“Being Church:  We Believe”

First Congregational UCC – April 20, 2008

The Rev. Sharyl B. Peterson

 

Scripture Reading: Mark 9: 14-29

As I told the children this morning, this month, we’ve been considering what it means to “be church.”  And part of what it means to be church – to be Christian church – to be UCC church – has to do with what it is that we believe.  So today, we’re going to reflect together on one of the toughest faith questions of all:  what do we believe?

            Good faithful people have been trying to answer that question for as long as there have been people of faith.  Throughout the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, we find all kinds of belief statements about God.  For example, God is good … God is all-powerful … God is ever-lasting … God cares about God’s people… and the ancient shema, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”  In the New Testament, in both the Gospels and in the letters, we find all kinds of belief statements about Jesus, and his teachings, and his life..  For example, Jesus was a healer … Jesus had compassion on others … … Jesus was resurrected from death … Jesus calls his followers to share the Good News… and Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. 

            People of faith have tried very hard for a very long time to capture in words what it is they believe about the sacred, about that which is ultimately mystery.  And it’s not an easy thing to do – which probably explains why they’ve done it so many ways, and that those ways keep changing.

            Somewhere around 150 to 200 years after Jesus lived, as the Christian church was becoming more formally organized, theologians and priests started developing new ways of stating their beliefs – that is, creeds – based both on the Biblical witness, on their own faith experiences, and on church politics.  Points of doctrine were argued over at church councils, and at special meetings … people lobbied for particular theological points of view, theological opponents were sometimes imprisoned or even assassinated, and statements of belief were voted upon, in a process that makes today’s political arena look pretty tame. 

            Creedal statements were dissected, word for word, concept for concept, thought about, prayed about, and fought about, in an attempt to do two things:  to define, as a community of faith, how Christians were alike each other; and how Christians were different from the Arians, and Donatists, and Gnostics, and all those other numerous religious movements current in the early centuries after Jesus.

            Probably the earliest of the formal creeds was the Apostles’ Creed, which you heard our choir sing this morning, and which some of us grew up reciting in church every Sunday.  The thought in the early Christian church was, as more and more people went out to spread the message of Christianity, there should be some agreement on what that word actually was.  Hence, the creed of all Christian “apostles,” which does its best to describe the nature of God, of Christ, and of the church.  And, while it was probably the most widely-known and widely-used creed in the early church, it was not the final answer, as far as creeds went.

            About 150 years later (in 325 CE), it got replaced when the Creed of Nicea was written, and adopted as the official creed of Christianity.  It was meant to be an improvement upon the Apostles’ Creed, expanding on the nature of Jesus Christ in considerable detail, including his relationship to God, in ways the Apostles’ Creed did not.  But its new and improved version of belief statements only lasted about 50 years, when it was revised to include an expanded consideration of the nature of the Holy Spirit, and its relationship to God.  That particular piece of the revised creed – called the filioque clause – was so controversial that it led to a major split between the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western branches of Christianity.

And on and on the process goes, right down through history.  The Reformation led to differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant creeds, and later on the development of different denominations led to some of them developing their own faith creeds, and even within a denomination (like our own), various belief statements like the Kansas City Statement (that we read last week) and the UCC Statement of Faith (which we’ll use next week), emerged in the on-going struggle to say what it is that we believe, what draws us together, and what separates us from “the other guys.”

            But the way we’ve done it in our own denomination – the roots of which go back to the Pilgrims – is somewhat different.  You will notice that our United Church of Christ and earlier Congregational statements (like the Kansas City Statement of 1913 which we used in service last week) are not creeds per se.  The United Church of Christ (and Congregational Church before it) is a “non-creedal denomination” – rather, we are a “covenantal” denomination – and it’s an important difference. 

            Our forebears recognized early that when you are trying to describe something as sacred, as mysterious, as beyond-human-understanding as God is, or as Christ is, it’s just about impossible to find human words that can accurately describe that for everyone.  For example, let’s look at the Apostles’ Creed a little more closely for a minute, a creed which forms the faith foundation for some denominations, and consider some of the points in the creed about which people might conceivably have different faith understandings.

            It begins, “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, maker of Heaven and earth.”  Right there, you have at least three different ideas, or propositions:  that you believe that God is Father, which in turn assumes that God is both human-like, and is male, that you believe God is Almighty, and that you believe God made Heaven and earth, which in turn assumes that Heaven exists.  

            The first proposition – that God is Father (with all its attendant implications) is problematic for more and more people today, for a variety of reasons.  First, many people in our contemporary understand God in ways other than as a literal, human-like figure – for example, as a force, or energy, or liminal presence.  Second, for people raised in more liberal traditions, and particularly for many people under the age of 60 who were raised with a variety of images of God, and not just traditional male images of God, they may completely reject the notion of God as “Father” – or prefer to expand the idea to God as “Father and Mother.”  When you move to proposition two, that God is “Almighty,” that raises issues about whether or not God is omniscient, and/or omnipotent, omnipresent, and the answers to each of those questions then raise questions about why suffering occurs (which are things I’ve talked about in other sermons and won’t dwell on here today).

