn’t have an official title for this sermon, but I will now call it “To the End.” It explores the affirmation of the creed “He descended into hell, and on the third day rose again,” and deals specifically with the topic of Hell. The sermon texts were 1 Peter 3:17-22 & 1 Corinthians 15:12-19

Polls in America on religious beliefs often reveal rather interesting results.

Using the same methods it uses to forecast election results with good success Harris Interactive conducted a survey of 2,201 US adults in 2003. The poll yielded these results:

• 84% of Americans believe in the survival of the soul after death.

• 82% believe in Heaven while a smaller percentage, 69%, believe in Hell.

• Folks who believe in life after death are quite optimistic about the location of their eternal rest, Only 1% believe they will end up in hell.

• So, I guess that means for the one or two people who are actually there, hell will seem like an awfully quiet and lonely place.

In my close to two years as a minister, I think I’ve had more questions directed to me about the idea of Hell – about who is there and who isn’t - then I’ve had about any other question or subject of our faith.

I can only conclude that contrary to what the poll may suggest, it is something that for many of us occupies our minds as well as our imaginations. Hell is something we fear not only for ourselves but for others as well.

So today, I’m doing something I’ve never done before, I’m preaching on the subject of Hell.

Now, I can’t say that, in modern times, belief in Jesus’ “descent to Hell” is highly contested by modern scholars. I already gave that honor last week to the Creed’s statement about Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary. I can however say that the phrase has not always been a part of the Creed. Throughout the centuries, its inclusion or exclusion has been a source of controversy in the church.

The earliest versions of the creed do not even have it. It first appears in one version of the creed in the 5th century. It appears with greater regularity in the 6th-8th centuries. But it’s not really until the 9th century that the phrase was universally accepted.

Even then, things weren’t settled. In the 16th century, during the protestant reformation, when all sorts of things were up for grabs, this phrase of the creed came under fire. John Calvin argued it should remain while others said that it should be taken out.

Yesterday, I checked my Methodist Hymnal at home and found out that the phrase is not included in their traditional version of the creed. John Wesley thought it was an important doctrine, but he knew it wasn’t in the earliest forms of the creed. So it is not part of the creed in the Methodist Church.

Since it appears in our traditional version of the creed, we’ll assume as John Calvin did that it has something good and important to say to us about our faith.

As we look at the phrase “he descended into hell”, one thing we need to keep in mind is that it’s not even clear that this phrase addresses the topic of “Hell.”

The traditional version of the creed, the one we usually use in our worship here at Knox, says that “Jesus descended to hell.” But if you open up your hymnal to page 14 and look just below the traditional version, you’ll find an ecumenical version that says, “Jesus descended to the dead.”

The ecumenical creed - is a modern version agreed upon by many different denominations. How these things usually work, is that representatives sit around a table. They try to come to consensus about the very least they all can agree upon. In this case, “Jesus descent to the dead” won out over his “descent to hell.”

To figure out what’s going on here, I’m afraid, we have to do a bit of language work.

The creed as we know it was originally written in Latin. The word that is translated into English as either “dead” or “hell” is the Latin word “infernos.” You might think that based on its sound, this word implies fire or furnance, things many of us associate with hell, but what it really means is “inferior” or “that which is from below.”

In the 1600s, when King James authorized the translation of the bible into English, the translators did us a great disservice by taking three unique and distinct words in our bibles and translating them all with the same word “Hell.”

One of those distinct words translated as “Hell” was the Old Testament Hebrew word “Sheol.” But Sheol isn’t Hell. It isn’t really a place of eternal torment and punishment for those who die outside of God.

In the Hebrew world, “sheol” was simply the place of the dead. When someone died, it was thought, they went to the place of the dead or to the underworld. There they held a shadowy existence. Some believed they just eventually faded away.

There is no hint that “Sheol” is a place of eternal punishment. It isn’t heaven and it isn’t hell. It is just the place where people went when they died.

Another word sometimes translated as “Hell” is similar to Sheol. It is the Greek word “Hades.” In Greek mythology, Hades was also the place of the dead. Before Jesus’ time much of what we call the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek into a manuscript called the Septuagint. Those who worked on this translation used the Greek word “Hades” for the Hebrew word “Sheol.”

The word Hades is also found a number of times in the New Testament. When it is used there it usually reflects the Old Testament understanding of “Sheol” as the place where the dead go.

So, in the Apostle’s Creed the phrase “he descended to the dead” in its most basic sense means that Jesus went to where all Jews and Greeks thought the dead went. That is he went to “Sheol,” or to “Hades,” or to “that which is below.”

This phrase was an assertion against those I mentioned of last week who said Jesus wasn’t really human. It affirmed that Jesus was in deed a flesh and blood person who died just as you and I will die. It means that Jesus was really, really dead. Period. End of Story.

So, one affirmation of this phrase is that Jesus goes with us to the very end. But the good news was that he didn’t stay there, and neither do we, because on the third day he rose again breaking the power of death. If Jesus does not go with us all the way to the very end, all the way to the place of the dead, breaking it’s power and hold over us, then in the end death has won the final victory. God was not really God and instead it turned out that death was truly God.

Of course, this phrase of the creed can and has been translated to say “he descended into hell.” With this translation it takes on much more meaning than Jesus just going with us to the very end or to death.

I mentioned that there were three words in our bible that often get translated as hell. I’ve already stated that the first two, “sheol” or “hades,” should not really be thought of as hell. That leaves us with the third word, “Gehenna.”

Gehenna was a valley located in Israel. It is also known as the Valley of Hinnom. This valley is mentioned in the Old Testament as the place where child sacrifices were performed by those who worshiped the Canaanite gods of Baal and Molech. Even worse, two of the biblical monarchs were said to have sacrificed their own children to these idols.

Also, in later Hebrew history Gehenna is the place where Judeans were slaughtered and thrown into the valley at the hands of the conquering Babylonians.

