Statement of Faith ~ Week 4

 

We believe in God the Creator, who is always creative and invites us to affirm and explore who we are, with all our differences, and who is the source of our faith. An Affirmation of Christian Unity

 

You may have noticed after the past three weeks that most creeds begin with a statement about God.  Sometimes the creed describes God’s activity.  You can look back at the UCC Statement of Faith.  In that creed, God creates, sets, seeks, saves, and judges.  All those are active verbs in the present tense.  The words from An Affirmation of Christian Unity give God a title: Creator.  We could also say Artist, Innovator, Inventor, or Sculptor.   Pause with me: how would you describe or define God’s activity, and what titles do you give to God?  Are the two in harmony, or is there a disconnect/dissonance?  There can be a gap between our descriptions of God and our lived experience of God.  Sometimes we talk about God as love but then act as if we must earn God’s affection and affirmation.  The words above affirm that the Creator is creating.  What new art piece is God working on within you or around you?  I can tell you, as a writer, a piece is never truly finished.  Rather, the time and day comes to publish and post this morning meditation after edits and revisions.  I know there are grammatical errors and things I want to rephrase, rework, and rethink.  But I offer these words, trusting and praying that God will work with/through and despite my mistakes and grammatical errors in your mind/heart/soul in response.  I am fascinated that, according to the above words, part of God’s creative work is to affirm and encourage us to explore who we are.  What did you discover about yourself last week?  What have you learned anew or again about yourself in the last year?  I invite you to stop reading and ponder those questions.  Finally, the creed affirms that we are all distinctive and different.  This is the beauty of diversity, and we know it can also, heartbreakingly, lead to divisions.  God can hold all that is unique in us in unity with each other, even/especially when we cannot.  I pray these words of the creed, and my words above, might awaken your thinking and living in these days as you explore your inexhaustible and exceptional life today.  Amen.  

Statements of Faith ~ Week 4

 

This week we will explore one more Creed.  Wait, you think, how many creeds are out there?!? And you thought your only choices were the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed!  As humans, we are wired to put words around the mystery of God we encounter and experience in our lives.  Remember that theology, including creeds, is autobiographical.  All we say about God says something about us.  Slowly read these words below with me:

 

An Affirmation of Christian Unity

We believe in God the Creator,
who is always creative and invites us to affirm and explore who we are,
with all our differences; and who is the source of our faith.
We believe in God the Saviour revealed in the world as Jesus the Christ, who died and is risen, the one Lord of the church.
We believe in God the Reconciler, the Holy Spirit, who is always with us bearing witness with our spirits that we are the children of God.
We believe that our smallness can never diminish God’s vastness; that our frailties can never overcome God’s will for wholeness; that our sin can never crush God’s power for new life even in the face of death.
We believe, and in this belief, we need one another, as a choir needs every voice and every part for the harmony to be complete.

We believe - that in the Holy Spirit, in Jesus Christ and in the love of God -we are one!
We believe - and may our lives reflect our belief.

 

Which words above caused you to nod your head vigorously in agreement?  Which thoughts/sentences above did you shake your head emphatically, no, in disagreement?  And the deeper question: why do you think this was your reaction/response?  It is good to ask, when reading a creed, which words we connect with and where we want to take a red ink pen and rewrite the idea.  But it is also good to ask why this is our response.  It is good to remember that where we emphasize one word, the original author or authors might have had a completely different intention in writing.  For example, in the Apostles’ Creed, the line “born of the Virgin Mary”, we tend to debate and discuss the word “Virgin”.  But the intent of the authors was to emphasize the word “born”.  Among early Christians, some contended that Jesus wasn’t really born.  I guess he just magically appeared out of thin air?  Poof!  The early Christians debated and were divided between the group that emphasized Jesus’ humanity and the group clamoring/claiming divinity.  In some ways, this forced binary choice still exists.  Holding Jesus as both human and God is difficult, like trying to pick up a single grain of sugar.  When we read the creeds, the words are filtered through our experiences, encounters, histories, biases, and beliefs.  Usually, we tend to agree only when the idea is aligned with our experiences.  Sit with this creed over a cup of tea/coffee/favorite beverage of your choice.  Listen to the words - not to poke holes or point out its errors ~ because none of us appreciate others offering color commentary on our lives.  Listen like you are meeting a new friend with curiosity and openness.  Amen. 

