SERMON SERIES ON THE NICENE CREED
HOLY
TRINITY, VANCOUVER, FALL 1994.
I: FATHER AND CREATOR
(P.D.M. TURNER).
Text: Gen. 1:1, 27,
31 + Lk. 15:11-31 + Jn. 14:9 + Rom. 8:18-22.
The shortest sermon I ever heard came from my firstborn,
aged a bit over three-and-a-half. We were looking out of the window at the end
of a long
The younger son is the practical atheist. He believes in
God the Grandfather. To grab the loot before the old man is out of the way, and
put distance between the two of them, is to take all creation for his own but
treat God Himself as dead. This boy loves things and uses people for them. He
is determined to live in God’s world as though God Himself did not exist. He
leaves to live it up and find himself; instead he gets lost and ends up as good
as dead. Though he prepares a fine speech, his sense of sin is not more than
knowing that, starving with the pigs (no place for a nice Jewish boy!), he’s
miserable. Then there’s his brother. He’s the RELIGIOUS type of sinner. He’s
never left home, but has he ever lived there? He doesn’t know his father at
all, or begin to understand why he still loves his younger brother, insists on
loving people and using things for them. He sees his father as a slavedriver, ungenerous, legalistic and impossible to
please. This man has kept all the rules, if you forget little things like love
for God and neighbour. He’s no better at relationships than his erring brother,
with whom – “that son of yours” – he acknowledges no relationship at all. He
takes a keen interest, though, in moral comparisons, in other people’s sins,
even to inventing what he can’t know, lurid activities on which the money got
spent. And he prefers to stay outside the big party rather than get mixed up
with father or brother. Don’t you think that the Lord means us churchy people
to read him as spiritually much more calloused than his wild young brother?
Last of all, there’s a father who gives everything, including unqualified freedom
to mess it up and reject him. For his younger son he will pine and wait for
ever. He persists in treating them both as his children no matter how they
treat him. When the runaway does wake up and decide to come home, he does not
reproach him, but meets him more than halfway. As a middle-aged, Middle Eastern
man, he does an extraordinary thing; he actually runs, for which he must hitch
up his robes and make himself ridiculous. With the older one he pleads, coming
out of the house himself to do it. For those hung up on God’s sex,
incidentally, clearly he is both father and mother; as we shall see, the
composite includes someone else too.
It was a cold, brutal world into which the Gospel and the
Creeds came. Huge numbers of people were owned as slaves, body and soul. The
free remainder had better take care to be male and adult, if they hoped for any
dignity or respect as of right. Dad could execute you if he didn’t happen to
take a shine to you that morning. Females of all ages went from hand to hand
like bits of coinage. Life was generally “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short”. Hope was at a premium. If you believed in the gods at all, you
couldn’t think of them as worth worshipping. The Stoic hoped to be brave, the
Epicurean to “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”, the Platonist that
his soul might transmigrate to a better body next time. History was cyclical
and had no purpose; certainly there was no benign will behind the forces of
nature. Most people lived lives of quiet desperation, attempting to console
themselves with sex, drink and often violent entertainments. In this context
the very first thing which we should grasp about the Creed is that it
represented the solution, not an extra burden or an intellectual puzzle in a
hard and ultimately hopeless life. Huge numbers of people had no choices, and
worse still bore the scars of having been torn violently apart from parents,
spouse, children and their homeland. Imagine the scope for inner healing!
Look at the Greek, and you will see that the Nicene Creed
originally started “We”. This is a church statement. It is intended to exclude other
beliefs and to demarcate between the Church and unbelievers. Every clause
should therefore be considered in the light of the alternatives which were and
are on the market.