In the New Testament, Gehenna appears twelve times; all but one of them spoken by Jesus. As it was the custom of his day, Jesus used the name of this horrific place, with its associated history, to refer to the metaphorical place of judgment.

Perhaps for us today, we might want to use a word like Auswitz or Hiroshima to get at what Jesus meant when he spoke of Gehenna; a literal hell on earth that is an image for the place of eternal judgment.

In a book of Lenten mediations I read this spring was a meditation written by Dale Aukerman. (This can be found in “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter.”)

In it he speaks of Hiroshima and the harrowing picture of a vaporized body that left the image of a shadow on the wall. When the bomb went off, the body allowed just enough light through to form this shadow. Years later, the German Theologian Heinrich Vogel saw the shadow and thought:

Jesus Christ was there in the inferno with that person; what was done to him was done to Christ; the horror he may have had no instant to feel, Jesus felt. The light of the world stood uncomprehended, comprehending, and undone by the hideous splendor of humankind’s stolen fire.

More than affirming that Jesus died just like you and I will, the creed affirms that in descending to Hell, Jesus went to the absolute worst of places. To the places that seem so far away from God. To the places we think that are beyond God’s reach.

The biggest problem with our common and popular images of Hell is that they lack any sense of God’s presence or God’s love. In popular notions, Hell is the place God sends people to eternal damnation. It is the place of eternal punishment where people are beyond the reach of God’s love.

But if Hell is beyond the reach and the power of God’s love, mercy, and grace, if the power of evil and sin is not broken by Christ’s resurrection, then as it was with death, we must ask ourselves is God really God? Is God really love?

This type of hell is not the Gospel message. The gospel message is that Jesus descends to the lowest and basest of all places. Go as low as you can go; even there you will find God. The psalmist says in Psalm 139:

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

The gospel message is that there is no depth which God, in his love, is not willing to descend for us. That’s the message we hear echoed in the passage we read from in 1 Peter, where it says:

He went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight people, were saved through water.

Remember the story of the Noah and the Ark? The one that says the earth was filled with violence and humanity was so evil and wicked that God grieved the day he created mankind? The story as we find it in Genesis says all but eight, from the family of Noah, were saved from the flood of destruction. And yet what does 1 Peter say happened here?

God in Jesus Christ descended to the lowest of places. He descended to those who were in prison and did not obey. He descended to proclaim the good news to those so wicked that God once thought them worthy of destruction.

New Testaments scholars point out that it’s only in association with Jesus that Gehenna or Hell is made mention of in the Bible.

Rightly so.

For if we cannot speak of God’s love in the very same breath that we speak of Hell. If we cannot speak of the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ who goes all the way to the bottom. If we cannot speak of Christ who goes all the way to the furthest reaches of Hell. Then we should never speak of Hell at all.

I think that leaves us with one question; who should we find in Hell?

Unfortunately, popular evangelical theology boils the bible down to offer a black and white answer: “Jesus died for our sins. We must confess him in this life to get to heaven. All others will go to hell.”

But, I don’t think it’s that easy. Instead, we should hope that the recent survey of Americans I started out this sermon with has it right. That in the end we shall find almost, if not absolutely, no one there.

The famous Scottish Presbyterian, William Barclay, wrote on Christ’s descent to Hell:

The doctrine means symbolically that either in this life or in the life beyond death all are offered the gospel of truth and the love of God. There are no limits in space and time through the grace of God. God has eternity to win us over. (Quoted from “The Life We Claim: The Apostle’s Creed” by James C. Howell.)

We should hope that in the scope of eternity, we will all get a “potent dosage of the mercy of God.” Some of us may very well experience that mercy as love and as grace. Others of us for a time - maybe for a very long time – may experience that mercy as judgment and as wrath.

But, no matter how we experience it, I believe – in the end - we will all come to fully know the love, the mercy, and the grace of God in Jesus Christ, so that at his feet every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The truth of the gospel is that in Jesus Christ - the one who descended into hell - God goes with us all the way to the very end, but who rises up again to break the power of sin, of evil, and of death; and for that I hope we can all say a resounding: Thanks be to God, Amen!

 

This sermon looks at the affirmation of the Creed that Jesus was both human and divine. It focuses on the phrases in the creed that say: “I believe in Jesus Christ…who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.”

When I mentioned to my wife that I planned on doing a sermon series on the Apostle’s Creed, the first question she asked was, “What are you going to say when you get to the Virgin birth?” I replied, “I don’t know I hadn’t thought that far ahead!”

What I think she was getting at was that of all the statements in the Apostle’s Creed, the one that seems to be the tallest lightening rod for controversy and that generates the most scholarly argument – at least in the protestant world - is the statement about Jesus being “born of the Virgin Mary.”

Affirmation of the virgin birth has been a lightning rod issue in the history of our own denomination. In the 1920s a group in one of our predecessor denominations wanted to require ministers to subscribe to a set of five fundamentals of faith, one of those was the virgin birth.

The church fought for a decade about whether or not to require ministers to subscribe to the five fundamentals. After years of heated debate, the issue was eventually shelved, and those who wanted the five fundamentals to become church law left and formed their own denomination.

Today, when it comes to the virgin birth, there are usually two extremes of thought. The first extreme is to say “It’s absolutely necessary to believe in it, and if you don’t you can’t even claim to be a Christian.” The other extreme is to say “No one needs to believe in it, in fact they shouldn’t. We’re modern, scientific people and can recognize a myth a mile away when we see one.”

Now, first off, I hope you don’t mind if I am honest in telling you that rationally, I have some skepticism about the Virgin birth. One source of that skepticism comes from - of all places - biblical study.

You see, only two gospels affirm the virgin book; they are the books of Matthew and Luke. In their affirmation about Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary, both authors look back to the Old Testament prophet of Isaiah.

Isaiah 7:14 says, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” By both of these New Testament authors and the Christian tradition that followed this verse is interpreted as a promise of the coming Messiah.

