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If you were here last week, you know that we started to
talk about the Apostles
Creed, the one printed on the front
of your bulletin. And if you remember, we talked about the
Creed being an ancient confession of the church, really a
summation of the Biblical story that from the earliest centuries
was used to help teach the faith in preparing people who
had come to know Christ for their baptisms. It was also used
to help distinguish the Christian faith from the myriad of
spiritualities running around the ancient world. And, I suggested
that in these seven weeks it would be a great opportunity
to memorize the Creed, or help your kids to do so.
Now, last week we only made it through the first two words
of the Creed: “I believe.” So this week, I did
a little calculation and discovered that there are 110 words
total in the Apostles Creed. At this rate, then, we would
finish this series…on October 22 of 2006! So this
morning we’re going to tackle a few more words.
Scripture text: Ephesians 3:14-19
You are riding across the country on an airplane packed
full of people. When you get around Chicago, the air ride
gets a little turbulent, and then rougher and rougher until
people are getting nervous as they are jolted around. Finally,
when the plane suddenly drops for several seconds, a man
near the front shouts out
“Does anybody here believe in God?!”
“I believe in God”
Most of the people you know in
your life would make this statement as far as it goes…which
isn’t very far.
I believe in God. Certainly,
there are a few people around who are atheists (though
it always impresses me that the the leap of faith an atheist
must take to not believe in God is at least as high as
the one a believer makes).
I believe in God…often means I believe in America,
being nice, honoring diversity and for the most part being
honest. And in fact, for many people those things are essentially
one and the same. Most people will tell you I believe in
God, but they could mean a hundred different things, so the
question is, which God?
Our culture lives out belief in some god, or in many gods.
The classic definition of a god is
“the thing or person
which has ultimate value in your life.”
That’s
an okay definition, I guess, but some specific questions
might put a little more teeth in it:
- What is it that brings
you hope for our world?
- When you run into unspeakable tragedy,
where do you turn?
- What is the driving force behind your
decisions in life?
- Who speaks with authority into your
life that you will listen to?
Some of the gods in our culture look religious, but many
of them do not. Maybe you never thought about these as gods:
- The god of technology…if you walk around your
neighborhood at night, you’ll notice the number of
homes where the flickering light in a dark living room
means that the plasma TV is earning its keep, or a light
in a basement where someone sits hunched over a computer
screen hour after hour. And it doesn’t seem too absurd
to me to wonder if these do not become altars of worship
for us...altering our habits, our thinking, our lives.
What drives your decisions?
- The god of independence…this is our specialty
in America. We are a people who do not want to be told
what to do or believe, whether that message comes from
the Pope, the President, a teacher, the Bible or a friend.
What I want to do is what I will do. Don’t tell me
what is wrong or right. And so we live in an amazing time
when we cannot say what obscenity is, or stop pornography
that hooks millions of people, or ban strip clubs because
we violate someone’s
freedom. “Don’t tell me what to do, I’ll
decide myself.”
Who speaks with authority and authority
in your life?
- The god of things. I don’t think I need to say
too much here. We accumulate and consume at a rate that
is unmatched in human history, that is destroying our physical
environment and creating huge gaps between people, yet
more and more retail stores get built, and we join buying
clubs and spend spare time shopping for things not needed
nor necessarily even wanted.
What is the driving force
in your life?
So if you’re on the airplane,
and someone shouts out does anyone here believe in God?,
some people might not raise their hands, though they probably
follow one of these three (or many other) gods. Others might
raise their hands…thinking
that everybody in America believes in God, don’t they?
It’s a sort of vague, fuzzy, good-feeling kind of God.
When I was on Whidbey Island this summer, in the town of
Langley is a little park, and at the park is a prayer wheel,
and the inscription says:
“Within are a myriad of voices
from around the world raised in prayers...Turn this drum
to spin them out into the universe.”
When Paul wrote to the Ephesians (the passage we just read),
he wrote to a town that had one of the wonders of the world:
the temple of Artemis (or Diana), a goddess who inspired
a temple 425 feet long, 220 feet wide, with 127 columns over
60 feet tall.
Artemis was the mother goddess of fertility,
served by prostitute priestesses 24 hours a day. A meteorite
is thought to have been hailed as the origin of Artemis,
and a portion of it was on display in the temple. This was
the “god” (goddess) that many of the people had
in mind. And so Paul was careful to distinguish that when
he said,“God,” the God he talked about was the
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
I believe in God…Which
God? Here is how the Creed
starts:
“God the Father”
The God that the early church
believed in when they began to use the Apostles Creed starts
with God the Father. In the Old Testament God is called “Father” many
times, almost always as the “father of the nation,” or
the “father of the king.” In the New Testament,
God is most often the father…of Jesus, and of his
people. Paul says in Ephesians,
“I kneel before the
Father.”
