I Believe – The Holy Spirit
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
March 20, 2011

Peace, Friends!

I came across a blog this past week that is by an aspiring writer.  She tells the story of picking up a book on a slow day at work and realizing it was someone’s journal.  The journal had been lying on the counter for years, so she decided to read it.  She says:

They’d listed presents for kids, feelings and thoughts, shopping lists. It was like a car wreck: I knew I shouldn’t read it but I couldn’t stop. She pondered whether her son thought she was a push-over. She thought buying an x-box and six games plus other stuff was too expensive for her son’s birthday – yet she bought it anyway. She needed to work on her ‘inner core.’ It was really fascinating actually, getting this inside-view of someone’s life – someone who I didn’t even know.

As we finish up this three-week series on the Apostles’ Creed, we’ve been doing the same thing.  We’ve been reading through the journal of the early church.  We’re seeing things they saw that we might not have noticed.  Not only that but we’re also seeing some things that we did notice, but this time we’re seeing them in a whole new way.

The Apostles’ Creed has been used over the last two-thousand years as a baptismal confession.  When you wanted to be baptized, this is what you had to say you believed in.  When we say “believe” we mean not just acknowledge intellectually but also trust.

Not so much the words but the reality behind the words.  What is that reality?

Trinity

The basic fundamental belief of the Apostles’ Creed is in its three-part structure.  I believe in the Father…I believe in the Son…I believe in the Holy Spirit.  This is what Christians have called the Trinity.  The word “Trinity” doesn’t show up in the Bible, but the idea is all over the place.  Consider this passage from Matthew:

And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16-17, NRSV).

Here we see Jesus being baptized and all three persons of the Trinity show up.  God the Father is the voice from heaven.  Jesus the Son is “the Beloved.”  The Spirit proceeds from the Father and descends like a dove on the Son.

Are we talking about three gods here?  No way.  When Christians say they believe or trust in the Trinity they mean that God is eternally one God in three Persons.  The word “person” trips us up a bit, but language always fails us when we trying to describe ultimately reality.

Each week I’ve been giving you a weak and strong metaphor to help your imagination grasp how something can be one and three at the same time.    All metaphors break down at some point, but some break down quicker than others.  A weak metaphor that is sometimes used to describe the Trinity is an egg.  An egg has a shell, a yolk, and a white.  On the surface this makes sense to compare an egg to the Trinity, but like last week’s weak metaphor, an apple, each part of the egg is just that, a part.  You can more or less take away one of these parts and still have a recognizable egg.  When Christians say that the Trinity is one God eternally in three persons, we don’t mean that the Father is part of God and the Son is another part of God and the Spirit is a third part.  Or that you can take away one of those parts and still have the Trinity recognizable.

The last two weeks I introduced you to two stronger metaphors.  The first was a triangle.  A triangle is eternally three angles and one object.  You take away one of those angles and you’ve no longer got a triangle.  Or last week we looked at speech.  Speech has three “parts” that must always be there: the speaker (the Father), the word (the Son), and the breath (the Spirit).  You take away one “part” and you no longer have speech.

A third metaphor that I want to share with you today is fire.  Fire is made up of three things that are always there.  First, fire has a flame.  Second, fire also gives off light.  Third, fire has heat.  Fire is three and one at the same time.  Yes, for those of you who are chemists, you can catch some chemicals on fire that burn at a particular temperature that gives no heat or visible flame.  All metaphors break down at some point.  But the fire that most of us encounter on any given day always has these three things: flame, light, heat.  You take away one of them and you no longer have fire.  Fire is eternally three and one, just like the Trinity.

Holy Spirit

On the first week we explored what it means to confess that “I believe in the Father.”  Last week we looked at believing in the Son.  Today we move on to the third person of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit.  I believe in the Holy Spirit.

It is a little hard to wrap our minds around what the Holy Spirit is, exactly, but Christian theologians have talked about the Holy Spirit as the friendship or love that the Son and Father share together.  The Holy Spirit is then God’s presence in our lives inviting us into that community that the Father and Son share.  It’s like the ultimate anti-clique.

When I was a teenager I so wanted to be included in the popular group in school and even in church.  I was kind of academic, nerdy and pimply, so I didn’t fit in very well with the cool kids.  I was also a Christian so I wasn’t into parties happening at kids’ houses when their parents were gone for the weekend and where there was a lot of alcohol being passed around.  These things tended to put up some pretty significant obstacles to me being accepted into that clique, but I still longed to be accepted and to be popular.