Prayer

 

God, You form and fashion us and all creation with a Word.  Open our ears to hear.  Open our hearts to Your warmth.  Open our lives to Your still-singing voice. You continue to re-author, edit, and write anew/afresh on our hearts.  Open us to the mystery of Your ways, not that we can ever fully understand and articulate who You are and what You are up to.  Grant us renewed energy to be fascinated by discovering You each day.  Help us hold our opinions, beliefs, and theologies lightly, for what we say today might be stretched in a new way tomorrow.  God, You are endlessly knowable.  Thank you for human words that help us explore and examine our theologies and our own lives.  Thank you for different creeds that we can let loose our curiosity in seeing where we agree and why we might find certain ideas like sandpaper to our souls.  Keep us questioning and on a quest to discover the ways You are here, right now, in our lives, communities, and world.  Thank you, God, for the delight of our relationship with You.  Amen.  

Statements of Faith ~ Week 3

 

Holy Wisdom of God, firstborn of creation, you emptied yourself of power, and became foolishness for our sake. You laboured with us upon the cross, and have brought us forth to the hope of resurrection. We commit ourselves to struggle against evil and to choose life.

 

One of the profound and powerful truths of the Holy is that there are many ways the Sacred shows up in our lives.  God is both Creator and found in creation, including humans.  God is both Holy Other and the intimate Animator of our life in ways we can sense.  God is both wisdom and foolishness, or at least what seems like foolishness from our human vantage point and so-called intelligence.  I so appreciate this creed’s reminder of God on the cross.  The question of why God/Christ/Spirit died on the cross is one that has confounded and confused generations.  Usually, our explanations are bound by the limitations of our human minds/experiences.

Fun theology nerd fact: we call these theories or explanations of why God died by the word: atonement.  It is a fancy word to toss around in a conversation today.  If you break that word down, we get a clue about what we are talking about.  Atonement is really at-one-ment.  God on the cross is seeking to be at one with us, especially in our suffering, which is the exact moment so many feel God as distant and disconnected.  Unfortunately, I think our human explanations of God/Christ/Spirit dying on the cross seem too neat and tidy.  For example, one very human explanation is that humans had a debt that we couldn’t repay, so God sent Jesus to die.  Of course, that raises the question: how could killing God’s son settle a bill?  How could us killing God be a positive to right a negative?  I wonder if God is really an accountant who has trouble with a balance sheet?  Another explanation or theory of atonement is that God was playing a trick on the devil.  The devil thought he had won by killing Jesus, but nope, Easter Sunday is a sacred surprise of the not-finished-ness of our God.  Another human explanation of why God died is that God is showing us sacrificial love on the cross.  Another is that God is showing us that meeting violence with violence will only lead to more violence on the cross.  In other words, trying to right a wrong with power or death will only keep the broken sacrificial system of demanding more blood going.  Dallas Willard once said most of our talk about Jesus on the cross makes us sound like vampire Christians only interested in Jesus’ blood.  And, heartbreakingly, so many of our Christian songs reinforce this message.  Why did God/Christ/Spirit die on the cross?  I don’t know.  I know that God’s ways are not my ways.  I trust that when I am suffering, I trust God has suffered too, not just on a cross but in the brokenness of humans who keep using our free will to hurt, harm, marginalize, and oppress each other.  We keep worshipping at the altars of money, fame, power, and bullying rather than at the altar of vulnerable, sacrificial servant love for all.  How might God’s laboring with us on the cross meet you in the places where you are struggling, stressed out, and aching today?  Let God in that place with a light of hope that Good Friday is not the last word, for Easter Sunday is coming for us to choose life.  Amen. 

Statements of Faith ~ Week 3

 

O God, embodied in a human life, we believe and trust in you. Jesus our brother, born of the woman Mary, you confronted the proud and the powerful, and welcomed as your friends those of no account.

 

Talking about God is riskier than walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon, because beneath our confident words is the inconvenient question: do we really know God’s actions in this world?  It isn’t like ChatGPT or some AI program can definitively tell us what God is up to in the world.  Rather, we are given glimpses, traces, of God’s grace.  Like footprints left in the sand where the Sacred has already been.  Then, we let loose our inner Sherlock Holmes meet Jessica Fletcher in the great mystery of faith.  What is God up to today?  I don’t know.  So, I search for the clues in scripture, past experiences of the holy in my life, moments of quiet, and movements of my soul to open to God in the present.  The words above claim that God’s love could not be contained, but came to us in flesh, breath, and bone of Jesus the Christ.  Jesus, born a vulnerable infant, is so counterintuitive to the brash bullying of the world today that values only prestige, power, and privilege.  Jesus welcomed the least, lost, lonely, and left out both because that was his experience as a baby and what Scripture commanded (see Exodus 22:21, Leviticus 19:33-34, and Deuteronomy 10:18-19).  Jesus walked prophetically with one foot just inside the religious system and one foot outside to reach the marginalized.  Jesus could confront the religious with love and then extend God’s love to all who felt forgotten by religion.  This is true not only then and there, but here and now.  We are called to both stand alongside the immigrant, oppressed, hurting, and forgotten and stay open to God’s work inside the body of Christ called “the church”.  The church is a very human institution.  We have foibles and failings.  God is reforming, refashioning, and re-storying the church again and again.  We claim our brokenness of the past.  The harmful, even hateful, actions of agism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, and silence on mental health.  Yet, these problems will take more than throwing money at them to fully reconcile and restore right relationships.  I take heart that Jesus didn’t change everyone’s heart.  It wasn’t like on Easter Sunday everyone realized what God was up to.  Truth is, I often miss God in my life.  Yet, I prayerfully seek to love God with all my mind, heart, soul, and strength; to love my neighbor as myself…knowing there is no finish line for this work, but it is the holy calling of my whole life.  Amen.  