What many folks don’t realize is that when Matthew and Luke were written their authors were working from a Greek translation of the original Hebrew Scriptures. That Greek translation is called the Septuagint and it translated the original Hebrew word “almah” which means “young woman” or “hand maiden” into the Greek word for “virgin.” The gospel writers retained the Greek translation of the Hebrew word and referred to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a virgin.

It is not really my intent to use the bible to disprove the reality of the virgin birth. Instead, I hope you see there is a range of possibilities in the translation and interpretation of the Hebrew and Greek texts that will lead good and faithful Christians to different conclusions about this issue.

For me personally, while I know all this from my biblical studies, my skepticism about the virgin birth is kept in check and balanced by this one thing: I firmly believe in the reality of Christ’s resurrection, so really, is it any more of a miracle or is it any more of a stretch of my faith or my imagination to also believe in the Virgin birth?

We know that Mary was a young woman when she gave birth to Jesus, but we can’t with any certainty prove one way or the other the state of her virginity. That is simply a matter of faith.

Another source of skepticism for me comes from the simple fact everyone knows - unless they haven’t yet been told about the birds and the bees - It takes the sperm of a male and the egg of a female to make a child. But, I wonder, is that always so?

Imagine if you will my fascination in turning on the radio a few weeks ago and hearing a story on NPR about “parthenogenesis,” which is a fancy word for a phenomenon frequently found in nature called “virgin birth.” It happens on occasion in birds, in fish and in all the lower forms of animal life. In fact, until recently, the only vertebral groups scientist had not yet found a documented case of ‘virgin birth’ was in sharks and in mammals.

The NPR story told of a female hammerhead shark in a zoo that had recently given birth to a baby shark. That’s not usually such a big deal. Unless the female shark has been isolated in a tank for over three years with three other female sharks as her only companions. Researchers wanted to make sure the shark hadn’t simply stored up sperm from a previous encounter with a male shark - which too happens in nature. So they conducted genetic studies on both the mother and the child.

The data revealed no other DNA involved in this birth. There was no evidence of any sperm. There was no evidence of any DNA from a male shark. And yet to the surprise of scientists there was a baby shark. Now the only group of vertebrates left for scientists to discover a case of this parthenogenesis or ‘virgin birth’ is in mammals.

Of course, this story proves absolutely nothing when it comes to the birth of Jesus and his mother Mary, but it does seem to create a little more room in my mind for some mystery around the very real possibility of a virgin birth.

Perhaps the more important lesson in both areas of skepticism is the danger of reducing the things of faith to the realm of textual criticism and to scientific study. When we do that we usually end up destroying any sense of mystery in our faith.

It seems that a generation younger than most of us sitting here in this room gets this. They are able to understand this better than we are. At a recent conference I attended, Diana Butler Bass, a researcher who studies protestant mainline churches like our own, told a story about attending a lecture in an Episcopal church. (Correction: Please see the comment below from Diana Butler Bass regarding the source, origination, and persons involved in this story.)

The speaker at the event was Bishop John Shelby Spong. Now for those of you who don’t know who Bishop Spong is, let’s just say you can’t get any more liberal as a Christian than he is. He is as far left on the spectrum as any person can be. And some doubt that he is even a Christian at all.

Diana said that during the question and answer period Spong got into it over the virgin birth with a member of his audience. They fought back and forth about whether it happened, about whether it could have happened, and about whether or not it matters if it happened.

When the argument was over, Diana was approached by a teenager who happened to have been in the foyer of the church setting up tables for the fellowship hour that followed the talk. The teenager had overheard some of the heated debate and said to her:

“I don’t understand why they’re arguing about the virgin birth. It doesn’t matter if it happened or not…it’s just too beautiful for it not to be true.”

If we get all caught up in the historicity, or in the biology, or in our skepticism over the impossibility of it all, we will miss out on the reality this teenager so easily grasped: “The virgin birth is simply too beautiful for it not to be true.”

The beauty that the virgin birth really affirms is that in Jesus Christ, the Divine truly became human. The Logos became flesh. The Word came and lived among us. God took on the form of our very existence and became, “Immanuel, God With Us.” The truth the statement “he was conceived by the Holy Ghost and Born of the Virgin Mary” really means to convey is that in Jesus Christ, God was pleased to “to pitch his tents among us.” As the gospel of John puts it.

Have any of you read any of the books in the Mitford Series? This series of novels written by Jan Karon tell the story of Father Tim who is an Episcopalian Priest. In the book “At Home in Mitford” Father Tim enters the church sanctuary one evening. As he walks in from the back, he notices a man sitting in one of the pews. Walking toward him Father Tim starts to offer him some help but then he realizes the man is praying.

At first the man prays quietly but eventually his voice gets louder and louder. Finally he raises his head up to the ceiling and yells out “If you’re up there prove it!” Father Tim slips into the pew next to him and says “I think the real question isn’t “Are you up there?” but rather “Are you down here?”

Jesus conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary speaks of the wonder and mystery of a God up there who came down here. But the creed doesn’t just affirm the divinity of Jesus it also clearly affirms his humanity. It goes on to say that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.

It may seem strange, odd, maybe even a bit out of sorts to mention Pontius Pilate smack dab in middle of the creed. But his mention is really quite important because it serves a date marker. The bible itself often does this sort of thing to date the events that take place. For example: In the Old Testament, the book of Isaiah dates one of his visions by saying, “in the year that King Uzziah died.” In the New Testament, the gospel of Luke dates Jesus’ birth with, “there was a census while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

We also date things by important people or major events. We may not recall the exact year something happened, but we might remember it was the year the Twin Towers came down, or when JFK was shot, or the year that the Bartman ball stopped the Cubs from going to the World Series.

In biblical days there was no dating scheme that said Jesus died in 33 AD. By dating Jesus’ crucifixion and death under the Roman prefect named Pontius Pilate, the creed firmly places Jesus in history.