The God that Christians confess is not a generic, vague,
fuzzy God, but this God. Now, this is going to present some
questions for us, particularly in our day.
a) Is God a man, since He is called Father?
No. God is beyond gender. But he is the God that Jesus 170
times calls Father, the personal God that we just cannot
impersonally start to call “It.”
God is not a woman either, though scripture uses language
with feminine imagery, as when Jesus, God’s Son, says,
“Jerusalem,
how often I have longed to gather your children together,
as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.”
Scripturally, and following Jesus, we continue to call God “Father,” but
remember that this is meant to convey a personal God.
b) I have friends who have been horribly, wrongfully treated
by their fathers. Should we therefore not call God Father?
No. What must be said is that a poor human father is not
an accurate reflection of God. Every human father falls short
and needs forgiveness. The analogy is not perfect. God is
not like the father that abandons his children. God is not
like the father that strikes the children’s mother.
Rather, God is like the father shown in the scriptures: like
the father who watches for his wayward son to return home
and then welcomes him lavishly, beyond all reason. God is
like that kind of father.
I read a book this summer with the unlikely title of Blood
Done Sign My Name (the title of an old Negro spiritual).
It was the most powerful thing I read all summer, and I suspect
I might invite you to read it with me for a “Read Good
Books” discussion after the first of the year. It’s
non-fiction, and it is actually about racism in North Carolina,
and in our United States.
The man who wrote it, Timothy Tyson,
weaves his own story and that of his family into the events
of the racially turbulent 60s and early 70s.
All I want to share with you right now from it is a picture
of a father.
The picture comes from a time when Tim Tyson is 17 years
old, disillusioned with himself and his world, and decides
to run away from home and live with two friends who have
dropped out of college, in a broken down little place in
Flat Branch, North Carolina.
Tyson sneaks out of the window of his parents’ house
one night and takes a bus as far as he can, but still has
27 miles to walk to get to Flat Branch. Tyson’s parents
receive his I’m-running-away-from-home note, and being
wiser parents than I think I would have been, they think
they might make things worse if they force him home. Instead,
they get in touch with the two friends in Flat Branch and
find out where the beat-up old house is. Tim’s Dad
drives several hours to get there, and then in the dark sets
out to find his son. He finally catches up to him walking
up the road from the bus station, pulls up along side of
him and unrolls the window.
“Hey, Little Buck,” he said, “Let’s
go to Flat Branch.”
Tyson writes,
“I climbed into the back seat, scarcely able to
comprehend what he had just said. But it became faintly
imaginable when I saw that he had brought a gallon bucket
of peanut butter, several dozen pairs of outlet socks,
an ancient black-and-white television set someone had given
him, and an old black leather Bible.
“We rolled down the 2-lane blacktop through the swamp, turned
onto unpaved Flat Branch road, and then rumbled up the driveway
to the falling-down farmhouse where my long-haired friends
waited excitedly...”
(a little later)
“Standing between the cornfields, my father
and I wrapped our arms around each other and held on tight
for a long time. He laid his thick hand on my head and
thanked God for giving him this fine son- one is not under
oath when delivering such prayers- and asked Him to stand
by me in the days and years to come. Then he pressed into
my hands the Bible that (his dad) had given him on the
day he’d
left home, and drove away.”
God is not like every father, but
some fathers can reflect God. When the Creed calls God “Father,” it
is distinguishing Him from anything that is fuzzy, hazy or
impersonal. The Father of Jesus Christ is affectionate, intimate
and looking for us. It is the God of whom St. Augustine says,
“God
loves each of us as if there was only one of us to love.”
Jesus
calls God “Father,” a term of respect and personal
relationship. Most of the time. Except once, when Jesus was
in his darkest hour, praying in the Garden he calls him not
just Father…but Abba…Daddy. I
believe in God, which God? God the Father.
“Almighty”
I looked up this word Almighty, since
it is used in the Bible as well as the Creed, and checked
out the Greek. Do you know what “almighty” means
in the Greek? It’s two words put together that mean
literally “all” and “mighty!!” I
love this Greek thing!
It’s a word of power and strength
and dominion. It means God can do all things. There is nothing
God cannot do. It’s the angel Gabriel’s word
to the Virgin Mary and to the older Elizabeth that “nothing
is impossible with God.”
What an amazing combination of words describes the God the
Creed claims is our God. God is the personal and intimate
Father, who seeks us out and wraps his arms around us, and
he is Almighty. Powerful and strong. He’s both. And
the thing is, you have to take both. We can’t choose,
as we’d like to do. He is both Abba and Almighty.
That presents another hard question, in these days of floods,
mudslides, earthquakes and terrorism.
If God can do all things,
can God not stop these terrible things?
Is God too weak,
is he uncaring, is he unable to hold them back?
