Sermons on the Christian ecumenical creed of 381 AD ãWe (I) believe in one God …ä Psalm 42:1-5 (beginning of 6); Galatians 3:23-29

Destined to believe in God

We read in the Psalms: ãThe fool says in his heart, ÎThere is no Godâä (14:1). Many, especially in the ãWesternä world, would disagree with that. We have atheists by conviction and we have atheists by convenience; they say that ãGodä is a human creation. We donât need it and we donât really want it. Indeed, we need to get rid of God, kill God if necessary, declare God to be dead, if we are ever to be free from outside interference and begin to take life into our own hands.

The fact is, of course, that the weight of evidence is against the atheist. Every survey reveals that a majority of people believe in God – in Australia 80% of people believe in God or in a ãhigher powerä. Religious movements and sects around the world are attracting millions of people. Most cultures are based on faith and cannot be understood apart from it. Indeed religious faith seems to be the soil in which cultures are grounded and from which cultures are fed.

There are many – not only theologians, but also scientists and philosophers – who say that life is always reaching beyond itself, longing for the ãbeyondä. We are part of a creation that wants to reach out. Just like the flower turns toward the sun; just as we gasp for fresh air to fill our lungs when we have been in a stuffy room; just as we yearn for water after having walked in the hot and dusty desert; so our inner selves, our true selves, our souls, long for God. As we heard this morning:

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. (Psalm 42:1f.)

Faith is the event when we come into our own, we become who we are: created for a meaningful relationship with God. Just as we need food and shelter and medical care and money to exist, so we also need friendship, love and faith in order to live.

Churches in the Reformation tradition have developed a question and answer teaching procedure by which they prepare new converts for Baptism and Church membership. Converts are asked: ãWhat is the chief end of human life?ä to which they reply ãTo know God!ä or: ã… to glorify God and fully enjoy God forever.ä To know God, to glorify God, to enjoy God forever – that is the destiny of the human person and that is the reality and the substance of faith. This deep inner conviction, that in the midst of the uncertainties and the ambiguities of life I have been accepted. That at the center of life there is not ãnothingä, but there is a God who says to us: ãYou belong to me; you are accepted; you are OK!ä

“We (I) believe ·”

A Christian Creed therefore begins with the sounding reality of the Christian life, faith: ãI believe in God …ä Here we take an intentional step. Here we can assert our individual autonomy of which we hear so much today. We donât just swim with the flow, but we ask ourselves to whom we want to belong. It is important to know that. How else can we respond to the challenges of life and to the challenges of our time? When you open your newspaper and you read about racism and tax reform and drug abuse and immigration policy and torture and war and child abuse – how are you to respond unless you know where your allegiance is?

When Christians in Germany in the 1930âs were confronted with the challenge of a system that wanted to dictate to peopleâs conscience, some of the Christians got together and expressed their convictions in a confession (the Barmen Theological Declaration, 1934) in which they publicly declared that Christ alone is the way, the truth and the life, and that they refused to bind their conscience to any other leader. When the Apartheid regime in South Africa raged, some of the Christians shaped the ãKairosä document in which they claimed that the Gospel is more than the private consolation of the individual person, but it is Godâs good news which must shape all areas of society. By saying ãI believeä we take a stand; and soon we find others who take the same stand and the ãI believeä becomes the ãwe believeä.

Faith comes from hearing the story of Jesus

Faith has content. It is faith in someone! Faith is not just a fuzzy feeling or doing the right thing. Faith is not a psychological act of will; it is not something we produce. In our text this morning we read that faith comes (Gal. 3:23-25). Faith comes to me from the outside. How does it come?

Again the apostle Paul answers: “·faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). This is why our New Testament is dominated by the gospels. They tell in many different ways and in a variety of pictures the story of Jesus as the story of God’s coming. Why? So that this story may surprise you in your heart that “God” is not only a word in our language, but a reality that can warm our hearts and give purpose to our life. The gospels are told to draw us into the circle of God’s love.

Faith means trusting ourselves to the story of Jesus

That is the good news which we know with our ãheartsä. It is a bit like friendship or like falling in love. You know that it is real, you are committed, you are willing to pay a price. Faith is real.

Faith does not suspend our personal freedom and integrity. In that sense faith includes a decision. We decide that this particular story, this story of Jesus is trustworthy. This story has the ring of authenticity. We know in our hearts that it is true, and therefore we want to stake our life and our future on it. Amongst the many voices that promise salvation, it is this one voice that fascinates us.

Faith therefore means trusting in the story of Jesus. Or better: entrusting our life and future to him.

It is more that just irrational feeling and it is more than what you can prove with your reason. But it is real. At this point we need to be aware of three possible distortions of faith.

The first one we know from the distinction in our language between “faith” and “belief”. Faith is not the same than belief. Faith is more than the intellectual affirmation that certain doctrines are true. Doctrines derive from faith, and they are guardrails and signposts and maps to protect faith from going astray. They point us ever again to the ground and content of our faith. You may very well have intellectual problems with some parts of the creed. With your intellect you may not be able to understand or affirm certain parts of the creed. But that does not mean that you don’t have faith. Faith is the grateful response to the unconditional love and acceptance of God.