Statements of Faith ~ Week 3

 

O God, the source of our being and the goal of all our longing, we believe and trust in you. The whole earth is alive with your glory and all that has life is sustained by you. We commit ourselves to cherish your world and to seek your face.  Creed used by Women in Theology group from Eastwood, Australia

 

Creeds, like hymns and scripture, are one of the tools we have to encourage and engage in theology.  Theology is what we say about God.  Theology is impacted and influenced by your encounters, experiences, words you’ve heard, and reactions you’ve had to others.  For example, you may have heard growing up that God is a white male with a long flowing robe and beard.  In response, you may continue to hold that image tight as the only image that is right.  Or, when you hear God referred to as “Father,” it might be like nails on a chalkboard to your soul.  Or, you may be somewhere in between.  All theology is a very human attempt to define the undefinable, to speak the ineffable, to hold what is beyond our capacity.  All theology is autobiographical.  Rather than hang our heads or stomp our feet as if we have it all figured out, I believe that what we say about God is a snapshot of where we are at that moment, with open curiosity that God is not finished with any of us yet.  When the Creed above speaks about God, the writer directs our attention and intentions toward the earth/creation.  Our Creator, still creating, is woven into all that is around us ~ both seen and unseen.  Unlike people who see God as a clockmaker who made creation and then stepped back to let it unfold without interaction, this creed is saying that God is intimately involved in tending all life.  God is not in some galaxy light-years away, but as close as our next breath.  God is there in the food we eat to sustain us, in relationships that cause laughter, and in moments when we feel fully alive.  This part of the creed reminds me of a poem by Mary Oliver, which also reads like a creed and theological statement.  Slowly savor these words with me:

 

Who made the world? 
Who made the swan, and the black bear? 
Who made the grasshopper? 
This grasshopper, I mean— 
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— 
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. 
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. 
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. 
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 
which is what I have been doing all day. 
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? 
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

 

May this awaken your imagination to sense God’s sustaining presence in you, through you, around you, and beyond you today.  Amen.

Statements of Faith ~ Week 3

 

We continue to lean in, listen to, and learn from the creeds of the church.  We’ve explored the UCC Statement of Faith two weeks ago; last week we let the words of the New Creed from the United Church of Canada spark our imaginations and stir our souls.  This week, we turn to a Creed created by a Women in Theology group in Eastwood, Australia.  I invite you to slowly savor these thoughtful words, noticing where your soul is drawn and where you find yourself questioning, or with curiosity bubbling up to know more.

 

Creed used by Women in Theology group from Eastwood, Australia

​O God, the source of our being and the goal of all our longing, we believe and trust in you. The whole earth is alive with your glory and all that has life is sustained by you. We commit ourselves to cherish your world and to seek your face.

O God, embodied in a human life, we believe and trust in you. Jesus, our brother, born of the woman Mary, you confronted the proud and the powerful, and welcomed as your friends those of no account.

Holy Wisdom of God, firstborn of creation, you emptied yourself of power, and became foolishness for our sake.

You laboured with us upon the cross, and have brought us forth to the hope of resurrection.

We commit ourselves to struggle against evil and to choose life.

O God, life-giving Spirit, Spirit of healing and comfort, of integrity and truth, we believe and trust in you.

Warm-winged Spirit, brooding over creation, rushing wind and Pentecostal fire, we commit ourselves to work with you and renew our world. Amen.

 

Consider the descriptions of God above.  What does it mean that God is the source of your being and goal of your longing?  What does that look like, feel like, and sound like?  Connect this to the passage from yesterday in Mark 12 about loving God with all your head, heart, hands, and every fiber of your being.  How might you live these words?  Where is your trust level in God today, realizing that the gauge can go up and down?  How are you turning toward and tuning into God’s wisdom?  What does it mean that God labored with us on the cross?  Or we could say, God suffers with us when we find ourselves weighted down with the crosses of injustice and inequality today?  How can you be awake and aware of the warm-winged Spirit that is brooding, surfing, hovering, and humming amid your life and all that has breath in creation?  Take just one of the questions above to let this Creed rummage and roam around your life today.  Amen.