The friendship that the Father and Son share is nothing like this clique I wanted to be a part of growing up.  It is rather an unconditional love that seeks to invite as many people into the love-fest as possible.  It isn’t exclusive in anyway.  In fact, the Son became like us so that we might become like him: friends with God.  The Spirit is God’s presence and grace continually inviting us into that friendship and love even when we don’t recognize that it’s God who’s doing the inviting.  The rest of the Apostles’ Creed flows from this basic idea that God is at work in each of our lives through the Holy Spirit inviting us to be friends with God.

Holy Catholic Church?

Um…Did we just become Catholic?  I thought we were Protestants.  We don’t believe in that whole pope thing do we?  Well, not exactly.  Although I don’t think the Pope is someone we can ignore.  But that’s for another sermon on another day.

Rather, when we confess that we believe or trust in the Holy catholic church what we mean isn’t that we’re pledging allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church.  “Catholic” simply means “universal.”  The Roman Catholic Church is just part of that universal Christian church which exists across time and across place.  The universal church includes Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and all the bigillion varieties of Protestants.  There are probably some other branches of the Christian church that belong in that list too, but those are at least the big ones.

So if we don’t mean that we believe in the Roman Catholic Church, what are we saying we do believe in when we confess, “I believe in the holy catholic church”?  I think what we’re saying is that our life as Christians is basically like the life that the Father and Son share through the Spirit.  It is a life that is communal, not an individualistic life.  We don’t run this race alone.  We do it with others.

Jesus asked Peter who he believes he is and Peter responds that Jesus is the Christ.  Jesus then says, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18, NRSV).  That’s a pretty impressive statement.  My imagination runs to the gates of Mordor in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.  This community that Jesus set up first in the twelve disciples and extending on to us is a pretty powerful community not easily destroyed.

Later on in the book of Hebrews, the author of Hebrews says, “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:24-25, NRSV).  Here we are encouraged to not fall into the individualist traps of “my own spirituality.”  When we’re a community of one, we have no one to check and balance us.  We have no one to notice and point out our blind spots.  We need a much bigger community.  A community that reflects more the community that the Spirit has with the Father and the Son.

Communion of Saints = Church over Time

We continue then to confess that “I believe in the communion of saints.”  Are we praying to saints now too?  No.  That’s not what I mean.  Although I think that it’s not a bad idea to study the saints and even to learn how they prayed.

Rather the communion of saints means at least two things.  It means that this community of the church extends over time.  There are those who have gone before us and faithfully followed Jesus.  They have often blazed a trail for us.  It would be silly to ignore that trail.

Have you ever been cross country skiing?  I know, spring is upon us and you don’t want to hear about anything that has to do with snow.  Bear with me a moment.  If you’ve been cross country skiing before, you know that it’s much easier and more fun to ski in the groomed trails.  But occasionally Sarah and I will get off trail.  If you’re going off trail and you’re breaking trail for the person behind you, it is exhausting.  The person behind you is having all the fun because they’re getting the benefits of the fruit of your work.  Why not get the benefits of the fruit of the work of those who have gone before us?

The writer of Hebrews says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1, NRSV).  That chapter goes on to describe all those witnesses: Abraham and Sarah.  Isaac and Rebecca.   Jacob and Rachel and Leah.  Joseph.  Moses.  Joshua.  Samson.  Deborah.  Samuel.  Ruth.  David.  Solomon.  Daniel.  Esther.  Nehemiah.  Isaiah.  Ezekiel.  Amos.  Jesus.  Paul.  And if Hebrews was written 2000 years later surely Sycamore Creek Church would be included somewhere in that list.  We follow people who have broken trail before us.  We don’t do it alone.

Communion of saints = Lord’s Supper

The “communion of saints” can also be understood as Communion or the Lord’s Supper or the “Eucharist.”  It’s the act of worship when we gather around a table and eat bread that is Jesus’ body and drink from a cup that is Jesus’ blood.  We read that the early church “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42, NRSV).  This community of saints gathers together so that they’re not alone, and then they come to the table to meet Jesus through the power and presence of the Spirit so that we’re not just doing it alone as humans, but we’re living this life by the power of God.

Forgiveness of Sins

When we come to that table and we confess our sins we are forgiven.  And so we confess that “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”  This idea of being forgiven of your sins is usually called “atonement.”  It is what makes us right with God.  Sometimes atonement is described as “at-one-ment” with God.

Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures…” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4, NRSV).  Christ died for our sins; for the ways that we miss the mark, either intentionally or unintentionally, of what God desires of and for us.  Through Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and community we are reconciled and at peace with God, but how exactly does this work?

I could spend a whole six-week series walking through these “atonement theories,” but right now I just want you to be aware that in the history of Christianity there is more than one idea about how Jesus’ work makes us right with God.

