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September 12, 2004
We Believe in One God
We Believe in One God
Exodus 20: 1-5 / Hebrews 11: 4-6
September 12th, 2004
This morning you all said together the Nicene Creed. For some of you it was the first time. Those of you who have attended Christmas morning worship here, you remember saying it. But few of us have dug into those carefully crafted words that express the core of our belief system.
The opening words of the Nicene Creed are, “We believe in one God.” Today to say that must seem to many people hardly exceptional. I suppose we think of the two options as atheism or theism; belief in one God or believing there is no god. Who thinks of many gods in the modern world?
Many scientists today think belief in God is nothing more than refusing to let go of an ancient outlook. Science has demonstrated that all there is, is all there is, after all. The more humble or indecisive sort say, “I don’t know,” and we call them agnostics.
Many others today think not so much in terms of one God as in terms of “spirituality.” Spirituality is a response to the feeling that there is something more than what we see. Folk I know interested in “spirituality” meditate rather than worship. Meditation is a discipline of concentrating on something other than the material world, something inside. It results in an odd sort of radical individualism, an “ism” of the self.
Some spirituality fastens on feminine images of what is beyond. Back in 1993, several of the mainline Protestant denominations Re-imagined God in terms of this feminine principle. There was a big conference up in Minneapolis at which many Presbyterian women played a leading role in re-imagining god as female Sophia. At the 1994 General Assembly that I attended I saw many people wearing little gray buttons saying “Sophia, Dream the Vision.”
New Age fascination with crystals with their remarkable refractions of light, or Wicca, which is essentially nature-religion, suggest how widespread are the ideas about the spirituality that avoids thinking in terms of one God.
But two challenges in particular face believing in one God today. These are both adaptations of ideas from long ago. First, there is the challenge of thinking of God as a national god rather than the one God who is over all. Second, there is the challenge of thinking in terms of the god who we can manipulate to control life. This is the god we call today “technology.”
These two challenges get at the very heart of life and roar their appeal largely unchallenged by most Christians. Oddly, they have become a part of “conservativism,” while being at odds fundamentally with what the Bible teaches us about God.
Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the last century, thought of God as one’s “ultimate concern.” He was, as I see it, both right and wrong. He was right in that God ought to be our ultimate concern, but he was wrong in that we may have an ultimate concern that is not God. I once asked Jules Mureau, a prominent Episcopalian theologian, how he thought of God. He paused for some time and then said, “I think of God as what is beyond myself.” He was also, as I see it, both right and wrong. He was right in that God is beyond us, but wrong in that God is considerably more and other than what is beyond me. What is beyond me may be just beyond me, or way beyond me, indeed, categorically beyond me.
When we ask, “What is our ultimate concern?” and “What is beyond myself?” and then look around us to find an answer, it can seem very much that the American way of life has become our ultimate concern. And the means to this high standard of life is the technology that makes what is beyond our capabilities possible. We little realize how we are rekindling ancient and pagan ideas about the gods.
Way back in Old Testament times we read of Dagon, the God of the Philistines, and Molech, the god of the Ammonites. Dagon helped the Philistines and Molech helped the Ammonites. Ancient Greece and Rome had pantheons in which the gods worked for the good of the favored people.
The conflict in Palestine now between Palestinian Arabs and Jews suggests a battle between the God of Israel and Allah, the God of the Muslims. We are not immune to this tendency. When I hear passionate singing of “God bless America”, I wonder if we have forgotten we should sing more passionately as Christians, “God bless the world,” because we believe “God so loved the world?” The God we worship is not an American deity.
The ancients worshipped the gods that make things happen. There was Mars, the god of war. There were fertility gods who controlled the fruitfulness of fields and flocks, who granted children to men’s wives. Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth in the land in which I was born. Worship these gods and you manipulate them for your good. These ideas seem quaint to us today.
But have we not bowed at the shrine of technology as the ancients bowed before their unseen agents that controlled what they wanted to happen? We run the risk of deifying technology with shrines on our great university campuses. More than ever we need to remember, as Christians, “We believe in one God.”
We reveal how fully we worship the deity of technology when we check to see if questions of ethics must bow to the god of technology. When what we can do is the first issue rather than what we ought to do, you know which god is in control. Those who devised the atom bomb quaked to think what powers of destruction they had let loose. Questions about the morality of stem-cell research hinge on the temptation to “harvest” fetuses as the greatest source of stem-cells. Huge ethical issues bow before the god of the possible. If we believe in God, the question of what we can do will be controlled by what we ought to do as discerned from conscience informed by Holy Scripture.