“...believe”:
there are at least three ways of believing:
Firstly, there is intellectual conviction of the revealed
truths of the Christian faith. I am sure that every one of us has to go through
a mental housecleaning; this applies especially to those reared in
non-Christian systems. The Faith is a coherent system which must be learned as
a ‘given’, something objectively true. I say this partly because modern
West-coasters are often fatally subjectivist, and we bring that baggage with
us into the new life. We say that we can’t believe something when we haven’t
experienced it, whereas there are countless wonders which we will never
experience until we believe them. Many of us have come to know God in a
decisive personal way; but we still need to read the Bible daily for ourselves,
to submit our minds to the Word of God, learn the houserules now that we are in
God’s household, and not expect some poor mortal to tell us all we need to know
in 20-30 minutes once a week. This is how we become more and more at home and
at rest in our believing.
Secondly, there is a personal relationship of trust, love
and obedience, which is sometimes missed by those of us who have always lived,
philosophically speaking, within the Christian system [cf. Jb. 42:5-6, where Job
says that before this his knowledge of God had been hearsay, “but now mine eye seeth thee.”]. I never myself doubted any clause of the
Creed until I was twenty. I was sure that Jesus rose from the dead, but not
that He was alive. Holy things can look very simple when all you do is handle
the outsides of them year after year, as the elder brother did. Do not go to
your grave in that state.
Lastly, there is walking in the dark and living with
mystery, a mystery which grows as we grow. My personal conversion was when I
gave as much of myself as I knew to as much of God as I knew. 36 years later I
am amazed to realize how shallow my knowledge was both ways. I brought a
shopping-list to God. Having filled it, He proceeded to see to it that
everything else promptly started to go wrong. It was then that I found myself,
for the first time in my life, sitting right outside my faith staring at it,
and saying that it was too tall a tale. I have an analytical mind, I loathe
unclarity, and walking by faith is quite unnatural to me. I am also a planner
who likes to be in control. But God did not and does not explain more than one
step at a time, let alone consult me. I went forward only because I couldn’t go
back, couldn’t imagine existing without Him. No, the Christian faith is not a
watertight explanation of all that happens in the world or to us personally.
Faith is not knowledge, or what Scripture calls “sight” [I am thinking of the
whole of Job (the man never does get
an explanation), I Cor. 13:8-13, Heb. 11]. We are not offered that in
this life. I will not pretend that I don’t consider our faith easily the best
explanation of why, both in the sense of “How come” and of “What for”; but we
never learn more than hints about the origin of evil in the universe,
technically known as the “mystery of iniquity”, or have a complete answer as to
how God can be perfectly loving and perfectly in control. We have to walk in
the dark and live with mystery as one aspect of being creatures not the
Creator. If we could get our minds around it all we should be God. To be a Christian
involves trust that we have been granted sufficient understanding to go on
from where we and the world are, and getting on with the job of obedience with
the power He gives us.
“...in...God”:
we start from the premiss that God exists; however common practical atheism may
be [Cf. Ps. 73:11 (“‘Hogwash’, they
say ‘How is God going to see it? Does the Most High know anything?”’), Rom. 1-3] the theoretical variety is as
minor a theme in Scripture [“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’.” Ps 14:1, 53:1] as it is infrequent in human
experience at all times and places. Much more significant are questions, since
we will all worship something, about what kind of God exists.
“...one God”:
He is not an idol made by man from some component of creation [Read the
brilliant polemic against idolatry in Is.
44:9-20]. He does not need us. Nor is He part of a pantheon, along with the
Sun, the Moon, Luck, Fate, Eros, Bacchus and so on [Ps. 82:1 etc. etc.]. He is not a dualism ‘beyond good
and evil’ [“God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” I Jn. 1:5]. There is only one of Him and
only He is to be worshipped [Ex.
20:3, Dt. 5:7].
“...the Father”:
He is a person, not a thing to be used by us, manipulable
by sympathetic magic. He will not jump through hoops for us. He has a particular
character, and this is not a construct based on even the best of human parents.
You and I may have had good parents, bad parents, or no parents at all; but He
is the source of all that was good in them. He is relational: though the
Fatherhood of God may not be twisted to mean that all of us are automatically
His children, or live like it [Lk.
6:36], He is impartially good to us [Mt.