The importance of the date marker takes on even more significance when you consider this: While the problem for us moderns can be the assertion of Jesus’ divinity, the problem for most folks back then was exactly the opposite. Many folks had no problem believing in the divinity of Jesus. The problem for them was believing in his humanity.

Around the time the creed was written various theories abounded that denied Jesus was God in the flesh. Various theologies and religions of the day said the spirit world was good while the fleshly, material world was bad. They argued that if the physical world was evil, then there was no way a divine being would ever take the form of a human.

So, some said Jesus was just a myth. Others said that Jesus’ body didn’t have a real body. It only appeared as if he had a human body. They went on to say that when Jesus was crucified he never actually died because it wasn’t a real body up there on the cross with actual flesh, blood and bones like we have.

Against all that, the creed affirms that Jesus was in fact a living breathing human being, a historical figure who was persecuted in the days when the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate was in power. And that along with the rest of us he suffered, died, and was buried.

A few years back, Joan Osbourne famously sung a popular song “If God Was One of Us” In it she asks the question:

What if god was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home

Now the creed doesn’t affirm that Jesus was a total slob or just any old stranger riding on the bus, but the irony of Osbourne’s question is that the Apostle’s Creed and the faith we claim does indeed affirm that in Jesus Christ, God became one of us, living and dying just like each and every one of us.

So, the answer of the creed to the question, “God are you down here?” Is a definitive “Yes!” Thanks be to God, Amen!

This is the third sermon in a summer sermon series on the Apostle’s Creed. It deals with the phrase “I believe in Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord.”

The year is 304 AD. The last great persecution of the early Christian Church is in full swing. In a few short years Emperor Constantine would ascend to power making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. In the mean time, the Emperor Diocletian orders all Christians - under the pain of death - to give up their holy scriptures to be burned in flames of fire. The persecution proceeds with fierce intensity throughout Northern Africa and it spreads throughout the Empire.

Some Christians under pressure consent and give in. They betray their faith as well as their Lord. In later years, when Christianity becomes the established religion of the Empire the fate of these who betrayed the church becomes a great source of controversy.

Many other Christians withstand their ground and swear their allegiance to Jesus as Lord even though the Emperor claims to be the only who can be worshipped and the power of the Roman Empire is absolute.

In this time of persecution, Thelica is one of many Christians captured in a raid on a house where church services are held. First he is severely tortured and then he is brought before a judge who urges him saying, “You are to obey the decrees of the emperors and the caeasers.”

Thelica stands his ground. Swearing his allegiance to Christ, he responds, “I care only for the law of God. This I have learned. This I obey. For it I am to die. In it I wish to finish my life. Besides it there is no other law.” The judge is so furious with Thelica that he orders him back to jail until he can devise a method of death worthy of his stubbornness. That is all history tells us of Thelica. But we can surmise that the story does not have a happy ending.

Fast forward to a time much closer to our own. It’s the mid 1930’s. Hitler has just ascended into power in the war devastated nation of Germany. In order to stay in power, the state church makes compromise after compromise with Hitler. A group of leading theologians concerned with these compromises gathers in the city of Barmen. They issue a declaration that states amongst other things:

Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

Not long afterwards, one of the signers of that declaration, Martin Neimoller preaches a famous sermon called “Christ is My Furher.” This sermon does not please Hitler. Neimoller is hunted down and promptly thrown into jail where he spends the next 8 years of his life in a concentration camp.

Stories of Christians who stand up to the powers that be are found throughout the ages. They are stories of believers who took today’s phrase of our creed seriously; so seriously that many of them paid for it with their own lives. They are stories of those who stood with conviction and proclaimed, “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord.” A proclamation made in the face of persecution, torture, and death.

From the earliest days, the simplest proclamation of the Christian faith has been “Jesus is Lord.” Even today, as Presbyterians a profession of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord is the only requirement made of those who wish to become members and join the church. “Jesus is Lord” is the central proclamation of our faith.

Today’s phrase of the Apostle’s Creed tells us at least three things about the one we proclaim as Lord:

The first thing we can say is that we believe in the person of Jesus. Jesus was a baby boy born in a particular geographical location. He was trained as a carpenter. He grew up to be a man with a ministry in a particular point in time. When we speak of Jesus we mean that he was a living breathing human being who walked on this earth, gathered disciples, taught the crowds, was crucified under the roman authorities, and died on the cross.

We’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks as we look at other aspects of the apostle’s creed that cover this more specifically. But the central point is that our faith in Jesus is rooted in history.

The second thing we can say is that Jesus is the Christ. Now many people think that Christ is Jesus’ last name. That is simply not true. Just as it is not true that his middle initial is an “H!” The word Christ is not a name. It is an adjective. Christ is the Greek word for the Hebrew word meaning Messiah. So, instead of saying Jesus Christ, it is actually more appropriate for us to say, Jesus the one who is the Christ. Or Jesus the one who is the Messiah.

But that still doesn’t tell us enough. We need to know what the word Messiah means. In the Hebrew world, the word messiah meant the “anointed one.” The word was used of Hebrew Kings, like King David, who were anointed to be servants and leaders for God.

In ancient times, the reign of King David was the pinnacle of Israel’s power and glory. After his reign the kingdom of Israel fell apart. It suffered invasion after invasion by many of its neighboring nations. During this time, various Prophets arose declaring hope that Israel would one day return to its former glory. These prophets hinted at the coming of a new Messiah, or Anointed One, who would come to conquer Israel’s foes and establish the reign of God in the world.

As the disciples and early believers in Jesus tried to put into words what they experienced in him, they scoured the Old Testament looking for images and phrases. And, as they searched the scriptures, they came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. They came to believe he was the one spoken of by the prophets in scriptures the one who would come to establish God’s reign in the world. And so they came to proclaim that, “Jesus is the Messiah.” Or “Jesus is the Christ.”

