Today, we return to our consideration of the Apostles’ Creed. Personally, I’m glad to do so. No one can claim with honesty, whether the result of the referendum declared in the early hours of Friday morning pleased you or not, that we, as a country, are entering anything other than a period of uncertainty and, potentially, turmoil. So it is good to return to matters which are much deeper than politics, matters which are eternal, matters which ground us in the one God who will never fail us.
 
So far, we have considered the nature of belief, the origins and purposes of creeds in general and the Apostles’ Creed in particular, and thought a bit about what is meant by referring to God as both Father, and as Almighty. We have seen how important the idea of God being in relationship is within the Christian faith. Primarily there is the relational nature of God himself who is, at the same time, both one and three, the three persons of God. Perhaps you might want to think more of three personalities of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – existing in a unity of love. That God is love is the key to understanding, as far as we are able, who and what God is.
 
That relational nature of God is seen both in his fatherhood, in the eternal embrace in which he holds us, and in the sense that the word “Almighty” conveys of God being the ruler of all things. In order to rule, a ruler has to be in touch with, in relation with those ruled. No ruler is more in touch with the ruled than God is with his creation. His relationship with his creation is one of perfect love. God not only determines what is best for creation, but wills it to be so.
 
The next phrase of the Creed opens up for us the opportunity to explore the relationship of God with creation a bit more deeply. The Creed doesn’t spend much time on the first person of the Trinity, God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. That’s all it says, picking out just three things to say – Father, Almighty and Creator. It would be a mistake, though, to think of God the Father only as creator, as if his work was done when creation was finished. For a start, creation is not finished and second, we must not separate in any way the First Person of the Trinity from the Second and the Third.
 
But of all the attributes of God the Father, those who formulated the creed picked out ‘creator of heaven and earth’ as the most important. If you are to say one thing about the First Person of the Trinity, this is it.
 
As is so often the case with the Apostles’ Creed, it borrows biblical language for this clause. Our Scriptures open with an account, actually two accounts, of God engaged in creating. It is through the act of creation that there is anything at all and, more significantly, anything with whom God can relate. Without creation, there would be no object for God’s love, and nothing to love God in return. Scripture tells us that it is not only we whom God loves and who love God. The loving relationship with the divine encompasses all things, even those which we consider inanimate, but which God in his wisdom and mercy has also created.
 
We may be used to thinking in global terms, and even know a little of what is beyond this planet, and we have also been thoroughly schooled in thinking of there being only one God, and rightly so. But in terms of the history of religious thought, the idea that there is only one God has been by no means dominant. A few weeks ago we remembered Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal. In his day, many people believed in a choice of gods. They believed that there were different gods for different tribes and peoples, different gods for different things, like gods for rivers, mountains and trees.
 
The Christian faith, as expressed in the creeds and in Scripture, not least in the First Commandment, contradicts these claims. It asserts that there is only one God, that God is universal, that the God we worship is no local deity but the God of all places and times, the God of every people. The phrase, heaven and earth, was chosen to refer to the whole created reality. The Nicene Creed adds to it, saying that God is the maker of “all things, seen and unseen”. This is one of those points when we need to be more aware of the thought world of those who wrote these words. We probably have different notions of what is unseen. To us, it maybe things at the atomic and subatomic level, or things beyond the reach of astronomers’ telescopes. Maybe we could also mean things which have reality but no physical form, like thoughts and feelings and emotions. But when these words were formulated, most probably people were referring to the realm of the spirits. I would suggest that heaven and earth, things seen and unseen, can include all of these things, that neither interpretation is superior. Rather its points to the facts that religion and faith are not replaced by other forms of understanding, but are complemented by them.
 
But humanity is in a privileged position, because we have a particular awareness of creation and our place in it. When we confess God as creator, that puts us in context. Faith is not just about us and our relationship with God but about our place among all creation and our relationship with all else that God has created.
 
Again, many centuries ago, people would have taken a different view of this from us. We have a heightened understanding that our actions can have a very serious effect on the rest of creation. More than ever before, seeing ourselves as part of what God has made places responsibility upon us to join with God in loving care for all that is around us. Confessing that God is the creator, and therefore that all God creates belongs to God, reminds us that creation is not our domain and that we cannot and must not measure the worth of the world purely in terms of its value to humanity. Creation derives its value because it is divinely made, not through some measure of usefulness.
 
This takes us back to the idea of being in relationship. We know that, as creatures, we humans cannot be wholly independent of one another. It is a relationship which, for God, is entirely voluntary. God did not have to create. God did so entirely through grace, to which creation itself bears eloquent witness.
 
