Difference between revisions of "Sermon for August 18th, 2019"

From Neal's Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Line 26: Line 26:
  
 
Πιστεύω εἰς θεòν πατέρα, παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς.
 
Πιστεύω εἰς θεòν πατέρα, παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς.
 +
 +
In any case, poetry is easier to teach, learn and memorize, something that would have been important in the days before the invention of the printing press and widespread literacy.
 +
 +
God's role as the creator of heaven and earth is reflected in the famous passage at the beginning of the gospel of John (today's scriptue passage): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  This has echoes even further back to the opening of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew scriptures.  There's a subtle difference between Genesis and John:  In Genesis, we read that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."  Simple and straightforward.  But in John, we read that in the beginning was the Word.  And the "word" creates heaven and earth.  What is the word?  It's God, of course, but it's also... a metaphor.  This is important:
 +
 +
Crash refresher course in English literature.  What's a metaphor?  It's a poetic feature of language where one thing is used to represent or stand in for something it is clearly not, for comparison and for poetic effect.  Examples:  Her hair was a long, flowing river.  Those two friends are peas in a pod.  That boy is a walking dictionary. Is her hair *really* a river? Are the two friends actually vegetables? Is the boy really a book, with pages, and legs?  Of course not.  Is God literally a word? No. We all recognize a metaphor when we see one...except when we see it too often, like in the Apostles' creed. 
 +
 +
I believe in God, the Father almighty.  Anyone see the metaphor there?  God as Father is just that...a very overused metaphor that we sometimes take a little bit too literally.  But the earliest Christians who penned the Apostles' Creed would have certainly recognized it that way.  Both God as *our* father, and God as the father of Jesus were expressions intended to convey a special relationship of some sort, not to imply shared DNA (which wouldn't be discovered for another 18 centuries).

Revision as of 21:31, 16 August 2019

John 1:1-5(OT page 91)

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

The Apostles’ Creed – I Believe in God

Last week, for my family and many of yours, was the first week of school, which often involves giving last-minute instructions to children while you are headed out the door in the morning, and hoping that they remember, or that your instructions even make sense in the rush and haste of the moment.

I'm reminded of the story about a truck driver who was delivering some penguins to the local zoo. But his truck broke down right outside the city. Luckily, a pickup truck passed by, and the driver flagged him down, giving him $300 and telling him, "Please take these penguins to the zoo." A few hours later the man saw the same guy heading the opposite direction with the penguins still in the back of his pickup. He yelled at the man, "You were supposed to take them to the zoo!" The pickup driver replies, "I did, but we had money left over, so now we're going to the movies."

Clarity in directions is important. In fact, the Apostle's Creed, (which is the subject of today's sermon and the next five after it) probably represents an early attempt in Christianity to do just that--to clarify Jesus' last instructions as he was ascending into heaven, and told his followers to "Go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

In my imagination, I like to think of them all standing there, listening to these instructions, saying, "Absolutely, Jesus, we'll do it! We just have a few questions about what you mean when you say...awww shoot, he's gone. Guess we'll have to wing it."

There's an old tradition that says the apostles went back to their house after that and immediately wrote down everything Jesus had taught them in 12 different statements, each one contributed by one of the 12 apostles--hence the name, "The Apostles' Creed."

As quaint as that tradition sounds, there are two problems: First, the Creed doesn't really contain much of what Jesus taught--if anything, it's more about who he was (or who his early followers believed he was) than what he did. And the second problem is that there's not even any documented evidence of the Creed in its final form until the 8th century (seven hundred years after Jesus lived). Much of the Creed goes back to the 5th century (all but a few lines) and some key parts of of it go back to the third century. A few lines can be traced to passages of scripture, so possibly as early as the 2nd century, but what this all means is that the Apostle's Creed most likely evolved over time, growing and changing in the hands of many different authors, as the early Christian movement grew and changed, and needed to clarify certain things, like what exactly Jesus meant when he said "God the Father" or "the Son" or "The Holy Spirit."

In fact, that's exactly how the Apostles' Creed is arranged: Into three sections, each beginning with the words, "I believe in..." followed by what early Christians believed about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. The longest section is about Jesus (which makes sense, because that was the thing that most set Christians apart from their Jewish relatives or from Greek and Roman religions). The next longest is the section about the Holy Spirit, which contains all the early Christian beliefs about the church and its work in our lives.

The shortest section is the one we're considering today, the section about God. That makes sense, too, since it's actually the part most people in the ancient world could agree on: "I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth." Ironically, this shortest section is the hardest one for us in the 21st century, but I'll come back to that later.

But first, I want to spend a little bit of time reflecting on what those words meant to the Christians who wrote them, and who first spoke them together in their services of worship. We'll work our way backwards, beginning with the words "Creator of heaven and earth." These words don't appear in the earliest versions of the Creed, and were probably added in the seventh century. My guess is that they were added to give God something to do, balancing out the other two sections, where Jesus and the Holy Spirit have lists of things they do. What does God do that is unique? What is God's special role apart from the Son and the Spirit? God is the creator of heaven and earth.

The "heaven" in the Creed does not necessarily refer to the afterlife--in Greek its the word "οὐρανοῦ" which is plural, "the heavens" and in Latin it's the word "caeli" which like it's Spanish descendant "cielo" simply means "the sky." God created all that is above--the sky--and all that is below--the earth.

In Latin, there's a neat play on the two verbs in this phrase, "Credo" (believe) and "Creo" (create). You can still hear this in Spanish, "Credo en el Creador." One theory is that the Apostles' Creed was originally written to be more poetic than dogmatic, more like a playful work of art than a binding legal contract. That same playfulness shows up in early Greek versions of the creed, too. Listen for the alliteration on the letter P in this first line:

Πιστεύω εἰς θεòν πατέρα, παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς.

In any case, poetry is easier to teach, learn and memorize, something that would have been important in the days before the invention of the printing press and widespread literacy.

God's role as the creator of heaven and earth is reflected in the famous passage at the beginning of the gospel of John (today's scriptue passage): In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. This has echoes even further back to the opening of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew scriptures. There's a subtle difference between Genesis and John: In Genesis, we read that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Simple and straightforward. But in John, we read that in the beginning was the Word. And the "word" creates heaven and earth. What is the word? It's God, of course, but it's also... a metaphor. This is important:

Crash refresher course in English literature. What's a metaphor? It's a poetic feature of language where one thing is used to represent or stand in for something it is clearly not, for comparison and for poetic effect. Examples: Her hair was a long, flowing river. Those two friends are peas in a pod. That boy is a walking dictionary. Is her hair *really* a river? Are the two friends actually vegetables? Is the boy really a book, with pages, and legs? Of course not. Is God literally a word? No. We all recognize a metaphor when we see one...except when we see it too often, like in the Apostles' creed.

I believe in God, the Father almighty. Anyone see the metaphor there? God as Father is just that...a very overused metaphor that we sometimes take a little bit too literally. But the earliest Christians who penned the Apostles' Creed would have certainly recognized it that way. Both God as *our* father, and God as the father of Jesus were expressions intended to convey a special relationship of some sort, not to imply shared DNA (which wouldn't be discovered for another 18 centuries).