Time to Re-Think the Creed?

One of the challenges of preaching the church’s welcome to those who don’t believe everything we say, is that the church doesn’t always help with that message.  Imagine an impassioned ending to a homily that goes something like, “So don’t worry too much about what you believe.  If you want to be here, then there must be a reason.  You and God will work out what you believe just like those first disciples did.  They didn’t know what they believed either.  They just kept gathering together and things started to happen.  Don’t worry, just keep showing up.”  And then the preacher sits down and someone says, “Now, standing, let us affirm our faith using the words of the Nicene Creed.  We believe……”  And then comes that long list.  It happens.  And when it does this preacher has to note once more that there’s something wrong with the picture.  There it is again, that pesky creed.

I’ve been noticing the creed lately, not just because it speaks of belief, but also because of what the creed doesn’t say.  There really isn’t much in the creed about what it means to be a Christian.  Oh it has plenty to say about things like who Jesus is and how he is related to God, and about the whole Trinitarian, divine, cosmic scheme of things, but the creed doesn’t say anything about following Jesus, or loving our neighbor.  There’s nothing about the community coming together on Sunday or feeding the poor or aching to have our lives transformed.  I’m just not sure the creed deserves such a prominent place in the middle of our service any more.  It’s been around a long time, and ideas and understanding do change.

I’ve also been thinking about the creed because I see some communities around the world replacing the creed in their liturgy with what they call an “affirmation.”  Here’s one from the New Zealand Prayer book.

The Affirmation of Faith

You, O God, are supreme and holy.

You create our world and give us life.

Your purpose overarches everything we do.

You have always been with us.

You are God.

You, O God, are infinitely generous,

good beyond all measure.

You came to us before we came to you.

You have revealed and proved

your love for us in Jesus Christ,

who lived and died and rose again.

You are with us now.

You are God.

You, O God, are Holy Spirit.

You empower us to be your gospel in the world.

You reconcile and heal; you overcome death.

You are God.  We worship you.

And here’s one from the Iona Abbey worship book from the Iona Community in Scotland

An Affirmation of Faith

We believe in God above us,

maker and sustainer of all life,

of sun and moon,

of water and earth,

of male and female.

We believe in God beside us,

Jesus Christ, the word made flesh,

born of a woman, servant of the poor,

tortured and nailed to a tree.

A man of sorrows, he died forsaken.

He descended into the earth to the place of death.

On the third day he rose from the tomb.

He ascended into heaven

to be everywhere present,

and his kingdom will come on earth.

We believe in God within us,

the Holy Spirit of Pentecostal fire,

life-giving breath of the church,

Spirit of healing and forgiveness,

Source of resurrection and of eternal life. Amen

Both of these speak central themes from the Nicene Creed, and both add a bit of what Christians have come to value as central to the faith since those days.  Empower us to be your gospel (good news) in the world.   God beside us…servant of the poor…Spirit of healing and forgiveness.  Little changes and additions, but changes.  

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if God is at work among us as we claim in our worship, and in our community life and our outreach to those in need, that God would also be working on our understanding of what life with God is about.  I am encouraged to see signs, like these affirmations, that Christians are at work updating the ancient framework of ideas around which we gather.  And it isn’t that I don’t think the Nicene Creed is important. I value it as a foundational piece of our history, a set of ideas that has anchored the tradition for sixteen hundred years.  It is just that there is so much more to say about who God is and what God is up to among us.  Still, the Creed is important. In fact, I think the Creed is so important we should give it it’s own feast day.  One Sunday a year we could really focus on the Creed in the context of its place in history and spend some time appreciating and celebrating its carefully crafted language.  