The third thing we can say is that Jesus is God’s only Son. From the earliest days the disciples who followed Jesus and the earliest Christians who came to have faith in him proclaimed that when they encountered Jesus they encountered and discovered the very presence of God.

It would take many years for the church to refine precisely how that could be. Some would argue that Jesus was just a man adopted by God as his son. Others, following the lead of John’s Gospel, would say that Jesus was existent in the very beginning with God. Eventually the church would settle on saying that Jesus was at the same time both human and divine, that Jesus was both man and God found in one being.

No matter how the church tried to formulate it, the simple reality it proclaimed was that in the person of Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, was found the very presence of God. Paul writes about the mystery of encountering God in Jesus Christ in his letter to the Philippians. His Christ hymn is my all time favorite passage of scripture:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

In all his writings, Paul never really talks about or dwells on the events of Jesus’ earthly life and ministry. For the Apostle Paul, the essentials about the work of God in Jesus are to be found in his death and in his resurrection. Paul’s central message is that Jesus’ death and resurrection is what truly makes all the difference. It is those events that sets Jesus apart as the exalted one. As the one we call our Lord.

Back then, there were lots of guys named Jesus. Historical records also tell us there were a number of would be Messiah’s who lead revolts against the Roman occupation and ended up crucified upon Roman Crosses. But this Jesus, the one we proclaim as the Christ, is the only one of them who was then and who today is still proclaimed as Lord.

In the risen Christ, the early church met and encountered the very presence of God and proclaimed him as Lord. In the risen Christ, Thelica met and encountered the very presence of God and proclaimed him as Lord over the demands of the Emperor. In the risen Christ, Neimoller encountered the very presence of God and proclaimed him and not Hitler as his Furher.

There are some statements we might choose to take exception with in the Apostle’s Creed. For ages, theologians, scholars, and ordinary Christians have struggled with statements like “he was born of the Virgin Mary,” “he descended into hell,” or I believe in the “holy catholic church.”

Those objections are really secondary to the one statement in the Apostle’s Creed that should give us the most pause. The statement we should not proclaim lightly or take cavalierly is this one - “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord.”

When we say Jesus is our Lord, what we need to have in mind is that he is Lord over and above any other Lords we might have. When we proclaim him as Lord we proclaim our allegiance to him over and above any other allegiances we hold.

Thelica proclaimed his allegiance to Jesus over Diocletian and the Roman Empire. Neimoller proclaimed his allegiance to Jesus over Hitler and the Third Reich. If it came down to it, we too might be asked to proclaim Jesus as Lord, even if our lives should happen to be in grave danger in doing so.

Today we can’t imagine our nation or our leaders demanding our allegiance to them over Jesus. But we shouldn’t think we get off the hook just because we don’t live in a time or in a place where we our government demands our total allegiance.

The reality is that various lords compete for our attention and our allegiance everyday. They may be our families, our sports teams, our technological gadgets, our comfort, our security, our national welfare. You name it; there are all sorts of Lords we try to fit in comfortably along with our allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord.

The question the Apostle’s Creed really asks us to answer is this: “Is Jesus Christ, his Only Son” your lord over and above all those other Lords you may have in your own life?

In the mid 20th Century, Dorothy Day was a tireless worker for Jesus Christ among the inner city poor in New York City. An advocate for causes of peacemaking and justice in the world, she spoke prophetically reminding the church of its call to courage and compassion.

Toward the end of her life, Dorothy Day was interviewed by Robert Coles a professor at Harvard University. Coles wanted to slowly and deliberately get to know her better, so he set up a number of sessions to interview Day over a period of several months.

In his first interview, Coles said to her: “You used to be a writer. Why don’t you take a notebook. Fill it up with some autobiographical reflections about your life. I’d love to read it and go over it with you the next time we get together.” The next time they met, Coles eagerly anticipated seeing what Day had written. However, he was disappointed to hear her say:

I try to remember this life the Lord gave me, the other day I wrote down the word “a life remembered,” and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most – but I couldn’t do it.

I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life.” (illustration is from James Howell’s book, The Life We Claim)

Here is the essence of proclaiming Jesus as Lord:

To have him lead you and guide you.
To turn to him when the hard decisions and trials come in life.
To take up his yoke and to learn from him and his way.
To follow him wherever he may lead you.

And at the end of your life to be able to say along with Dorothy Day; “my great luck was to have had him on my mind for so long in my life."

There’s a group of scientists sitting around a table. They’re trying to decide which one of them is going to go tell God they don’t need him anymore. One brave soul volunteers to do the dirty job. He finds God and says, “God, you know, a bunch of us have been thinking and I’ve come to tell you: We really don’t need you anymore. I mean, we’ve been coming up with great theories and ideas. We’ve cloned sheep. We’re on the verge of cloning humans. So as you can see, we really don’t need you.”

God nods his head understandingly and says “I see. Well, no hard feelings really. But before you go, how about a little contest?” The scientist says, “Sure. What kind of contest?” God replies, “A man-making contest.” Quite sure and full of himself the scientist says: “Sure! That’ll be no problem.” Bending down, he picks up a handful of dirt and says, “Okay, God, I’m ready!” God shakes his head and responds “No, no, no … You go get your own dirt.”

I bet for most of us here this morning affirming that God is the maker of heaven and earth is a bit of a no brainer. As people of faith, we look at the world around us. We see its wonder, its beauty, its majesty. Most of us can’t help but think and attribute it to the work of the Maker. And as people of faith most of us would go even further, saying God didn’t just create the world and then leave it to its own devices. God didn’t just wind things up, walk away, and let the clock go on ticking on its own.

We see that affirmed in Psalm 104 where it says, “When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.” It is also affirmed in Colossians 1 where in speaking of Christ it is said, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” The biblical assertion found here and throughout scripture is that God’s hand is at work in this world. God is busy creating, recreating, transforming, resurrecting, and redeeming this world in which we live.