Plastic surgery, the technology that allows severely burned people to look better, that fixes babies with cleft pallets, has fallen from its lofty goal of helping people. Many plastic surgeons today deny the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm” as they hurt and distort human bodies in “make-overs” that attempt to manufacture “perfect” body parts in keeping with the modern sexual preoccupation. It seems quaint and impractical to ask the question, “Does God approve of the direction we’re taking?” But if we believe in God, we will ask this question.
So when, in church, we say together, “We believe in one God,” we open ourselves to a very different way of thinking than controls the mind of much of the world today—no longer just the Western world. America set the pace and some countries are catching up. What deities have we flashed before the world imagination? The deities we proclaim are the gods that we actually worship.
We look back with gratitude to the Council of Nicea, when 318 men came together from every part of Europe, Asia, and Africa and said with one voice, “Only one God!” They overcame ideas about national gods and technological gods who could be manipulated by sacrifices. Together they said, “We believe in one God.” That was a huge achievement.
We must wait till a future Sunday to look at what made all of these Christian leaders come together at Nicea and what were the broader issues they faced. It is enough this morning to recognize that when they said together, “We believe in one God,” they achieved something never before accomplished in the annals of history. It was not the product of a natural religious evolution.
What led to this huge moment that taught us how to think about God? First, it was the Israelites, the Jews, who taught us there is only one God. When we look at their story, we see it began with God undermining the nationalistic, territorial idea of a supreme being by having Abraham travel from one spot to another. He recognized that the God who led him from Haran to Canaan was more than the deity of one location. God continued to teach the Israelites this lesson as they went from one spot to another—to Egypt, and then out of Egypt to wander forty years in the wilderness. Of all places, out in the middle of nowhere, on the backside of the desert, God revealed Himself to Moses. How strange that God should speak to Moses from such a nothing of a place!
Then having primed Israel by moving this people from place to place, from Mt. Sinai, a tall hill in the middle of nowhere, God taught them, “You will have no other gods before me. You will make no idols.” And thus Israel had fixed in its thinking, “There is only one God, a God over everywhere—over Egypt, over the desert, over the land they longed to see. We cannot distort Him by making statues that suggest what He is like.” Why no idols? Because idols always take the form of something God created, limiting the idea of God of those who focus on the idol. One God. No idols.
Then in the fullness of time after many suggestive moments, when God appeared to Abraham, to Moses and seventy Israelite elders, and to Gideon, a great Israelite general, God appeared in a seemingly impossible condescension, as a little baby in an obscure village in Palestine. Nobody thought of the Creator of heaven and earth this way. Gradually the world took notice that something very strange, very grand happened in Jesus of Nazareth.
Josephus, the Jewish historian, living and writing in Rome where there was a strong fellowship of Christians, wrote of their Jesus:
He was a wise man, if one should call him a man. He was a performer of marvelous works and a teacher of those who received the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by the foremost men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who first loved him did not cease. For he appeared to them on the third day alive again, the holy prophets having foretold these things and many other marvels about him. And even now the tribe of Christians, so called, has not disappeared.
This is a remarkable testimony from a non-Christian. It was because the message of Jesus dove-tailed so remarkably with the message of One God that the Jews had spread throughout the world that the Gospel of Jesus resonated with people everywhere it was preached. The reason why 318 men could come from all over the known world to the town of Nicea to talk about the central truths of life, was that the Gospel of One God and the Good News of one Lord Jesus Christ overcame the two tendencies that have always seemed most important to people: nationalism and the manipulation of the means of securing a good life.
When we affirm together, “We believe in one God,” we are pulling ourselves back from the temptation to worship the deity that favors America most, and from the temptation to worship the technology that can make life as we want it to be.
We need to think aright about God because our thinking about life can’t rise any higher than our thoughts about God. If our god is the god of America supremely, what will we do when we see the god of China gets more powerful than our god? If our god is the deity that drives technology, what will we do when ethical questions are swept aside with broad sweeps, and we find ourselves facing Mr. Hyde when we look into the mirror? It matters how we think about God. It matters that we say from the heart “We believe in one God.”
It was a huge achievement to recognize that there is only one God. It still is a huge achievement to realize not only that there is one God, but also that we submit to His sovereignty over all life.
I believe the reason why God gave Israel the Fourth Commandment, “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy,” was that keeping sacred one day in seven brought a continual reminder in the cycle of time that there is one God, and living willingly, indeed joyfully under His sovereignty is needful for life. It seems to me that the Lord’s Day has become less and less important to the Lord’s people as we have been lured to bow to the gods of nation and technology. Keeping the Lord’s Day is not just a matter of legalism. It is a matter of keeping focus that there is One God, in whom we trust.
How do you think of God? Today we have said together, “We believe in one God.” You said this with me. I said this with you. When we say this together, we willingly bow the knees of our hearts to Him. Let us leave this place this morning looking the week ahead in terms of this confession.