A second possible distortion of faith is when you identify faith with feeling. Not that faith is without feeling. But our feelings are determined by so many factors; and we all know the hours and days and weeks and months and years when we don’t feel God. People of great faith have told me that in the hour of crisis they did not feel the presence of God. As if our Lord wanted to include all our experiences of the absence of God in his own cry: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And age does not help for some of us. I was talking to a friend of mine, a medical doctor, a strong Christian all his life. Now he is over 70 and doubts and disillusion cloud the sky. Then it is good to know that not our feeling, but Jesus Christ is the rock to which our faith is anchored, and this rock is safe and secure even when our feelings waver. Looking unto Christ we constantly say: “I believe …”, but then becoming aware of ourselves, of the frailty of human existence we lament: “help my unbelief.”

Faith is also more than ãbeing goodä. Before we can make our faith visible by doing good things, by engaging ourselves for justice and peace, we must have faith. Before we become active, we have heard the story of Jesus as the good news that God loves us and we have entrusted our life and our future to God.

Faith means obeying the story of Jesus

Hearing the story of Jesus as the story of God’s love. Entrusting our life to it. That is faith. But faith is in God. God! And where God is involved “hearing” and “trusting” leads to “obedience”.

Not the obedience which results from the command of a person who has more power than I have. In this sense the soldier is obedient to the general; and we are obedient to the traffic rules. No, it is the obedience which is part of the liberating experience of being loved and accepted. In the New Testament the liberating relationship with Christ is described in words like “following Jesus”, the “obedience of faith”, yes, even: “dying with Christ”. This means that our faith in God determines everything, our whole life.

Faith means understanding the story of Jesus

Faith is restless. It is a dynamic reality. It seeks visibility and activity; it is ãmade effective through love” (Gal 5:6). It aspires for the word of confession and for the deed of love. But not only that: faith also seeks understanding. Having believed, our heart is warmed and stirred, and our hands and feet have become itchy. But we also have minds; and they want to understand what has happened to us. Faith does not suspend reason; it teases our thinking into activity and gives us something to think about.

Our minds are limping a little behind. The apostles Paul captures this when he confesses:

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Cor 13:12)

You see: faith ãtrustsä in the promises of God. It is the knowledge of the ãheartä, our conscience. With our thoughts, our reason, our mind, we limp behind the knowledge of the heart, we limp behind our experience of faith. With our intellect we see ãin a mirror, dimlyä, we ãonly know in partä. We shall have to wait for our reason to catch up with our faith

In a loose series of sermons I want to engage in some of this catching up. We shall recall the ground and content of our Christian faith. Lest we become too provincial and too individualistic, we follow the most widely accepted Christian ecumenical creed in the world: the Creed of Nicea and the Constantinople (todayâs Istanbul) from the 4th Century. Its authority is accepted by all Christian churches. It is quite old of course, and it was written in a very different context than ours. But we shall use it for what it is. Not an object of faith itself, but a guide to the ground and content of faith. The purpose of a creed is not that you say: I believe all that, and then I am a Christian. No, a creed has its original and proper place in the worship life of the church. It comes from the experience of faith in Christ and wants to protect the integrity of that experience. Together with the Lordâs Prayer and the 10 Commandments it is one of the three most used texts in the churches.

The Nature of a Creed

There are some people who question the need of creeds and of theology. All we need is our experience, the church and the Bible, so they say. But in our world where everything is short lived, where everything becomes so complicated that people no longer understand and therefore turn to those who offer easy answers, it may be good to remind ourselves that there are rocks for our stability and lights for our guidance; that there are things that last in the midst of the uncertainties and ambiguities of life.

What is the function of a creed for the life of faith?

Imagine yourself driving on a highway at night – take the road along Lake George. It is dark, perhaps foggy. Meadows on both sides. I am very grateful for the guardrails, the white lines, and the reflectors that keep me, not only on my side of the road, but on the road altogether, that keep me on track. The guardrails, the white lines and the reflectors are not the highway itself. On their own they won’t get you where you want to go. But they help you to stay on the road.

You are looking for that village in the mountains, last Tuesday it was Stanwell Tops for me. Streets are small. You know the general direction, but you can’t find it. And then you see a signpost: “Stanwell Tops – Christian Conference Centerä. The signpost is not the thing itself, but it helps you to find your way and get there.

You want to drive from Canberra to Mildura. Which is the best way? Via Albury or via Wagga Wagga? You get a map. You count the kilometres; you consider how much is high way and how much is dirt road, and then you decide. The map helps you to go where you want to go and to get there in the most pleasant way.

A Creed is like the markings on the road, or like a signpost, or like a map. It is not the main thing; it is not the object of faith. But it helps us to stay on track and get us where we want to go. And since the journey of faith is much more important than going to Stanwell Tops or to Mildura, we need reliable guides who have stood the test of time and human experience to keep us moving in the right direction.

We therefore want to use the Christian ecumenical creed as a guideline to consider our faith and inter-relate it with the biblical message. Now these are sermons, not lectures; and I have 20 minutes, not a semester. So we can only scratch the surface but I hope that it may help us all to rediscover some of the riches of our faith in Jesus Christ, that our hearts may be warmed and our minds may be stimulated.

Thorvald Lorenzen: Kingston