These few words, ‘creator of heaven and earth’, offer just the tiniest hint of the riches and glories of faith. They are about God, about creation and about us. That we confess God as creator expresses the belief that, as we are in creation, so we are in God. We too are at the heart of the love which is God.
 
Amen

 
There is a simple dignity about the words on the wee plaque which sits inside our new noticeboard. It reads, “In memory of Jack McIver,” then it gives his dates, before adding, “An elder in this church since 1951.” I didn’t write these words, and I’m glad about that, because I don’t think I would come up with something so beautiful. The thing I find moving about that phrase is its sense of continuity, a sense that, though we see Jack no longer, he is still an elder of this church. And that is right. He serves in the church universal, in the church eternal.
 
These words about Jack seem to me to be an example of something the Church does well, but which few others do well, if at all. It is about a kind of remembering. The Church is a community of remembrance. That’s a word we normally associate with the war and with particular events in November, but it is equally applicable to other occasions. To my mind, what marks out remembrance, as practised by the Church, from remembering, is that remembrance has a sense of looking back, a sense of the present, and a sense of the future too. It sees what we are now, and what we hope and aspire to be, as being bound up with, formed by and related to where we have come from.
 
Today, I have decided that we will take a wee break from the Apostles’ Creed because of something that is weighing very heavily on my mind. That is the referendum on Thursday on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. Some months ago, I was asked by the Midlothian Advertiser to contribute to their occasional ‘Views from the pews’ column. It will be published on Thursday this week. Knowing it would appear on the 23rd, I felt I had no option but to write about the referendum. And as you will see you, if you buy the paper, I approach the subject through the remembrance of war. I was pleased to see, a few days after I had sent my article in, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, writing in the Sunday Mail, approached the subject in the same way. My belief is that remembrance is a particular gift and skill of the churches. We live constantly and consciously in remembrance of things past, with care for things present, and with hope for things to come. It is part of our calling not to forget but also to remember in particular, positive, ways.
 
To hear campaigners on both sides talk, all that would seem to matter is money and immigrants. There is no perspective. As avid readers of the Advertiser will be reminded, I hope before they go to vote, what has become the European Union was forged in the experience of war. By binding together the means whereby weapons are produced, making the nations of Europe and dependent on one another for the production of coal and steel, the vision was to make war in Europe not only on thinkable, but materially impossible. The bringing together of national economies in other ways, including through the single currency, had the same basic ideal. Countries which depend on one another do not fight one another. Countries which build one another up in prosperity and trade and cooperation do not develop the rivalries that lead to war. In the 65 years since France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy formed the European Coal and Steel Community, the organisation which led eventually to the European Union, no member state has gone to war with another. Never, in the history of this continent, has there been such a sustained period of peace. For that, God be praised.
 
As a church person, with a voice here and, later this week, in the local paper, I believe that my contribution to the debate is this – a call to remembrance; remembrance of wars past which all of us, even those with no personal memory, hold in the collective memory as people of faith, whose trust is in God. We call our fellow voters to remembrance, not of some heroic time when Britain stood alone, which anyway owes more to myth than to history, but to a remembering which leads to care for peace in the present and commitment to continuing peace in the future.
 
But that’s not all that churches can and should contribute at this present time. We are a community of other attributes too, attributes which can feed into and inform public discourse.
 
We are a community of sacrifice and generosity. We bear witness to God who sacrificed himself that all might live. The Christian life is a life of sacrifice, sacrifice of self for the good of all. We are called to understand that what we have is not ours, but held in trust, to be shared generously so that’s none go without. We are called to sacrifice what we think is our own interest that all may prosper, for we know through, both though faith and experience, that justice is not served, nor peace assured, when some are wealthy while others are in desperate need.
 
We are too, a community of welcome and inclusion. In many places in the Old Testament, and we read one a little earlier, God’s people were reminded that they were not to think of themselves as better than or distinct from others. Strangers were to be welcomed and accorded equal rights. In the life of Christ, we constantly see him reaching out across the borders that sin erects to love and value and care for those which various communities had rejected. Nothing in the Gospels mandates Christ’s followers to do anything other than what he did.
 