So what would we do in place of the Creed all those other Sundays?  I’m thinking of something a little more up-to-the-minute.  Imagine if right after the sermon, the preacher introduces a speaker, someone from the congregation who begins, “Hi, my name is Alice.  I want to tell you what I’m learning these days about what it means to follow Jesus, and tell you a bit about how that’s going.”  Maybe she’d talk for two or three minutes about some connection she was making between the gospel and her life, in a relationship, in caring for others, in hope, in seeing beauty in the world, in moments of silence or a walk by the river.  She might talk about learning to keep to the right path even when it costs something, or noticing systems that need to be challenged.  Maybe she would mention belief, maybe some new belief coming into focus, but however she told her story, she would be affirming a connection between God and humanity.  In that prominent place in the liturgy we would affirm not arguments settled long ago, but new insights into the nature of God reported by people just like us.  People who gather around those ancient ideas hoping that something new will happen in our lives.  

The Creed speaks of God choosing to come and live with us.  It speaks of the promise of new life on the other side of struggle and despair, and it speaks of our being empowered by God to become new people.  What it doesn’t say clearly is that all of those things are going on in our lives and the lives of those around us every day.   We’re the only ones who can affirm that part of the story.  So I wonder what you would say if it were your turn to speak.  What are you learning about what it means to follow Jesus?  How is that going?

John Baker

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Belief is Overrated

“Aw Mom, I don’t want to go to church today.”

“Why  not.”

“I’ve been going all these years and I’ve pretty much figured out I don’t believe all that stuff they say down there.”

“Well you still have to go.”

“Why?”

“You’re the priest.”

I spoke last time about wanting to provide encouragement for those interested in exploring what church might have to offer and who approach cautiously.  I spoke of familiar Christian words and themes that have become problematic even for those of us in the church.  Of all the words that might present obstacles for those taking another look or a first look at the church, I can’t think of one more fraught than the word, belief.  

The word has behind it not only deep history going back to the first Christians, who were called simply  believers, but also strained modern connotations colored by media stories where the word believer is used to describe a variety of people, but quite often those who struggle to hold the line against cultural shifts.  In many churches on Sunday the faithful stand up and say together, we believe, then recite a list of things any visitor would assume Christians must believe, or are at least supposed to believe—ideas that have, in fact, been considered the core of Christianity for most of two thousand years.  At funerals, one of the rare settings where people not connected with the church have a chance to see what we are about,  we quote heavily from John’s gospel where Jesus says those who believe won’t have anything to worry about at the end of their lives.  Those sayings are some of the most cherished and comforting in our tradition, but how do they sound to those who have no idea how belief is acquired, or worse still, how do they sound to one who has tried and been unable to lay claim to such belief?   We celebrate belief when we have it and ask God for more when we don’t.  We even ask forgiveness for unbelief as if belief were something we could control.  

The language we use would suggest that belief is at the center of everything we are about in the church, but I can tell you that is not the case in my experience.  When parishioners are asked why they belong to the church, an exercise we repeat for the congregation every few years, the answers have to do with belonging and acceptance, with being part of a community that can help shape their lives and the lives of their children, with being challenged to respond to the needs of others, with deepening a sense of spiritual connection in the universe.  We don’t hear much about belief.  It’s amazing to me that anyone who doesn’t already consider themselves a believer has the courage to come through the door on a Sunday morning, but they do, God bless ‘em.   I have great respect and admiration for those who ask if it is ok to stay around and participate even though they don’t believe everything on the list.  Fortunately, what they are looking for probably has less to do with beliefs and more to do with what happens in a congregation and what becomes possible in community.  

There are some Sundays when I am reading the words of our liturgy and wonder if they couldn’t be changed to better express the experience, and hopes and the important work of shaping our lives that brings us together. What I think happens for many of us is that we are raised with the church’s language, or we are helped through the door in a time when we are really looking for acceptance or guidance.  We focus on what we have found that helps us and much of the language that doesn’t connect fades into the background, like the wallpaper in a familiar room.  Once in a while we may notice things in the background that catch our attention because they don’t seem to fit our experience, but we have already grown accustomed to the room and we like it here so we work with the parts of the tradition that do fit and leave some of those other things leaning in the corner.  When people show up in our churches without the credentials of belief, concerned that they probably don’t believe all the right things and that somewhere down the line someone may catch them not believing all the right things, what they don’t know, and what we don’t usually tell them, is that many, even most of us in church on any Sunday are in the same boat…including the folks up front in those nice white robes.  JB