Debt Theory: One theory says that we owe God a huge debt for our sins.  Our sin is a debt to God, so big that we can’t pay it.  The only one who could was Jesus.  Jesus’ death paid that debt.

Substitution Theory: A second theory says that our sin was an affront to God’s holiness and God’s justice.  God’s holiness and justice had to be met, so Jesus took our place and paid for a crime that he did not commit.

Satisfaction Theory: A third theory says that God was dishonored by our sin.  Thus, God’s honor must be paid back and paid back with interest.  Jesus’ perfect life restores God’s honor and his death pays the interest.

Ransom Theory: In this fourth theory we are held hostage by Satan, and Jesus pays the ransom by his death.

Rescue Theory: In this fifth theory we are held hostage by Satan, and Jesus came on a rescue mission to break us free from Satan.

Theosis/Divinization Theory: Jesus’ entire life (teaching, death, and resurrection) actually changes us.  Think of it this way: we usually say that one rotten apple spoils the bunch, but what if you threw one God-apple into a bunch of rotten ones?  This theory says that the one God-apple would absorb the rottenness of the rest of them.

All of these theories have biblical warrant.  I personally like the last one because it isn’t just focused on Jesus’ death which saves us but his whole life.  I also like it because it includes the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives right now!  It intrigues me that in the Apostles’ Creed “the forgiveness of sins” line is not under “I believe in Jesus” but under “I believe in the Holy Spirit.”  Through what Jesus did, the Holy Spirit continues to transform all the rottenness in our lives so that we become more and more like Jesus.  St. Basil, a fourth century church leader summed it up this way, “The goal of our calling is to become like God, as far as this is possible for human nature.”

Resurrection of the dead = The General Resurrection

This transformation continues to the point of our death.  The Apostles’ Creed continues when we confess that “I believe in the resurrection of the dead.”  Through the work of the Spirit in our lives, when we are baptized we participate in Jesus’ death and also in his resurrection.  Paul says, “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:4-5, NRSV).

This brings up a question of debate that comes up from time to time in the church and even in the Bible itself.  Is our hope in heaven instantaneous or something else?  On the instantaneous side of things, we read something like Jesus’ statement to the thief who was crucified on the cross next to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43, NRSV), and we see a kind of you’ll-be-in-heaven-right-after-you-die kind of idea.

But when we read Paul we get a different kind of idea.  This idea has more to do with a general resurrection.  When we die we will “sleep” until that day when we are all resurrected.  Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians, “When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’” (1 Corinthians 15:54, NRSV).  Here is the image of a seed being planted in the ground and dying and raising up into something new later on.  I don’t know what the right answer is to this question, or if there is some synthesis of the two (“sleep” often feels instantaneous), but in the end we can trust in the resurrection of our bodies as the ultimate fulfillment of the Spirit’s work in our lives.

This belief in the resurrection means that the material word matters.  God created and said, “It is good.”  We confess a belief and trust in the resurrection, we too are saying, “It is good.”  The body isn’t something to be escaped, but it is a gift to be embraced, and we look forward to the day when we will no longer suffer in our bodies, but our bodies will be in perfect alignment with God’s work in our lives.

Life Everlasting = Eternal Life

So we come to the last line of the Apostles’ Creed: I believe in life everlasting.  What does that mean?  I think it means eternal life.  In that most famous passage John says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16, NRSV).  This doesn’t just mean after death.  Faith and trust aren’t just fire insurance for life after death.  This ignores the work of the Spirit in our lives right now.  Eternal life begins right now, today!  The Spirit is working in your life today whether you recognize it or not.  Join in.  Participate with the Spirit and you’re participating in the community of love that the Father and Son share.

So What?

So why does a confession of trust in the Holy Spirit matter?  It matters because the Spirit of God invites us into the community of love that the Father and the Son share.  You may be excluded in every other area of your life—your work, your family, your school, even your church—but you cannot be excluded by God’s community.  The Spirit is the person of God continually inviting you into friendship with God.

That friendship of the Spirit heals.  The Spirit brings eternal life right now!  Are you hurting, wounded, and broken?  Have you not even lived up to your own standards let alone God’s standards?  If so, there is good news for you.  You need not stay stuck.  The Holy Spirit renews, redeems, and heals.

The last reason that this part of the Apostles’ Creed matters is because it shows that the work of the Spirit isn’t just something that happens to you and you alone.  Rather, the Holy Spirit’s usual manner of working is in the community of the church: through the communion of saints in the holy catholic church over time and place.  Do you want to know where the Spirit of God usually shows up?  If so, you’ll join the church as the community of people who are seeking to deepen their friendship with God.

Will you join me confessing our faith through the words of 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.