How shall we then live? We go out to answer that question. I pray you and I will answer it well, to the glory of God.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we bow before You and acknowledge You to be the Lord. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2004
We Believe
We Believe
(First in a Series on the Nicene Creed)
Deuteronomy 6: 4-9 / Mark 9: 14-24
September 5th, 2004
Jesus taught us that we should love God with all of our mind as well as with our heart, soul, and strength. This morning I begin with you a series of sermons in which I attempt to love God with my mind. I ask you to join me with your minds. I hope you will think about and talk together about what you hear.
We will begin to explore an ancient statement of faith in God, the Nicene Creed that was hammered out in the year AD 325, in a little town in northern Turkey. Why should we devote several months of Sundays to thinking about what Christians thought so long ago?
Because what they thought about is still important for us to think about. They wrote a very important expression of faith in God. The Nicene Creed was composed by Christians from many countries who came together not long after when to be caught as a Christian resulted in terrifying torture. At last they were free to come together to think about what was most important.
The Nicene Creed was written in a time when the young Church was also in terrible discord. We know something about that.
Today there is widespread disagreement between Christians, and that’s like it was back then. We need to remember what’s at the heart of our faith.
But our situation is different because it has been so easy for so long to identify oneself as a Christian. Then it was new to come together like this because so recently Christians were persecuted terribly. Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, remarked that in the ancient world hostile nations embraced or at least respected the superstitious of other countries. . . except for the Jews, and after them, the Christians.
It’s so easy to be a Christian today that some Christians are very “in your face” about it. They aren’t alone. Being a Muslim, or being a Mormon, or being a whatever has become very “in your face.” This cacophonous hodge-podge of proud religions has bred a crisis of faith for a lot of people. When you see many sects proudly claiming, “We’re the one,” which one do you trust?
Ruth Tucker, a professor at Calvin College, wrote a book a few years ago called Walking Away from the Faith. It is full of stories of people who were once well known as Christians who abandoned their faith. Why? For many different reasons. But mostly because of the silence of God when people desperately needed to hear Him. For people overwhelmed with the silence of God it is puzzling to hear others who talk easily about hearing God.
Within the church as well as outside the church there are many people who really struggle with the silence of God. There are people who stay in the church who have questions very much like those of people who say they are not religious. I have the hunch many people who say they aren’t religious are just admitting they’ve not heard the voice of the God a lot of religious people say they hear.
Those who are in doubt are further put off by some of the effects of self-confident religion. Arrogance about unseen things is off-putting. But worse than arrogance is the terrorism that has become such a part of our religion-saturated globe. Whether it be Iraqi Muslims who blow themselves up in suicide-raids, or Chechnan separatists who butcher little children in Russia, or people who murder doctors at abortion clinics, religious-motivated terrorism does little to convince doubting people about God. Religion can seem to instigate evil behavior.
But it’s not just the religion of terrorism that is off-putting. Where’s any sign of humility, even token modesty in speaking of this unseen God?
I get up early every morning and walk out to get the newspaper. When I look up into the early morning sky on a clear night and see it filled with stars so far away that the light I see actually was generated many years ago, I feel dread that I make my living speaking about God every Sunday morning! I resonate with the psalmist who asked, “When I consider the heavens the work of thy fingers, what is man that thou art mindful of him?”
When I look up I’m moved to silence more than to speech. A lot of people feel awe. I have atheist friends who feel awe before creation. I believe the immodesty and violence with which the word “God” is flashed before the world today leads many thoughtful people who feel this awe to pull back from specific belief in God. What is the path from this awe to faith, to trust in God as a Personal Being?
Some people think that the progress of modern science has made it hard to believe in God. Stephen Gould argued in his little book, Rocks of Ages, that religion and science talk about two non-overlapping arenas. Many scientists politely disagree. John Polkinghorne’s thoughtful books about God start with his findings as a physicist.
I believe the partisanship of much talk about God is off-putting to many thoughtful people. How can you trust that I will offer anything more than a partisan view that hopes to win your trust in the competing religious market place? Maybe you wonder if I feel genuine modesty before the unspeakable grandeur of the universe when I speak of its Creator.
All I can say is that I sense myself very much to be a pilgrim, a fellow pilgrim with you. I have personally placed my faith in Jesus Christ, not as a partisan, but as a pilgrim who has an invincible surmise that there is a God and that Jesus was more than a mere man. Something weird happened on Easter that compels my trust in Jesus.
Furthermore, I have few competitive instincts in matters of faith. Some fellow Christians see this as a liability. I am lured to Jesus because it’s clear when I read the Bible He loved not just my kind of people. Loving Jesus does not mean I must hate the Buddha, or Mohammed. I love Jesus because “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” to die for it. There is too much I don’t know to be arrogant.