Most of us can’t even begin to imagine God not having a hand in creating this world. Other explanations seem empty, vacuous, and void. They don’t begin to account for the beauty, majesty, and wonder of the world in which we live. But we do know there are folks out there who look at the world and instead of seeing it as the work of God they find something else to attribute it to.

In his recent book “The God Delusion” the famous atheist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins says that whenever he hears someone say God created the world, he turns to them and says something like, “Well then, smarty pants, who created God?”

For Dawkins, the simplest solution is always the best solution. So, when Dawkins sees the complexity of biological life and the appearance of design in living beings, he doesn’t answer the question of how it came about by proposing yet an even more complex and highly intelligent God. Instead he says the answer to the complexity we see in biological life is found in simple beginnings through the process of slow and gradual change that build over time into the complexity we see today.

Now Dawkins argument works great if he sticks to biology. Darwin’s simple theory has done wonders for advancing the study of biological science. But when Dawkins begins to talk about physics and the complexity of a universe that is perfectly tuned to support life, he is way out of his league and gets into big trouble.

Dawkins knows that science has not found the same sort of simple answer for physics and the existence of the universe that the theory of evolution has provided for biology. So all he can say is that we shouldn’t give up hope that science won’t someday come up with that simple solution. But then he adds that the weak answers we currently have for physics are a lot better than saying God has anything to do with it.

Now, we may go around feeling sorry for folks like Dawkins whose lives are not anchored in some form of faith in God. We may wonder what keeps them together through the hills and valleys of life. We may wonder what it is that guides their decision making and how they live their life. But stop for a moment and turn the tables. These folks go in turn feel very sorry for us poor fools who have to have faith in some sort of God in order to make it through this life.

Nowadays Dawkins and others like him aren’t content to just feel sorry for those who believe in God. They are on the attack warning others of how dangerous it is to believe in God. The titles of their books in our bookstores reveals their agenda:

Sam Harris - “The End of Faith”
Richard Dawkins - “The God Delusion.”
Christopher Hitchens - “god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” (that is god with a small “g” mind you!)

These folks are not content with simply saying God doesn’t exist and leave it at that. They sound the alarm that faith in God is dangerous and in the end will only lead to our destruction.

This week I picked up two of these books. Right off the bat, it was clear that much of what they talk about in terms of faith in God is based on extremes of religious fundamentalism. They also turn to the Bible and create from its pages the most extreme caricature of God possible.

These books aren’t written for folks who lean toward fundamentalism in their religious belief. The authors are smart enough to know they don’t have a prayer in swaying anyone away from their fundamentalist believes. They are really meant for folks who have already sworn off faith in God.

But I think they are also written for folks of moderate religious faith – which is what I think comfortably describes most of us sitting here. They are meant for good, sincere, thinking folks like us. These authors think and hope they might somehow be able to convince us that our religious faith is indeed a problem.

In his book, “god is not great,” Christopher Hitchens takes a chapter to dismantle belief in God based on “arguments from design,” At the end of it he says,

Thoughtful believers can take some consolation…the faithful stand acquitted…we no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious. What believers will do now that their faith is optional and private and irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion.

Now, I’m no religious fundamentalist. I don’t tote the bible around saying Genesis proves the earth is 6000. I don’t tell others if they don’t believe it they’re godforsaken. I don’t even think the point of Genesis is to tell us a thing about how the universe and our planet was created. But when I read this I got mad. I got steamed. My blood pressure went way up when I found out that my faith in God is optional, private and irrelevant. And that I’ve been lumped in with the same group of folks who just built the “Creation Museum.”

Have you heard about this?

There’s this group. They have a website called “Answers in Genesis.” The motto on their site is “believing it, defending it, and proclaiming it.” And they’ve just opened up what they call the “Creation Museum” in Petersburg, KY. For only $19.95 you can be affirmed that the book of Genesis provides all the answers regarding God’s creation. You can walk through the Garden of Eden. You can see the Tree of Life laden rich with fruit. You can walk through the Cave of Sorrows and see the horrific effects of the fall of man.

But what I find ironic is that the museum also is open on Sunday. I mean isn’t there something in Genesis about the final day of creation being God’s day of rest. And what about the thing in the 10 Commandments about keeping the Sabbath? Anyway…

Unlike those who might plan their family vacation around a visit to the “creation museum” I’m quite okay with letting science answer the questions of “how” life came into existence. I don’t think it’s necessary for us to rekon science with the creation poetry of Genesis 1 and 2.

But I’m not okay with science going beyond the questions of “how.” I’m not okay with science claiming to have done away with any need for faith in God. And, I’m not okay with it being the only fount of knowledge to help us answer the “why” questions of creation.

In a Presbyterian Congregation in the DC area, a pastor invited one of his parishioners to share a devotion with the session. A man of faith, this parishioner also was a prominent scientist. He came and talked with the session sharing his thoughts on science and faith and in talking about creation he said:

God did it. The Genesis stories of creation, while different in detail, agree that God did it. This theme runs throughout the Bible. That God did it does not suggest how God created us, and I find it somewhere between amusing/annoying/irritating/maddening that people might have the temerity to insist that God did it in a way that is pleasing to them. (Illustration courtesy of Homiletics Online.)

God did it. That’s what the church has affirmed through the ages in the Apostle’s Creed. The church continues to affirm that today. It continues to affirm it. Even if the creed was written before folks knew the Sun didn’t revolve around the earth and that Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection seemed like a viable theory for the existence of life.

That’s the good thing about the affirmation as we find it in the Apostle’s Creed. It doesn’t attempt to explain in anyway shape or form how it was that God made the heavens and the earth. It doesn’t propose a literal six days for the creative activity of God.
It simply asserts God is the Maker of Heaven and of Earth. It leaves it at that.

But we can’t leave it at that. Affirming that God is the Maker of Heaven and Earth, we have to ask the question, “So What?” We have to ask, “What does it mean for us today to affirm that God is the creator of all?” As people of faith we have to ask the “why” questions of our existence.

