Nicene Creed

07/20/11 Nicene Creed GUMC Youth

What exactly is a Christian? There are some who would say that a person is a Christian because they live a certain way; some would say that a person is a Christian if they have particular opinions about issues like homosexuality and abortion, not to mention a bunch of other political issues; some other people would say that Christianity is all about love and that anyone who loves (in a way that the culture defines love), must be a Christian. Perhaps more people would say that a person is a Christian if they go to church with some regularity at all. But is that what it means to be a Christian? I think that the way our society talks about what it means to be a Christian misses the point altogether.

The reason why I think this is because, when we look throughout history, we see that a Christian is not someone who does particular things, but one who believes particular things. Lots of people can care for the poor and the oppressed; lots of people can think that love is important; lots of people can do good to all they meet, but a Christian does all these things because of what they believe about God, about humanity, and about the relation between the two. To a Christian, love is not a goal in itself, it is not something that we can detach from God and define however we want to. For a Christian, love is something that is defined by God's love; we love because Christ loves us. This means that our love for others is not based on what they have done to us, nor on what we think they deserve, but on the fact that we have been loved; God loves us and loves them, so we love them, too.

When people talk about it being important that people believe certain things, it is easy to get the feeling that we aren't dealing with the real issues. After all, what stops people from saying that they believe something and then living however they feel like living? History is full of examples of people who have claimed to be Christians but have done absolutely terrible things, sometimes even in God's name. If it is so clear that someone can believe in Jesus and then be a horrible person, what good is it to talk about what a Christian is in terms of what they believe?

I am more and more convinced that, when someone says they believe and then goes and treats other people cruelly or hatefully, the problem isn't what they say they believe, but in what they really do believe. If you want to know what someone really believes, deep down inside, don't listen to what they say, but look at what they do. You will get a much clearer picture of what they really believe from their actions than their words. The same goes for us, too. If you want to know what you really believe, look at how you live and what you do, the choices you make. You may be surprised that the things you really believe in are not what you thought they were.

I want to show you what I mean by telling you a story. It is a true story, though it didn't happen to me. I had a professor in seminary who was an important mentor in my life. He got his Ph.D. from Boston College and he had a good friend who was in seminary there at the time and who was a fairly new Christian. You need to know that people from Boston can get very feisty and argumentative. This seminary student was on a plane and sat down next to a businessman, who was also from Boston. It came out that this friend was a seminary student, so the businessman made it clear that he was a committed atheist. They then began to get into a loud argument, with about half the plane listening in. They went back and forth about all kinds of things until they finally got down to root of the issue and realized that the thing that divided them was their view of humanity.

The businessman claimed that human beings were basically good while the seminary student claimed that human beings were created good but had become tragically flawed. They went back and forth and back and forth on this issue until the seminary student said, "You don't really believe that and I can prove it." "No you can't." "Yes I can." "No you can't." "Yes I can." Finally the seminarian said, "Show me your keys." "What?" "Show me your keys." You see, there is a lot of crime in Boston, so you lock everything. You even lock the wheel lugs on your car because, if you have nice wheels and they aren't locked up, they will probably be stolen. So this businessman, who said that human beings were basically good, had a whole bunch of keys so he could lock up all his valuables so they wouldn't be stolen. You see, although he said that people were basically good, but he behaved as though at least a certain portion of human beings could not be trusted and must be guarded against. It turned out that this man did not really believe what he thought he believed.

Anyway, back to the question, "What is a Christian." If there were anything in history like a definition of what a Christian is, it is the Nicene Creed. Some of you may be familiar with it. Others might be more familiar with the Apostles' Creed. They are very similar, but the Nicene Creed has been held up by more churches throughout history than any other statement of faith. I want to go through the Nicene Creed, statement by statement, and make some comments on it. I think that if we actually listen to what the Creed declares, we will find that, if we really believe what it talks about, it means some pretty concrete things and we find that we can't just say it and then go out and do whatever we want. You can't take what I have to say about the Creed and say its a true paraphrase of it, but I think that it will highlight some key issues. It is entirely possible to have a whole message on every one of these points, (and who knows, we might do that some day), but I'm going to try to summarize some main points.

"I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible." What I think we need to get from this is that God is always, always first. Before there was anything else, there was God. This is why I think that a Christian does not necessarily have to reject the Big Bang Theory. It seems to be to be fully compatible with this conviction. There was a time when there was no universe, then, the universe came into being. All a Christian needs to do is stress that this universe is not self-generating and that God was the one who finally created it.

But what this means is that whatever we think about, whether it is the love of God, the power of God, or anything else, God always comes first. God loved us before we ever loved him. Nothing we can do can ever get before God; whenever we make a move, we find that God was there already. The Psalmist writes, "Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the grave, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will lay hold of me. If I say, 'Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, and the light around me will be night,' Even the darkness is not dark to you, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to you." God always comes first.

