I Believe – The Father

I Believe – The Father
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
March 6, 2011

Peace, Friends!

Have you ever picked up someone else’s journal and read through it?  Willing to admit it?  If you have, then you will quickly realize that you’re looking at the world through their eyes.  You’re seeing the things they see and in the way that they see them.

Today we begin a series on the Apostles’ Creed which is like the journal of the early church.  When you pick it up you see the world the way they saw it.  In some sense, the Apostles’ Creed is also the journal of the church today.  It is a corporate confession of faith.

The story is told by Justo L. Gonzalez in his book, The Apostles’ Creed for Today, about a monk who went to see his spiritual director.  He told him that he didn’t know what to do in worship when they recited the Apostles’ Creed because he didn’t believe all of it.  The spiritual director said, “Recite it anyway.”  Again the monk came back and told the director, “I can’t say this.  I don’t believe it.”  The spiritual director said, “Recite it anyway.”  A third time the monk came and said, “I don’t understand why you keep telling me to recite something I don’t believe.”  The spiritual director said, “Because it is not your creed.  It is the church’s creed.”

So does the Apostles’ Creed not mean anything for us today?  Is what we’re up to just a historical exercise?  Absolutely not.  Yesterday I presided at the funeral of Ken Ziegler, a member of our church.  Ken died two Sundays ago after suffering from Multiple Sclerosis for thirty-some years.  Over the past two years Ken was in the hospital more times than any of us would care to be.  When I would visit, it was always a little hard to carry on a conversation with Ken because his voice was so week.  I would ask questions and he would give simple answers.

One time Mary asked me if I would pray the Apostles’ Creed with them.  I came to find out that Ken and Mary would pray this creed often before going to bed.  So from that point on I would pray the Apostles’ Creed or one of the other prayers that she told me that they prayed.  I would end the visit with these prayers, and I would invite Ken to pray along with me.  I would hear him whispering, “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth…”  Ken would say more words in those prayers than all the rest of the time I visited him.  He would say them because they gave him hope as his body deteriorated.  I can’t think of a better endorsement of the meaningfulness of the Apostles’ Creed than it being prayed on the lips of one who is suffering at the end of his life.  So let’s take a moment and pray the Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day He rose again.
He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.
Amen.

The Trinity

So when you look closely at the Apostles’ Creed you’ll notice three parts.  The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit.  Here we’re talking about the Trinity.  The word “Trinity” doesn’t show up in the Bible, but the idea is present in many places, some of them obvious and others more hidden.

One hidden place where we see the Trinity is in the very first verse of the Bible.  We read, “In the beginning God [plural] created [singular] the heavens and the earth. The earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness. And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface” (Genesis 1:1-2, NLT).  In Hebrew the word for God is plural and the tense of the verb “to create” is singular.  So right off the bat we have an odd thing going on.  The subject of the sentence doesn’t match the tense of the verb.  It would be like saying, “I is.”  God is both plural and singular at the same time, and that is what Christians confess: God is one God eternally in three persons.  That’s what the Trinity means: God is The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, one God eternally in three persons.  I believe in The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit.

A weak metaphor for the Trinity that is often used is water.  It is said that water is one element that can be a liquid, a gas, and a solid.  The only problem with this metaphor is that it is not all three at the same time.  It is not eternally a liquid, a gas, and a solid.  It is one or the other.  A stronger metaphor is a triangle.  A triangle is always three angles and/or sides and one shape.  If you take away one of the sides or angles it is no longer a triangle.  It is eternally three and one at the same time.  God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I Believe

So what does it mean when we say, “I believe”?  Are we just talking about knowledge here?  Is that what the creed is all about?  Accumulation of knowledge?  Absolutely not.  Belief as the creed talks about it is not equal to knowledge for Jesus says, “Do you still think it’s enough just to believe that there is one God? Well, even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror!” (James 2:19, NLT).

Rather, when the creed says, “I believe” it’s talking more about trust.  It’s more like Psalm 31 which says, “But I am trusting you, O LORD, saying, ‘You are my God!’” (Psalm 31:14, NLT).

Have you ever had a moment when you thought you believed something in your head but when push came to shove you weren’t so sure you trusted what you thought you believed?  The two are very different.  At the Grand Canyon is a new attraction called The Grand Canyon Skywalk.  It is 1.2 million pounds of glass that extends 70 feet over the canyon’s rim 4000 feet above the Colorado River.  Very competent engineers have built this to sustain your body weight and the weight of many many more, but believing and trusting are two very different things when you are faced with the choice about walking out on to the skywalk or not.  Belief is less about knowledge and more about trust.

The Father

So if belief is about trust, who exactly is The Father that we say we’re trusting when we confess the creed?  Recently in the USA Weekend insert in the paper was a headline article about how Americans imagine God.  Several people well known and not gave their description of God.  Michael Emerson, the actor who played Benjamin Linus in Lost, caught my eye when he said that God was “a kernel of positive electromagnetic power in each of us, a remnant of the origin of the universe that can flare up within us in the form of grace or inspiration.”  This is a very different way of imagining God than when we confess that we believe or trust in God the Father.  When we say that we believe in The Father we are confessing a personal God, not an impersonal force.