5:45]. He is full of good will, and loves His whole creation [Ps. 145:8-9] and mankind in particular [Lk. 11:11-13, 12:4-7]. If it is right to
fear Him, it is definitely not because He is malignant (though Job did call Him
a sadist when in his misery he touched bottom), or arbitrary. We know where we
are with Him, in the sense that He means well by us and is implacably opposed
to evil. The bottommost reality in the universe is personal, relational, loving
and good. It follows that our individual personhood is guaranteed, even the
slaves, the women and the children. There are no unimportant people. It
follows, too, that our moral sense corresponds to reality. When we hate our own
sinfulness, cruelty and injustice, we can be sure that our God hates them
with us, just infinitely more. In this faith we can find energy and a dynamic
for change. When we fight evil, God is with us. Why, to take the example
closest to home, am I a person, for whose education her earthly father impoverished
himself? Why was I not sold in a cage in the
market-place by my “best before” date? Let those silly women who indict the
Bible, the Fathers and the Christian faith in general for women’s alleged
oppression try opening their little mouths on that or any subject in any
society where the Gospel has never taken firm root, and see what happens.
“...Almighty/Ruler
of all”: “almighty” is not a very fortunate translation, because it sounds
too abstract. It suggests among other things that He will suddenly come to from
snoozing in the passenger seat, seize the wheel from us, and relieve us of the
liberty He has given together with all its consequences. The Fathers meant by
the word Pantokράtwr “all-sovereign, the governor of all”. This is not a
statement about our theoretical free will or determinism; it means that God is
God, so that creatures/events are under His control [Ps. 104:24-30, Acts 2:23,
Rom. 8:28, I Cor. 10:13]. Perhaps the most striking of those texts is Peter’s
statement in the Acts passage that
the death of Christ was at one and the same time the responsibility of wicked
men and the plan of God. We are supposed to learn to trust, not in a theory
about predestination (double or otherwise), but that He INTENDED you and me,
from our unique genetic makeup, through all that we would do and experience, to
the moment and manner of our death. There is a point to it all, even when we
can’t see it. You were planned, you are in His hands, He
knows what He is doing with you. There are no insignificant events. God’s
‘providence’ is both complete, so that we can’t fall through the safety-net of
His guidance for us [Eph. 2:10] in
spite of all our sins and blindness (and, I might add, the amount of worrying
that some of us do about getting guidance) and also wholly loving in spite of
appearances [Jn. 14:5-14]. Hang onto
this faith, and you will not mess with the occult. “The hidden things belong to
the Lord our God.” A magnificent tapestry is being woven out of all that is. I
don’t want to be bland about this: that something which I thought irreparable
in this world has recently come straight in my life does not mean that
everything will, in mine or yours, and it’s infinitely easier to see God’s hand
in things that go right, or come straight after much patient waiting, than in
the many hard and bitter unresolved experiences which come to us all. But what
will you? Try to cut your losses and leave the Lord behind? Only the eyes of
faith will see pruning [Jn. 15:2] and
discipline [Heb. 12:3-13] as signs of
love. The fact is that the cross, resurrection and character of Jesus are
easily our main grounds for believing in God as a loving and generous Father [II Cor. 5:18 ff., I Jn. 4:7-12 etc.]. Jesus
is pivotal: the doctrine we are considering today would never have carried
conviction on the basis of a few Hebrew texts alone. Some of us have found that
Jesus is never closer than when we are really going through it, and that he who
asked “Why?” gives us rare glimpses of the right side of the tapestry, where
the point of all the knots and crossed threads is clear.
“...maker of heaven
and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”:
the ramifications of this doctrine are enormous. For a start, there’s no Mrs.