But even
as we wrestle with this, and it is an intensely complicated
question, we still have to remember that this is the same
God, the Lord your God who brought his people out of Egypt
with a mighty hand. The same God who raised Jesus Christ
from the dead. From the dead! If he raised Jesus from the
dead, if he broke the power of the thing humans have feared
since Day #1, He can do anything. Our questions and confession
belong together.
“Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief!”
This
is the God we confess.
“Maker of Heaven and Earth”
The God that we confess is the
God who made everything. Everything, the world and us too.
The God who is not the same as his creation. The physical
world we live in, though it is not as it was intended long
ago, is still an amazing world. People who put their hope
and trust in some other god must account for the making of
heaven and earth.
Years ago, as a young Christian, I argued and argued over
evolution, whether it was fact or theory. Over these years,
our culture has embraced evolution as fact, and the accompanying
idea of big bangs as a rather accidental beginning to the
world. I look at my kids’ science books, I talk to
their science teachers, I hear programs on NPR that make
room for no other ideas. And don’t get me wrong, I
think there are many, many parts of evolutionary theory that
don’t offer a problem to Christianity at all. Ultimately,
the book of Genesis is far more concerned with the origins
of the world, not how everything came to be so much
as who brought it into being
and why.
In the last 10 years a theory called Intelligent Design
has become a hot button issue. Intelligent Design is a theory
which says that certain features of the universe and of living
things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather
than an undirected process such as natural selection. Particularly
in the questions around the origin of life, it tries to use
statistical and experimental evidence to rule out the possibility
of sheer “chance” that some evolutionists embrace.
Opponents see Intelligent Design as a sneaky conservative
Republican Christian George W. Bush plot to reintroduce
the presence of God into an arena they thought He’d
been removed from forever. Maybe it is. But honestly, when
I hear the statistics of probability applied to an evolutionary
sequence of events that would have had to happen to bring
the world into being, the staggeringly impossible “accidents” that
would have had to take place, I become a lot more open to
other theories. But still, more than any of the how questions,
I’m interested in the who and why questions.
This summer I was up on Whidbey Island,
and I woke up at 6 in the morning as the sun was barely coming
up, and took my kayak out onto a very glassy Puget Sound.
The sunrise made the entire bay and the mountains turn a
deep magenta color. I paddled out towards a circle of what
I thought was 15-20 seagulls sitting in the water, but as
I grew close I discovered they were loons.
Loons are normally quite shy, but they let me drift to within
about 10 yards, and then they slowly, calmly disappeared
below the water and popped up again about 20 yards away.
They started to call to each other, that low, beautiful and
haunting call. There was not another person in sight anywhere.
It was staggering.
I think about what John Calvin said, that when we look at
the amazing variety and beauty and color and texture of creation,
we can see God. We don’t see all of God, mind you,
in his creation: for that we need the scriptures and Christ,
but we can know something.
On Friday night, we came with many of you to hear the marvelous
music from Sylvia, the choir, the ensembles and others. It
was a huge gift. And I received another huge gift that night.
I got to hold Zachary Barwell part of the time. Zach is about
6 months old, just this great little guy. He’s at this
age where he’s discovering everything, his hands are
moving, grabbing, exploring all the time. He looks at his
hands waving around in front of him like
“Wow, look
at these hands, I wonder whose they are?!”
Whenever
the music would start in a new way he’d go very still
and lean into me, like he was listening and enjoying. An
amazing, special part of God’s creation.
People will argue forever about
just exactly how the loons and the bay and the mountains
came into being, or how a unique human was ever created.
What the Creed says is that the God we confess…is
the one who did it, the Maker of heaven and earth. And for
this, a poem might be more helpful than any scientific or
theological report, so I brought one with me.
James Weldon
Johnson, an African American living in the early 20th century,
gave us a story based on Genesis, written back in 1927. I’m
going to begin reading from just after the part where God
has been busy creating, and repeating “It
is good. It is good.”
“Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that he had made.
He looked at his sun,
And he looked at his moon,
And he looked at his little stars;
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said: I’m lonely still.
Then God sat down—
On the side of a hill where he could think;
By a deep, wide river he sat down;
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought: I’ll make me a man!
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image;
Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.”
The Maker of Heaven and Earth.
So we walk in this world. We climb onto planes that hurtle
through the sky as a routine part of everyday life. And if
we find ourselves there, and someone shouts out,
Does Anyone Here Believe in God?!
I wonder what we’ll do. Maybe we’ll raise our
hands. But if we do, let us not think or speak the nonsense
of the gods of warm feelings, of prayers going off to the
universe at large, of technology or independence. Let us
not slide into the vague religious gods of spirituality.
It is not just “God” that the Christians believe
in…
- it is God the Father,
- it is God the Almighty,
- and
God the Maker of Heaven and Earth.
And as we will read
soon these next weeks, God the Son and Holy Spirit.
Will
you stand with me as we confess our faith together using
the Apostles Creed?
I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth.
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
he descended into hell;
the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic Church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
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