The Father is first the Father of Jesus.  We read in John, “‘Where is your father?’ [the Pharisees] asked. Jesus answered, ‘Since you don’t know who I am, you don’t know who my Father is. If you knew me, then you would know my Father, too’” (John 8:19, NLT).  The word that Jesus usually used to refer to God was Abba.

I worked in an outdoors store one Christmas break while in seminary.  One day an Israeli woman came in to exchange something.  There was a little confusion, and she had to call someone so she dialed her cell phone, and despite studying Hebrew for three years, I didn’t understand one word of the Hebrew she spoke except the first word which was “Abba.”  She was calling her dad.  “Father” is probably a little too formal of an English translation for “Abba.”  It should probably be more like “dad” or “papa.”  When we confess that we believe in God the Father, we are confessing a personal, knowable God that is like a dad or papa.

So The Father is The Father first of Jesus and secondarily The Father is our Father.  When the disciples ask Jesus to pray he says, “Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” (Matthew 6:9, NRSV).  For some of us this is not good news.  It reminds us of our earthly fathers who were not loving fathers.  Some of us were even treated in unspeakable ways by our earthly fathers.  But this is running things the wrong way.  It is not that God is like our earthly fathers, but rather that our earthly fathers should strive to have the character of God: loving, mercifully, graceful, patient, long-suffering, and so on.  God as our Father holds our earthly fathers and mothers accountable to God’s character as Father.

This brings up an interesting point.  Is God also The Mother or only The Father?  There are many descriptions in the Bible as a mother.  Consider just this one: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15, NRSV).  Here God is a mother.  So in some ways God is also a Mother, but I am not going to go into this in depth because this summer I’ll be touching on this question more fully in a series called Questions 2.0.  For now let us understand that when we say, “I believe in the Father” we mean that we trust in a God who is personal and knowable and that this God is first The Father of Jesus Christ and then our Father too.

Almighty

As we continue in the creed we confess that God is almighty.  God is often called Almighty in scripture or The Almighty One.  We read in the book of Revelation, “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega — the beginning and the end,’ says the Lord God. ‘I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come, the Almighty One’” (Revelation 1:8, NLT).  To be the beginning and the end at the same time sounds pretty powerful.  Sometimes we say that God is omnipotent meaning “all powerful” or “omniscient” meaning “all knowing.”

When we say that God is almighty we are confessing that God is beyond our conception.  We can’t fully understand God.  We can know God just as we can know another person, but in the same way that we can never fully understand another person, we can never fully understand God.  St. Augustine says, “God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand.  If you understand, you have failed.”

I think that perhaps the best way to grasp at what it means for God to be Almighty is to confess that God is three and one at the same time.  In other words, it seems pretty hard to understand that God is Trinity: one God eternally in three persons.  But God is almighty and able to be three and one at the same time.

Does this mean God can do anything God wants?  Well, in some ways yes and in other ways no.  Recently, Alexis, a youth in our church asked me whether God could create another being more powerful than God.  This kind of sounds like another question that I sometimes get asked: could God build a rock so big that even God can’t throw it?  Or what about this question: could God be unloving?  The answer to each of these questions is NO.  God cannot act outside of God’s character.

Creator

One way that God did act within God’s character is in creation.  “In the beginning God created…”  I was talking with an atheist one time who was telling me that his god was all creation and all the forces within it.  I asked where this god came from.  He said that creation came from evolution.  Now I don’t have a problem synthesizing evolution and God, but I wondered how the first thing even existed to begin evolution.  He said that if my God was only in charge of creating that first thing, then God wasn’t very interesting to him.  I didn’t think of it at the time but I would have liked to have responded, “Well, at least my God created your god.”

When we confess that God is creator of heaven and earth we confess that not only did God begin creation, but God also sustains creation.  We read in Hebrews, “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist” (Hebrews 2:10, NRSV).  God is the source, ground, and being of all that is.  We were not just created by God, but it is only in God that we continue to even exist.

So What?

So what?  So we confess that we trust in God the Father Almighty who created the heavens and the earth.  So what?  What does it mean for my life today?  Let me offer three answers to that question.

First, it matters what we confess because Christians have a uniquely Christian perspective on who God is.  As our world continues to get smaller, and as we continue to come face to face with people and religions who have different perspectives on God, it is important that we not lose sight of what exactly it is that we believe about God.  Gregory of Nazianzus, a 4^th century church leader, put it most succinctly when he said, “When I say  God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”  This is the God that Christians say we trust.

This conception of God does not preclude conversation with people of other faiths.  Rather, it gives us the opportunity for real honest authentic interfaith dialogue.  It means that we can then talk about places of agreement and disagreement both.  If we neglect either agreement or disagreement, then we neglect authentic conversation.

Second, it matters what we confess because our belief about God gives us hope and meaning in life.  Bertrand Russell, a 20^th century atheist, said when he was dying, “There is a darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”  No God = no hope.  No God = no ultimate meaning.  No God = triviality for a moment.  God = hope.  God = ultimate meaning.  There is a reason that when Ken could not say much more he would use his breath to utter the prayer of the Apostles’ Creed as he lay in a hospital bed.  His belief and trust in God gave him hope and meaning.

Third, when we say we believe in The Father we imply something else.  We imply a child, a son.  But now we’re jumping ahead of ourselves.  That’s next week.

I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

Share on Facebook