God who has to be impregnated. Just as our God is not a fertility deity
demanding to be worshipped by such foul practices as human sacrifice and ritual
prostitution, He does not mate with, or share His throne with, fertility
goddesses or gods. Earth, Gaia, is our mother only in a metaphorical sense, nor is the
metaphor biblical. We are saved from the worship of something that as a deity
has always proved cruel and bloody. This formulation, “...all things visible
and invisible”, is elastic beyond any imaginings of the authors: it can stretch
to particle physics, to the theorem which the great mathematician will say he
has “discovered”, not invented, to a universe so vast and old that I can’t
take it in, the miles of DNA in my body, time itself, that mysterious medium in
which we live, even to other universes yet more complex. In this faith God is
the origin of all that exists; therefore we can rely on the essential goodness
of creation, including our physicality, sexuality etc. [Gen. 1]. Of course
they are marred by sin, but they are not shattered by it. The material creation
is like a superb Ming vase: it has a visible crack in it from top to bottom,
but it remains glorious and God keeps it from falling apart. It is not entirely
inaccurate to say that the Biblical picture of the world is of a beautiful harmony
in creation, in which only the mind of man is corrupt [cf. Gen. 3]. I remember
seeing a part of the brilliant Da Vinci’s notebooks, with detailed drawings for
a submarine. He wrote that he would never publish his design, because “the evil
heart of man would lead him to use it in warfare”. We are talking of a God out
of Whose mind all matter came, and Who, perhaps not
coincidentally, was incarnate as a craftsman, creating beautiful and useful
things. This rules out a very old and still popular
explanation of what is wrong with us, namely that we are a pure spirit
imprisoned in an evil body like gas in a dirty bottle. Fäµα Fµα, said Plato, “our corpus is our casket”: the Christian
view is clean contrary. We must not fear our bodies, or the sexedness apart
from which we never know another person: a man must accept the rightness of his
having and using superior size and strength to protect and provide, the beautiful
young girl must not starve herself, terrified to bud and bloom, but “suffer
herself to be desired/And not blush so to be admired”. It is belief in a
falsehood, ironically when marriage has never been more equal, childbirth safer
or contraception more reliable, that spawns these perverted fears. In this
faith we get ourselves into proportion: we are very small in the hands of a
great God, Who made things older and bigger than ourselves [Jb. 38:4-20] as well as spiritual beings
stronger than we [Heb. 1].
“God is kind and clever”. Do you believe that for
yourself? Will you, if you never have, come home to your Father now? Maybe you
don’t remember leaving; but I promise you that you will recognise Him, and to
know Him will be like coming home for good. You will never be at rest anywhere
else. I can’t tell you what it will mean: maybe indescribable joy, maybe
unspeakable suffering. Certainly you will live more intensely. Only you can
choose this; you must see where you have gone wrong, yourself decide to join the
party. In Jesus, God sheds His dignity. He weeps and waits, runs towards you, begs you to come in. Rom.
8:18 ff. seems to be saying that the whole sorrowing creation is waiting for
you and me to do just that. I cannot prove to you that death and decay,
microbes and parasites, drought, earthquake and volcano, disappointment and
tragedy, appalling neglect and deliberate atrocity are not the real face of
God. I do know that I see another face when I look at Jesus Christ. In this
faith I hope to die.
It was on a Friday morning that they
took me from the cell,
And I saw they had a
carpenter to crucify as well.
You can blame it onto Pilate,
you can blame it on the Jews,
You can blame it on the Devil, but it’s God I
accuse.
“It’s
God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me”,
I said to the
carpenter a-hanging on the tree.
“You can blame it onto Adam, you can
blame it onto Eve,
You can blame it on
the apple, but that I can’t believe.
It was God that made the
Devil, and the woman, and the man,
And there wouldn’t
be an apple if it wasn’t in the plan.”
“It’s
God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me”,
I said to the
carpenter a-hanging on the tree.
“Now
Barabbas was a killer, and they let Barabbas go,
But you are being crucified for nothing
here below;
And God is up in Heaven, but He doesn’t do a thing,
With a million angels watching, and
they never move a wing.”
“It’s God they ought
to crucify, instead of you and me”,
I said to the carpenter a-hanging on the tree.
“To hell with Jehovah,” to the
carpenter I said.
“I wish that a carpenter had made the world
instead.
Goodbye and good luck to you:
our ways they will divide.
Remember me in Heaven, the man you hung
beside.”
“It’s
God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me”,
I
said to the carpenter a-hanging on the tree.
[Friday Morning, Songs of Faith and Doubt by Sidney Carter].