The Church is also called upon to be a community of truth. I have been dismayed by both sides in the current referendum campaign. Neither side has been, at least in my view, entirely truthful. Both sides have made preposterous claims. The truth is that many of the questions about what may happen if the UK votes to leave, or if it votes to remain, cannot be answered. The truthful answer to many is simply – we don’t know. Now, I can understand why so few politicians are brave enough to say this. Many believe they are elected to know the answers. But the good of society and the cause of democracy are not well served when a situation is created in which people will end up voting for the side whose lies are most convincing, or indeed whose predictions of doom are most frightening. Truth is something noble, something costly, but something empowering. The Church is witness to the ultimate truth, the truth of God, from which all truth is derived. As a community of truth, we must call on others, especially those entrusted by the people with great responsibility to live by and speak the truth.
 
Furthermore, the Church is a community of prophecy. Not a community which tries to describe predict the future, but a community which seeks to speak the Word of God for today. In every situation, in every decision, we must ask – what do we know of God? What do we know of God’s wishes for and priorities for the world? I am in no doubt that God will work his purpose out regardless of how the UK votes on Thursday. I am certainly not going to be so crass as to say that a vote one way is the Christian way to vote and that a vote the other is unchristian. But God gives us, his beloved creatures, a huge measure of responsibility to order this world in which he has placed us. It is responsibility which is best exercised with regard to what we learn of God through Jesus Christ and through the holy Scriptures. And our call, as members of God’s church, is to communicate what we know of God, that others too may know of his ways.
 
Underlying and giving validity to all of these dimensions of our life as the church is the fact that we are a community of love. St Paul told the Church in Corinth that they could do anything, but if they did not have love, it would be worthless. We serve and bear witness to and put our trust in the God who is love. It is love which enables us, not only to speak the word of God today, but to say it in the right way. It is love which enables us to discern the truth, and live by it. It is love which gives meaning to all thru welcome and inclusion, for, under God’s guidance, and with Christ at our side, we are called to love unconditionally. It is love that makes sacrifice possible. Sacrifice is a giving up in love; if there is no love, the giving up becomes extortion, something imposed and done unwillingly. And it is in love that we remember, calling to mind the people of the past in loving remembrance, caring for the present in love and building in love for the future. Love, above all, is what our faith is about, and it is in love that we need to address all matters, all decisions, asking the question and answering it for ourselves – what is the loving thing to do?
 
Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth.” God sprinkles us into the world to speak truth, to practice generosity, to embody inclusion, to offer welcome, to witness through sacrifice and also to remember in a way that honours the past, cares for the present, and builds for the future.
 
May God bless us all as we decide how to vote, and as we cast our ballots, and may God bless, protect and guide us all, our country and our continent, whatever the outcome.
 
Amen.

Last Sunday, as the sermon limped to its close, I joked, rather feebly, that, having spent two Sundays dealing with the first two words of the Apostles’ Creed, we would speed up a bit. In preparing the sermon for this week, I have become more and more aware of how difficult that promise will be to keep.
 
The problem is this. The Creeds are ancient documents. Almost every word in them was understood subtly differently when they were written. As we’ll see today, even ordinary, everyday words expressed subtly but importantly different concepts. Some might say – chuck them out, then. If we need a statement of faith, let’s write new one, and that might be an interesting and valuable exercise. But arguably, the Creeds are still of value. The work of theology is never to establish something timeless and unchanging. It is always to respond, to articulate the faith anew in a changing world. Theology is always developing, always moving on. Good theology is pilgrim theology, always on a journey, in conversation with the world, towards God.
 
One advantage of using the Creeds to this day is that they are widely recognised signposts along the way of our theological pilgrimage. They stand above the painful reality of the division of the Church into denominations and confessional families. They mark points of exemplary unity, calling us all to choose the paths on our ecclesiological pilgrimage which lead us back to unity, peace and oneness in Christ. They do this by laying bare the common core of the Christian faith, albeit in a way which requires constant reinterpretation. They are signs that church unity will, once again be possible.
 
As much as churches need to be in dialogue with one another, so do we, as individuals and as a congregation, need to be in dialogue with texts such as the Creeds. We need to ask, what do the Creeds mean for us today? Although the texts are ancient, we cannot be bound by ancient answers.
 
The text we know as the Apostles’ Creed was developed out of an ancient liturgy used at baptism. It is therefore closely bound up with initiation into the church. It is thought that it would have been presented originally as a series of questions, rather than as a text for recitation. Some more modern liturgies in different churches have sought to recapture that form. The association with baptism is still very important, no matter how it is used, for when we say it, it acts as a reminder, a weekly reminder, of our baptism and therefore of our place within the church, the family of God. Anyone able to see ‘I believe’ is, through baptism, incorporated into the ‘we believe’ of the Church. As individuals, we are never alone in the faith. Our corporate recitation blends each of us, as we say it, into one body, the Church, which is both local and universal, both temporal and eternal.
 