Paul Simon, of Simon and Garfunkle fame, has a wonderful new album called “Surprise.” One listen to this album and it’s pretty obvious that Paul is getting up there in age and is starting to think about the later stages of life. One of my favorite songs on this album is called “Outrageous.” In it Simon reflects on his fight against the affects of aging, saying:

But I’m tired, 900 sit-ups a day.
I’m painting my hair the colour of mud, mud, OK?
I’m tired, tired, anybody care what I say? NO!
Painting my hair the colour of mud.
(I say: at least he has hair to paint!)

Throughout the song Paul asks over and over again: “Who’s Gonna Love You When Your Looks Are Gone?” “Who’s Gonna Love You When Your Looks Are Gone?” And finally, at the song’s crescendo he belts out his own answer to the question singing, “God will, like he waters the flowers on the window sill.”

Now I don’t know where Paul Simon stands in regards to being a man of faith, but here he joins in with the chorus of the Psalmist who says “when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. The affirmation that God is the creator who sends rain upon the flowers leads us to affirm that God cares for and loves each and every one of us….and will love us still even when our looks are gone. Which is very good news for some of us!

It also means that each one of us is cherished and that we are called to cherish and respect one another. Regardless of whether we have the best car to drive, the flashiest clothes to wear, or the the newest Apple iphone. Before God the creator, the one who knew us even when we were in our mother’s womb, those things just don’t matter.

At the same time, the assertion that God is the Maker of Heaven and Earth isn’t just about us…One of the more recent critiques against the Christian faith has been its record on the environment. As people of faith in God the creator, we’ve often supported using and abusing the world and its resources because of the assumption that God’s creation is centered around us.

A UMC minister, James Howell has written a wonderful book about the Apostle’s Creed. In his section about God as Maker of Heaven and Earth, Howell tells of the time his daughter wrote a column in the newspaper which expressed a pro-environmentalist stance on a local issue.

One of his parishioners read the article and approached him the following Sunday to ask him what he thought about it. Howell responded, “I’m with her.” The parishioner turned and walked away muttering “hmmmmph, the environment. That’s liberal.” Howell reflects on that experience saying:

With regard to the environment, if God created the world, aren’t we as God’s people under some obligation to care about the world that God has placed us in? Isn’t it the case that when we pave over some species that we are silencing some voice of praise that God has created in the great chorus of praise and creation?

…If liberal means we want to remember and to be astonished and moved by the glory of God, and to nurture what God has gingerly placed in our hands, then I suppose I will be liberal – although shouldn’t the effort to “conserve” God’s world, be dubbed conservative? (The Life We Claim by James C. Howell)

As Christians, as those who believe that God is the Maker of Heaven and Earth, it might be a wiser course for us to stop spending all of our energy defending that affirmation. I think it’s okay for us to let science continue its work of exploring the wonders of the universe and to help discover the “how” questions of our existence.

At the same time, we should be very busy answering the questions of “why” we are here. We should be busy living as if we all are created beings, valuing each one as endowed and blessed in the image of God. We should be seeking in all things to live in right relationship with God, with others, and within this world that God has created. In sum: If we assert that God is the Maker of Heaven and Earth then let’s get busy living as if that were really so.

The Christian faith is full of lots of tensions.

In a recent issue of the Christian Century was an article called “Marked: Christians and Tattoos.” Did you know that tattoos are really quite popular with a younger generation of Christians?

On the front cover was a picture of a man’s arm with the Latin words “Simul iustus et peccator” emblazoned across it. That phrase comes from the reformer Martin Luther. It means simultaneously a saint and a sinner. Luther understood that even as Christians we have the capacity to do both great and terrible things.

Another tension is between faith and works. The mantra of the reformation was saved by faith alone. At the same time the book of James reminds us that faith without works is dead. I would never want to say that we are saved by works, but there is an important place for works in our life of faith.

Yet another tension is that God is unreachable and transcendent, so far over and beyond us that we can never reach him. And at the same time God is immanent or so present and very close to us that he is in everything that surrounds us.

Now, as humans we tend towards resolving these tensions by stressing the one side we prefer over the other side we don’t care for. We tend to minimize, discount, or ignore what the Bible might have to say about the other side of the coin.

Today many folks recognize the danger of trying to resolve these tensions. The problem is when we get rid of them we destroy the mystery that is a part of who God is. The other problem is that it splinters and fractures the church along doctrinal lines. This is one of the primary reasons for the existence of tens of thousands of protestant denominations.

Some argue that one way to get beyond all that is to get back to the basics of the faith and to settle on a simple set of basic, core beliefs. Instead of stressing the finer, narrower points of doctrine, they propose that we start with the Apostle’s Creed as a basic statement of faith.

But why the Apostle’s Creed?

I suppose some might think it should be used because it goes all the way back to the very first apostles. For centuries church tradition held that the 12 apostles put together the creed on the day of Pentecost so that they had a simple, easy message to proclaim as they carried the good new of Jesus Christ out into the world.

According to this tradition, each of the 12 apostles was inspired by the Holy Spirit to contribute a particular clause of the creed:

Peter said, I believe in God the Father Almighty Maker of heaven and earth.

Andrew chimed in, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord.

James followed with, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.

And so on and so forth.

Even though this view was widely accepted for more than 1000 years, most scholars today say it is not true. We now know that the earliest form of the creed comes from the middle of the 2nd century from the church in Rome. Not long after it appeared, it spread and was widely accepted throughout the Empire from present day France to North Africa.

We also know the creed was used during baptism. With its structure around the three persons of the trinity, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” those who came forward to be baptized were asked to answer “Yes” to three questions:

“Do you believe in God the Father?”
“Do you believe in Jesus Christ his only son?”
“Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?”

The reason some folks want to go back to just using the Apostle’s Creed as a basic statement of faith is not because it comes directly from the Apostles, but because it is a basic outline of what the church has held to be true for nearly 1800 years.

