We Believe: In God

This morning we begin a four-part series on the Apostles’ Creed. When I was growing up, we said the Apostles’ Creed every single Sunday. In fact, I thought of it almost like pledging allegiance, something we offered to God, and I really didn’t like it if I went to church and we didn’t say the Apostles’ Creed which, for those of you who worship regularly in the Farmington family of faith may surprise you because we affirm our faith with a broad variety of creedal statements. So, what changed?

First, I realized that while repetition is good, becoming rote and mechanical in our repetition is not. When we affirm our faith, it isn’t for the sake of ritual. So, what do we recite together an Affirmation of Faith every week in worship? It is for God. We declare what it is we believe in praise as a thankful response for God’s revealing Godself to us. It is for us as a church. We declare what it is we believe to make clear for ourselves who we are, what we believe, and what we resolve to do in response. And finally, it is for the world. We declare what it is we believe to define who we are and delineate what we stand for and against. (Book of Confessions, xiii)

The Apostles’ Creed is one of twelve documents that form the Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church. Each of these documents is based in Scripture and provides the pillars for what I think of as a broad avenue of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is what we, as Christians through the centuries, have agreed is accepted belief. And an avenue because this is an active roadway. When we affirm our faith, we affirm that we have not arrived and our lives have meaning and purpose that matter to God. Each of the Confessions was written for a particular purpose.

The Apostles’ Creed has the distinction of being the oldest affirmation of faith in continuous use in the church. It was written around 180 AD. as a teaching tool. The Creed’s structure is based on Jesus’s Great Commission – “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” So, when a person was preparing to be baptized, they learned the Apostles’ Creed and at their baptism, they were asked 3 questions: “Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty? Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?”

The answers are statements of personal belief – “I believe.”

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” So much is said in so few words. Soon after Jesus’ death and resurrection, as the followers of Jesus became a more defined group, separated more and more from their Jewish roots, and welcomed non-Jews into the community, one of the questions was how much of the old ways do we keep? Do we still read the Jewish Scriptures, what we now call the Old Testament?

The first creed of the church was simple, “Jesus is Lord.” But what about the God of our ancestors: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, of David and the kings of Israel and the prophets? Some, notably a Roman named Marcion, taught that Jesus was Lord, but was not the Messiah that the Jewish Scriptures had promised, and that Jesus had revealed that God was good and loving and merciful while the old Scriptures had described a wrathful, vengeful God. This teaching was heresy, and the Apostles’ Creed was written to refute it.

The God in whom we believe is the maker of heaven and earth, the Word who spoke all things into being, who came in the cool of the day to the garden expecting to visit with Adam and Eve, who was heartbroken when they had consumed the awareness of feeling shame and hid, and who continues to create, and is the source of our very breath.

Within the phrase “the maker of heaven and earth” is the affirmation that the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament. One God. Source of all being.

Who is both Father and Almighty.

I think it is really important for us to dig into why God is described as Father. God is spirit, neither male nor female. God is beyond our comprehension, and any description we offer for God is an inadequate, incomplete, and inaccurate attempt to reach beyond our understanding to grasp what we will never be able to comprehend. So, we use metaphors, similes, and parables. God is Father. God is like a mother hen. There was a father who had two sons.

20th Century theologian Paul Tillich wrote about the danger of using symbolic language to describe God, as double-edged because our comparisons “force the infinite down to finitude and the finite up to infinity” and “They open the divine for the human and the human for the divine.” “For instance,” he writes, “if God is symbolized as ‘Father,’ he is brought down to the human relationship of father and child. But at the same time this human relationship is consecrated into a pattern of the divine-human relationship.”

For people whose fathers have been abusive or absent, or for people whose fathers have not been trustworthy or honest or good, or for people whose fathers caused great pain in their lives, calling God “Father” can elicit negative connotations that are not helpful for them in understanding who God is.
At the same time, describing God as father is helpful to parents and children to understand the relationship God envisions between parents and their children. However, no human parent-child relationship lives up to God’s vision for how we are to love one another and no father-child relationship will ever truly reveal what God’s love for us is like.

So, if for you, calling God “Father” is painful or does not symbolize for you a loving, close, open relationship with one you depend upon and who is dependable, then I encourage you to think of who does have that kind of relationship with you. It may be your mother, or an aunt or an older brother, or a grandparent, or a friend’s parent, or a close friend, or a counselor.

The reason we call God “Father” is that it is describes and intimate, respectful relationship that is foundationally unequal – one is dependent upon the other – and the other is dependable.
For God is also Almighty, “eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible (Scots Confession)” unchangeable, all wise, holy, just, good and truth.

God is all-powerful. And God’s desire is to relinquish power to make possible relationship, with us.
This desire of God was most clearly revealed to us in the birth of a baby named Jesus, in his life, death, and resurrection… but that is next week.

Our best source of knowledge about God is Jesus. John’s Gospel begins with those well-known phrases, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made .…No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known…. 16For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Jesus revealed to us that God was not after us to punish us but to redeem us. God wasn’t in the garden looking for Adam and Eve because they had sinned but because God wanted to be with them. The consequence of sin is separation from God, and God so desired that gap to be closed that God came to save us. God is for us and has never been against us.

So Jesus promised, “I give my followers eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.”

Thanks be to God, our Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Amen.

The conclusion of Jesus’ words here is “I and the Father are one.” Next week we turn to the second question of the Apostles’ Creed, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” I encourage you to share your questions with me and I will try to answer them either in the sermon or directly. What do you wonder about who Jesus is and what we declare we believe about him?