Last week, we noted that the word ‘believe’ might be more clearly expressed as ‘trust’. This is not just interpretative wishful thinking. The biblical view of faith is very much about trusting, more so than about understanding. Consider the faith of Mary, told she would bear God’s son; or Abraham told to journey to an unknown land to found a nation for God; or Ruth, who put her trust in a God she did not yet know. It is with our Enlightenment emphasis on evidence, scientific method and proof that we have changed what we understand by ‘believe’ into a weighing up of probabilities.
 
Belief, faith and trust cannot exist in isolation. They have to be belief in, faith in, trust in something, and that something is the principal subject of the Creed, God revealed.
 
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
 
Although we will do so today, we should not really separate this article from what follows. The Creed is Trinitarian in structure, describing God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Though we talk of God in three persons, God is perfect unity. We’ll probably come back to a closer consideration of the Trinity later but, for the moment, the thing to remember is that God is a relational God. Relationship is at the heart, is of the essence, of God. That’s why we say, not that God loves, nor that God acts lovingly, but that God is love. It is in God who is love that we put our trust, and it is because God is love that we can.
 
The Creed briefly alludes to different attributes of God. First, it speaks of God the Father Almighty. In an era in which belief in the existence of God can no longer be taken for granted, this is helpful. It is good to be able to describe something of the God we trust. The Creed affirms that God is father. Such a description is by no means unique to Christianity. Other religions speak of the fatherhood of their deity. What is unique is that the Christian understanding of the fatherhood of God and, just to be clear, the motherhood of God too, is that it is much more about tender intimacy than about authority. The pattern of God’s fatherhood is seen most clearly in the story told by the Son, of a father running to embrace his wayward, estranged child. We trust the God who runs to meet us and enfold us in his love.
 
The Creed qualifies the word ‘Father’ by adding ‘Almighty’. When, a couple of years ago, a few of us gathered in a wee group to think theologically about God, we got ourselves tied in knots about the concept of omnipotence, the ability to do anything, an attribute traditionally ascribed to God. The problem we encountered is that omnipotence is a philosophical concept. Being ‘Almighty’ is, rather, a biblical one. Though they are related, they are not same. When the Bible calls God ‘Almighty’ it means he is ruler of all things. And that means God is in relation with all things.
 
We have already seen that God is tender rather than authoritarian. How does this fit with being ‘Almighty’? We can see the answer the Son, in whom we see God’s power to become weak, and yet to conquer; in whom we see God embodying the power of justice; in whom we see, most crucially, the power of God to love unconditionally.
 
The first words of the Creed say this: we trust in God who is love, and who tenderly loves all things. The relationship of those things with the loving God, and how God expresses his love, we will begin to explore next time.
 
But before I finish, I would like to go back to an idea I floated near the beginning of the sermon, that of writing a new statement of faith. I’d like to give you some homework to do, but of course it is optional homework. I would like to invite you, as we work through the Apostles’ Creed, gradually to write your own version. Think about what are the most important elements of your faith, the things you put your trust in. Think about whether you feel there is anything missing from this ancient text, something in your own life of faith, in your own experience of God, which should be included, and if there is anything missing, put it in. Think about what words best express what you think and believe. Think about your response to the ideas expressed in the text of the Creed, and about how you respond to what I am saying. You may agree with my interpretation or you may not. Try freely to express your own thoughts.
 
If a few of you take up this invitation, and I hope more than just a few of you will, and you are willing to share what you write, I would like to use the new creeds we write in a service as we come to the end of this series exploring the Apostles’ Creed. Unlike the suggestions box, you are welcome either to put your name to what you write or not as you choose. It is my hope that, through writing our own new versions of the Creed, we may be able to share with one another what we actually believe as a congregation, as a family of faithful people, putting our trust in God in this time and this place. And that, I hope, will build us up in unity and encourage us in faith, two of the basic elements at the core of Christian discipleship.
 
Amen.

 
Last Sunday, we began to explore the Apostles’ Creed, that text we have been saying together as part of our worship week by week for about the last ten years. We noted that it is a summary of many of the most important doctrines of the church, and that its short, simple form was probably intended to be a useful way of remembering the core beliefs of the church. We will look at these in more detail in the coming weeks but, as we begin to delve more deeply, it is important to remember that, despite the first word, ‘I’, the Apostles’ Creed is not necessarily a statement of personal belief, but a statement of the belief of the church, and it certainly should not be seen as a test.
 