The Creed provides plenty of room for mystery surrounding our faith in God. While it gives us a central story about God it doesn’t get into dealing with narrow and specific points of doctrine. There is plenty of room in it for a variety of thought, opinion, and belief about non-essential matters.

But the Creed does not simply give us the freedom to think that just anything goes. It is there to shape the identity of the church but it is also there to shape the identity of those who belong to the church.

A number of years ago one of my favorite Christian artists, Rich Mullins, was tragically killed in a car crash. Rich grew up in a tradition that didn’t value liturgy or the creeds, but toward the end of his life he began to discover the richness to be found in them. One of his latter songs was about the Apostle’s Creed. The chorus of the song says:

And I believe that what I believe is what makes me what I am
I did not make it, no it is making me. It is the very truth of God
and not the invention of any man.

I think Rich had it right. The creed gives us the story of God and it invites us to enter in and participate in that story. As we do the creed shapes and forms us into God’s people. It is not something we made up, it is something that makes us into the people of God.

The story of the creed tells us about who God is. To get the full expression of that story we need to look at the creed in its entirety, which is what we will do over the course of the summer. But for today, we’re going to look at just the very first phrase which says, “I believe in God the Father, Almighty.”

The very first thing the creed tells us is that it is not enough to just say “I believe in God.” If you just say you believe in God, most anyone today in our pluralistic society is going to ask, “That’s nice. What sort of God do you believe in?”

At the time the Creed was put together there were tons of competing gods people worshipped and believed in. From time to time, the Roman Emperor himself would declare that he was a God. So the creed defined who God was over and against the other Gods that people worshipped in the predominate culture.

Today, there are also competing Gods in the world around us. A good illustration of this comes from an article in the Weekender about the “Insane Clown Posse.” The Insane Clown Posse is a rap group from Detroit who dress up like clowns. In 2002, the group declared that they were followers of God. Five years later when asked to explain precisely what that meant, Shaggy, one of the band’s members said,

“To me, it’s more about Karma than God. God could mean anything. It could be your conscience or the way you act. But it’s not some old dude with a big gray beard looking down at you telling you what to do. It’s YOU.”

The creed definitely points us away from thoughts that God is just anything you and I might want God to be. It puts to rest any claim that God is Karma, or that God is you or me, or that God is a “big gray beard looking down at you telling you what to do.”

So, what sort of God is it that we believe in? In its short opening phrase we have two words used to describe God. The first is Father. The second is Almighty.

One common mistake when we hear God called Father is to assume that God is a male. But as I said last week, Jesus didn’t refer to God as Father to tell us God’s gender but to tell us how close the relationship of Jesus, as the Son, was to God, as the Father.

Jesus also taught us that God was ‘our Father’ so that we could know that our own relationship with God could be as close and as intimate as the relationship between a daughter and her father, or between a son and his mother.

That is the picture of God we see in Romans 8:

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

We also see that same picture of God’s love and care when we look at the story of the prodigal son. The parable tells of a father who waits expectantly for the return of his wayward son who has gone off and squandered all of his inheritance on wine, women, and song.

Many of us, especially those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in good loving homes, understand and get that sense of closeness and intimacy Jesus was trying to stress when he referred to God as a Father.

But, some of us aren’t so lucky. If we had a mean, distant, or cold father or mother, based on our own experience, we might tend to think that God is also mean, cold, or distant. Our own experience might affect what we think of God when we hear him referred to as a Father.

When we look at the history of the creed it’s interesting to note that most folks who learned and recited the creed when it was first developed in Rome during the 2nd century did not have positive images of a loving and caring father like most of us do today.

In the city of Rome and throughout the empire, the primary image of a father was that of the Roman Paterfamilias. The paterfamilias, or the head of the Roman household, was not generally thought of as loving, caring figure.

Instead, the father was thought of as a powerful and commanding figure. He held the fate of each household member in his hand. The paterfamilias was in charge of his household and demanded the obedience of all its members – whether they were women, children, grandchildren, slaves, freedmen or freedwomen.

So when the creed declared God as Father, most folks didn’t first think of God as a loving caring father like most of us do today. Instead they thought of God as the supreme Paterfamilias, the head of the entire household of the world.

On top of that image of the supreme Paterfamilias we add the word Almighty. It comes from the Greek word “pantokrator,” and really means “ruler of all.” So, as ruler of all, God the Father, Almighty is far more supreme and greater than any Paterfamilias that can be found on earth.

When you combine the image of God the Father Almighty as the ruler of all with the biblical images Jesus frequently spoke of God as a loving and caring Father, you have a rather subversive image of fatherhood that challenges any Roman understanding of the paterfamilias.

So, for those whose image of an earthly paterfamilias was cold, distant, uncaring, mean, spiteful, cruel, or whatever else they could imagine, by declaring faith in God the Father, Almighty, they could declare the love and care of a Supreme Father. A father who was more powerful, and at the same time more loving and more caring, than any earthly paterfamilias they could ever imagine.

Justo Gonzales in his book on the Apostle’s Creed writes about a conversation with a Roman Catholic Nun. This nun said her father had been an abusive alcoholic. As a teenager, she was jealous of her friends who had loving fathers who rushed home to be with their families while her own father came home late at night, drunk and shouting abuses at her and the rest of the family.

This nun was attracted to the Christian message because of its offer of a different kind of Father; one who as God the Father, Almighty was not only the ruler of all but who also loved and deeply cared for her.

I bet that Nun might agree with Rich Mullins in saying about the Creed, “I did not make it, no it is making me.” By God’s strength and by God’s grace through the creed, through the story of God and of our faith, she was able to put aside the negative experience of her human father. She was healed and transformed by the love and grace of “God the Father Almighty.”

The good news as it would have been in Roman days and as it was in the life of that nun is that the very same love and grace of God the Father Almighty is available to each one of us who will allow the story of God as told through the creed to also make and shape us. Thanks be to God, Amen.