"And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father; by whom all things were made." I want to draw your attention to what is probably the single most important phrase in this entire Creed. If you don't get anything else, make sure you understand this. Jesus Christ, who came among us and that we are learning about in Mark, is "of one being with the Father." Do you know what that means? It means that the man, Jesus of Nazareth, is God!

If Jesus is God, what does that mean? It means that Jesus needs to be the source and norm of all our thoughts about God. If we believe something about God and it doesn't line up with what we actually see in Jesus, it means that we need to rethink what we believe. This doesn't seem like that big of a deal. However, it is incredible how much this matters. Lots of people will talk about God as if Jesus had nothing to say about it.

Once, when I had the chance to give a talk to a bunch of college students, we split them up into two groups and gave each group a piece of paper. On one, we wrote the word "God" and asked them to come up with all the words and ideas they associated with God. On the other, we wrote the word "Jesus" and asked them the same thing. It was absolutely amazing how different the two papers were. The God paper had lots of words like "Powerful," "Majesty," "Authority," and things like that, while the Jesus paper had words like "Love," "Compassion," "Mercy," and things like that. But if Jesus is really God, and if there is no God other than the God who came among us as Jesus, how can those two ideas be so far apart? Jesus is the way we know God, he is God in flesh, God with us, God coming among us so that we might know who he really is. As Christians, we are not interested in abstract speculation about what God might be like, but about the concrete revelation in Jesus Christ of who God is. I could go on all night about this point, but we will unpack it as we go through Mark, so, in the interest of time, I will move on to the rest of the Creed.

"Who for us and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was made flesh by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end."

This part of the Nicene Creed teaches us that it is finally the Bible that we need to turn to if we want to understand God. Now, you might be thinking, "Wait a minute, the Bible wasn't mentioned anywhere in that passage. It's on the screen and I can see that the word 'Bible' or 'Scripture' isn't up there at all." That might be so, but the big point we need to take from this is about the Bible nonetheless. You see, when God became a human being, he did so at a particular time and at a particular place. Jesus actually lived in first century Israel and actually had particular disciples who followed him and did what he did. And at some point, Jesus ascended to heaven and was no longer on our earth in the same way. Because God was actually physically present as Jesus Christ in that time and place, in a way that he wasn't at any other time and place, it means that we need to understand that time and place as set apart in a special way. We cannot take any other time and place and substitute it in for the actual time and place when and where God came among us. Basically, what I'm saying is that, unless you know of another book where we get to see, not only Jesus in his first century context, but the whole history of Israel leading up to it, then we can use that instead of the Bible. However, since no such book exists, we are stuck with the Bible whether we like it or not.

"And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets." Being a Christian really, really makes a difference in our lives. Again, you might wonder how we get from this statement in the Creed, but it isn't that odd. After all, we are saying that the Holy Spirit is just as much God as the Father and the Son. This Holy Spirit is given to the people of God, so that God himself sets up residence inside of us. Paul even writes to the Romans, saying, "If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him." If we are not people in whom the Spirit lives, we do not belong to Christ. And if God himself lives inside of us, surely our lives must change.

The last part of the Nicene Creed is this, "In one holy catholic and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen." This statement has been debated over and over again throughout the history of the church and you can find lots of books that try to explain this in one way or another, but the point I want you to take from it is this: We absolutely cannot be Christians on our own. I know that we live in America and you don't find the individualist spirit stronger anywhere in the world than in America, but, whether we like it or not, you can not be a Christian without me, and I cannot be a Christian without you. You and I are bound together by the blood of Christ, and we are bound just as strongly to every other Christian in the world. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are the body of Christ here on earth throughout history.

This is really important. We need to understand that the Creed is saying what modern psychology is only just now catching up with. We are not who we are independently of our relationships. I don't just mean that boyfriends and girlfriends have an influence on us, but that they, along with other close friends and family, and even, sometimes, brief acquaintances, play a role in who we are as human beings. If it were not for the relationships in our lives, we would not be who we are today. If our relationships are good, that is a good thing, but if our relationships are bad or destructive, they will have a destructive impact, not only on our lives, but on who we are.

I've thrown a lot at you tonight. If it is helpful to you, I post all my messages online so you can read through them again. We will come back to these points over and over again. If we take these things that the Nicene Creed teaches us seriously, and I mean really seriously, the power of God will transform our lives and we will become more and more like Jesus, which is precisely what we, as Christians, are called to do. I will be glad to talk about any of these points with any of you at any time, and we can have a question night about things like this if you let me know that is what you want to do. As it is, I think we should wrap this time up and let it sink in. let us pray.

AMEN