God, the Bible tells us, is pleased to dwell in a humble and contrite heart. Not only God loves a humble and contrite heart. Particularly in matters of faith, doubting people are attracted to humility. I believe many people who don’t believe in God are put off by the absence of humility in many who say they do.
Another reason why people have doubts about God is how much suffering there is in the world. Particularly if we think of God as good and loving, and all powerful, why then in His world is there so much pain? How could a good God allow terrorism to go on? How could a good, all-powerful God have designed a system where the balance of nature depends on animals preying on each other?
But worse than all the predation in the animal world is the way human beings crush each other, creating a hopeless class of humanity, the poor who will never rise out of their suffering. How could a good God create people in His image, even religious people who say they love God, and then cause such suffering to each other?
In the lesson from the New Testament we read this morning a despairing father said to Jesus, “I believe, help my unbelief!” I suspect that his honest plea to Jesus is echoed in the hearts of an awful lot of people.
In the Bible we read that God told the ancient Israelites to remember every day one simple matter. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” These words were to be on their heart throughout the day. And this was the basic thing they were to teach their children.
It wasn’t a complicated teaching. It wasn’t an arrogant teaching. Moses taught them this after they’d seen amazing things happen in their nation’s history. The more thoughtful of the Israelites knew that their nation’s history had a higher purpose, to bring blessing to all the earth. The God whom they worshipped said to Abraham, “In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” The sense of this universal blessing was to keep their focus on God rather than on themselves as the conduits of God’s blessing. So long as they remembered to remind one another that they were to love God with heart, soul, and strength, their life had purpose.
Perhaps some would say that it was “brain-washing” that took place in devout Israeli households. Many people today favor a different kind of brain-washing, a kind that pummels young and old minds with the idea that all that matters is how much you have and how much you can consume and winning, whether it be games or battles.
The Nicene Creed was composed after Christianity won in a long struggle with other ideologies in the Roman world. But it did not systematize a spirit of triumph. Instead it reminded Christians of the God the ancient Israelites confessed morning and evening when they said, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”
A creed is a statement of faith. The word “creed,” comes from the Latin word that means “I believe.” But I have called my remarks today, “We believe.” In some of the early editions of this creed the first word was “we believe,” and in others it was “I believe.” But “we believe” is how this statement of faith was apparently first written..
The rampant individualism of today in our democratic society makes many people think it dishonest to say, “We believe.” After all, how do we know that others who say, “we believe” actually believe what I believe?
There is another Creed better known to most of us than the Nicene Creed. The Apostles’ Creed which was composed as we know it after the Nicene Creed was written, starts, “I believe.” It was a statement of faith people would say when they were baptized. It is an individual statement. The Nicene Creed is a statement of faith in which we humbly dare to presume that the object of our faith is larger than my personal opinion. I join with you and you with me as we say, “We believe.”
There are two questions that have haunted people of all time, to which the Nicene Creed offers an answer. The first question is “What’s next?” The second question is, “What else?”
I doubt that there is anyone who doesn’t wonder, “What’s next?” Movies like “Ghosts,” fascinate us with tales of the lingering unseen presence of people who have died. Haunted houses at Haloween would have no interest if folk didn’t wonder what’s next? Not only old people die. Young people die too. Even babies die. As I get older and read the daily obituaries I’m struck by how many people younger than I am have already finished their lives. Then what? The Nicene Creed offers a simple answer to that question that thoughtful people have found intriguing. We will ponder than answer.
Hinging on the question “What’s next,” is the other one. “What else?” We live in fabulous homes, drive fabulous cars, eat fabulous food, play and work with fabulous computers, but every one of these fabulous things leaves us unsatisfied. I think one reason alcohol and drugs may be so popular is that they erase the question, “What else?”
It’s a question that defies your desire to have proof. A simple answer may be the best one. What else? Well, God, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” The ones who wrote this Creed did not try to prove the existence of God. And humbly they admitted together, “We believe.” It’s a liberating trust. Generations of people have found release from their striving, from their anxiety in resting in and assenting to the basic Fact of God.
This morning we gather around the Communion Table. On this table are the two elements of bread and wine, simple, common elements found in our kitchens. We remember that the God in whom we say, “We believe,” was present, and people saw Him and heard Him. Some were amazed and some were appalled. And those who were appalled crucified Him, little knowing that in doing this they lifted Him up high where all people could see Him.
If you can say with me, “We believe” in this Jesus, you’re welcome at this Table. If you do not believe yet, it is best not to take this bread and wine, because it will be meaningless to you. But know that it is here before you as an invitation you can see, “Come, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” Jesus said. I invite you to trust in God, in this Jesus whom God provided for us to see and hear, and see if it doesn’t bring some peace into your heart.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we believe; help our unbelief. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)