            If we skip proposition three (about creation), and move on to the next section of the Creed, we have “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, etc.”  Now we run into theological questions that have been controversial for nearly 2,000 years, like whether Jesus in fact is the only son of God, or whether God might have become incarnate in other forms, plus the very challenging issue of what we mean when we say that Jesus is “our Lord,”  and exactly how Jesus was conceived, and what it means that the Holy Spirit “overshadowed” Mary, and the related question that raises that has to do with the gender of the Holy Spirit, since the Hebrew and Greek names for the Spirit are both feminine, rather than masculine, and whether Mary was literally a virgin in the way we understand it now, or was rather an unmarried young woman, which is what the Greek word that gets translated into English as “virgin” actually means. 

            If that all seems just too complicated, and we turn instead to the Nicene Creed, which we’re going to say together in a few minutes, you run into even more challenging images.  While much of it sounds like the Apostles’ Creed, it also contains those beautiful, and rather incomprehensible phrases like, (I believe in) “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.”  While they sound like lovely poetry – and indeed are – does anyone actually know what any of those concepts mean? 

            And so on and so on.  This is complicated stuff.  Because we are talking about stories – or attempts to tell a story – that is a story about things which cannot easily be pinned down, or measured, or captured in words.  And so, rather than being a creedal denomination, in the United Church of Christ, we are a covenantal denomination.

            That is, there is no single item of faith – no single belief statement – that we require every person to agree with in order to be a member of the United Church.  And, instead of agreeing on every single point of belief, we agree on how we’re going to act – we covenant to treat one another with respect, to accept the costs and joys of discipleship, and to serve God by serving others.

One more important point about belief is this – when our beliefs bump up against life’s realities, we may find some tensions, or points of disconnection.  In my experience both as a parish pastor, and as a hospital chaplain, ministering to people from a lot of different faith backgrounds, I’ve learned that when things go really wrong in people’s lives, people who thought they were pretty clear about what they believed, and thought they held those beliefs pretty strongly, often discover doubts and fears they didn’t know they had.  Just like that frightened father in today’s Gospel story. 

            His son has been mute, unable to speak, since he was a little boy, and he has what we would call seizures, which throw him to the ground, and cause him to foam at the mouth, and are sometimes so violent that he falls into the fire or into the river, nearly killing him.  His father loves him, and is terrified for him, and desperately wants him healed. 

            Because of the times in which he lived, the father’s understanding is that his son’s strange behaviors are caused by a demon – or by a demonic power – and he begs Jesus to help the child, “if he can.”  And Jesus’ response to him is a little curt:  he says “what do you mean if I can?”  “All things can be done for the one who believes.”  And the father’s heartfelt plea in response is this:  I want my son healed – I want you to help him – “I believe; help thou my unbelief.”

            And isn’t that also our plea?  When things get terrible in our lives – when we’re diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, or our beloved spouse or partner of many years dies unexpectedly, or we lose our job or our home – don’t most of us struggle faith-wise?  We really want to believe that God is good – that God really loves us – that God will help us through whatever we’re going through – but in the moment of pain and despair, doubts can creep in … what if God doesn’t?  what if God won’t?  what if we’re wrong about God?  And when that happens, an awful lot of people feel even worse, feel ashamed on top of feeling frightened, because they believe – probably because their Sunday School teachers or ministers or churches told them so – that if they have any doubts about their faith, they are bad people … that there is something wrong with them.  But if the God we believe in – or want to believe in – really is good, really is loving, really does care about us, that simply cannot be so. 

            One of my favorite discussions about “belief” is in Kathleen Norris’ wonderful book Amazing Grace, in which she describes her journey back into the Christian church after leaving it much earlier in her life.  Having moved back to a small town in rural South Dakota, she begins attending her Grandmother Totten’s Presbyterian church.  And at about the same time, she begins going on retreat at a Benedictine monastery. 

            Let me share a small part of her description of what happened:  “I had (come) to assume that religious belief was simply beyond my grasp.  Other people had it, I did not.  And for a long time, even though I was attracted to church, I was convinced that I did not belong there, because my beliefs were not thoroughly solid, set in stone (like I thought everyone else’s were).

            When I first stumbled upon the Benedictine abbey…, I was surprised to find the monks so unconcerned with my weighty doubts and intellectual frustrations over Christianity.  What interested them more was my desire to come to their worship … I was a bit disappointed – I had thought that my doubts were spectacular obstacles to my faith and was confused by intrigued when an old monk blithely stated that doubt is merely the seed of faith, a sign that faith is alive and ready to grow[1].”

            She reminds us that the word “belief” itself simply means “to give one’s heart to.”  “Thus, if we can determine what it is we give our heart to, then we will know what it is we believe.”  And she talks about how, in church, she found some practices (and prayers and other liturgy) that were meaningful to her, and others that were not.  And that was okay.  Just as it is for us. 

            As we struggle here in this place to “be church,” all of us are at different places in terms of what we “believe” – what we give our hearts to.  As far as we know, that’s been true for would-be people of faith as long as there has been a Christian church, and for would-be people of faith in other traditions for centuries before that.  We stand in a long, proud line of people who want to believe … of people who have questions … of people who have doubts.  And that is okay.  Because it is we struggle with those questions – as we share our struggles with each other – that we come to truly know what it is we do give our hearts to. 

            Lord, we believe.  Help thou our unbelief.  Bless our questions, and our struggles, as they draw us deeper and closer to You.  Amen.