An Invitation

Why would someone who is not sure what they believe or even if they believe in God want to practice Christianity?  I was introduced to some answers to that question more than twenty years ago as a seminarian serving at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington D C.  St. Mark’s had, for many years before I arrived, been honing their welcome of skeptics and agnostics into the life of their congregation.  A recorded message on their phone had led me to check out the congregation as a place to do my field education training.  The message welcomed people with big questions and with little or no belief, as well as “more conventional” Christians.   I was intrigued and showed up the next Sunday.  I am still intrigued by their message of inclusion and an emphasis that I now understand as one that shifted the standard for participation in the community from belief to practice. The congregation was full of people who had no interest in discussing their beliefs, but who were committed to serving the poor, promoting the arts in dance and theatre, and who met often in small groups to discuss life and meaning and growth through engaging life’s deep questions in community.  In that community, I met lots of people who were wary of traditional “church” and many of its ideas about God, and who practiced Christianity in ways that enriched their lives.  Many of those folks had stories about having been wary of or even hostile to religion and were glad now to have found a place in the church.  

So why this blog?  

I still meet people all the time who ask me if it is ok to participate in the life of the congregation if they don’t believe everything they think they are supposed to.  I know people who tell me they come to church at least in part because they have found a place where the clergy speak openly and often about all being welcome, regardless of what they believe.  Sometimes, those who have found a home in such a welcoming congregation ask for copies of sermons to send to friends who are, for one reason or another, wary of Christianity.  Maybe they had a bad experience with Christianity as children or they were pushed to affirm belief in doctrine they couldn’t accept in good conscience.  Maybe they have only been exposed to Christianity in the news and in popular culture or they surmise that Christian belief is all about miracles and magic and ridiculous sounding, outdated explanations for how the universe is ordered.  I hear those kinds of stories and more from people who are cautiously approaching the church for reasons they sometimes can’t name.  This blog is for those people, for their friends and relatives, for anyone you think might benefit from reading some part of the discussion around what is for me a strong sense of call to speak encouraging words to the religion wary.  

What to expect

I hope this will be a place of conversation and welcome.  I will post at least once a week, sometimes more often, working from stories that some parishioners will have heard more than once, from reading what others are writing on these topics, and from what I am learning in the life of the parish.  I will be writing about the language of Christianity and the concepts conveyed in our language, about  creeds and the prayers that shape our Eucharist.   Words like sin and salvation have begun to chafe and I’m not sure anymore what the Church means by redemption.  I can’t imagine God consigning anyone to hell and when I said that recently in a sermon, I was met during the exchange of the peace by a man in tears who told me he had been waiting 75 years to hear that sermon.  I want to say out loud things many of us have been waiting to hear.  I hope some of you will comment on these posts and suggest new topics.  You can expect that I will be honest about my own beliefs.  I won’t try to defend creeds or doctrines, and where I have trouble with the Church’s language or teaching, I will say so.  I want those who are wary of religion to know that it is possible to live in this place where all the ideas don’t line up easily and that some of us choose to stay here anyway.  It was meeting someone who had decided to stay anyway that fueled in me a strong sense of call twenty years ago and that gives this blog its name.  That encounter is one of the stories I tell over and over again.  It’s a good story.

When I arrived at St. Mark’s, it was their practice to provide a time for parishioners to respond after the preacher had finished preaching the sermon.  In one of the first sermons I heard there the preacher had talked about Jesus asking his disciples who people were saying that he was.  One of the people who stood up to speak that Sunday said she had been coming to services for several weeks.  She went on to say, “I’ve been coming and I don’t know if I believe in Jesus or even in God, but there is something here I need, so I’m going to keep coming.”  Her words have stayed with me all these years.  They’ve helped me welcome people who approach the Church with serious doubts about “conventional Christianity.”  They’ve helped me when I have wondered about my own beliefs.  And they have led me to the deep conviction that the Church must always provide a safe place for such honesty, a safe place for those who show up in our communities saying simply, “there’s something here I need.”