Before we move on, I want to say a bit more about that. And to do that, I need to be straight with you. I could not be a part of a congregation which required members to sign up to a set of beliefs. My whole ministry has been conducted on the premise that we are a group of people who sense that there is something about Jesus of Nazareth which is compelling. So compelling, in fact that we are prepared to devote time and efforts to finding out more; so compelling, in fact, that, having found out more, we want to make what he said and how he lived and what he did the main guide for our life. That’s why we come together to worship and learn and explore.
 
Finding our lives animated by what we know of Jesus and how we relate to him, we cannot and must not erect any barriers. Many churches do, of course. Alison[1] was telling me of a conversation she had had with a youth delegate at the General Assembly, who told her he had been asked to leave the Free Church because of some of his views. While I find that horrifying, I rejoice that he hasn’t just left the church altogether, but has found a new home in the Church of Scotland. But churches which act that way tend to be ruled by fear. A congregation which loves will always welcome, and will welcome questions and different points of view. It will not require unthinking assent but will promote conversation about even the most central aspects of faith. And it will never say – this is right and that is wrong. At most, it will say – historically, this is what the Church has taught, and ask how we respond to it today. It is through exploration that individual faith deepens, not through requiring absolute adherence to specific teaching and particular interpretations. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
 
But first, what of the origin of the Apostles’ Creed? Where did it come from? I’m sorry to say – nobody knows. It is first referred to in a letter, probably from Ambrose of Milan, in about 390 AD. But there are traces of very similar, but more ancient texts going back to about 180 AD. The form in which we know it dates from the late seventh century. Because it is possible to break it down into twelve articles or clauses, the tradition grew up that each of the twelve Apostles contributed one article each, hence the name. That tradition is clearly nonsense but what it is is a summary of the teachings of Jesus as handed down by the Apostles. Its picks up words and phrases from the gospels and other New Testament writing, which is one of the reasons why, so often, when we say it in a service, a particular word or phrase will resonate with something we have already been thinking about.
 
The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, is much more easily dated. It was written in 325 AD at the First Ecumenical Council, when bishops from across the church gathered, not in Nicaea, but in Constantinople. They gathered to try to decide on what was orthodox faith. Having been involved in writing many church documents, I cannot imagine that the process then was any different from how it is now. Strong personalities would have sought to dominate. Compromises would have been reached. Votes would probably have been taken. Some would have left satisfied, others disappointed. You can see why I am so reluctant to say these documents must be adhered to in every part. They are human, and though ancient, still provisional, but nonetheless useful.
 
And whatever their origins, they remain above all, a gift to the church, a gift which is used and cherished in most of the major denominations and confessional families of churches to this day. A gift which expresses, briefly and memorably, what the church, not as individuals, but collectively, to the best of its ability, understands to be the core of the faith.
 
I say ‘understands’, rather than ‘believes’, and I do that quite deliberately because, in conclusion, I want to address the second word of the creed – ‘believe’. In everyday language, when we say we believe someone, it means we accept that they are telling the truth. It is a judgement. The proof is not necessarily available, but what evidence there is points to that conclusion. In the Church, the idea of believing has been understood, misunderstood some might say, as the act of giving intellectual assent to a series of propositions. Take, for example, the proposition that God exists. You can’t prove it, but you can choose to believe it or not. But if you limit your understanding of belief to that, then the ability or otherwise to say the Creed does become a kind of test, a way of thinking I have tried hard to refute. Rather than that connotation, the word ‘believe’ at the beginning of the Creeds carries much more of the meaning of placing trust and confidence in something. Understanding the word ‘believe’ in that way transforms, for example, the first article of the Creed from, ‘I accept that God exists’, to ‘I put my trust in God. I place my confidence in the one who made heaven and earth.’
 
Week by week, therefore, rather than assenting to a series of propositions, when we say that Creed we are reaffirming our trust in God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in the other articles the Creed contains. We reaffirm our trust, because in the business of day-to-day living, faith gets tested and challenged. Week by week, through the saying of the Creed, we are given a choice to affirm to ourselves and to each other again, whatever has happened and whatever may happen, I will try to trust God; together we will put our trust in God. They are ancient words, of uncertain origin, but each week we can make them our own and find our faith strengthened through them.
 
It has taken us two weeks to get to the end of the second word, but believe me, trust me, we will speed up. Next week we will start to explore what the Creeds say about God as three persons in whom we put our trust.
 
Amen.


[1] My wife, minister of Northesk Church, Musselburgh, Convener of the Church of Scotland’s Ecumenical Relations Committee and a commissioner at the recent General Assembly.