Classroom, Communion and Creed: A Homily for the Signs of Our Common Faith Lenten series at Trinity Church, Barrie, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, March 15th, 2024. There is a video recording of this service and homily here.
It would have been about this time of year, 1700 years
ago, in the later weeks of Lent, that those seeking to become Christians,
called catechumens, would have been preparing for baptism. As part of this preparation, they would have been
expected to learn the statement of our faith that today call the Apostles’ Creed
(the Nicene Creed was first written in 325 but did not come into wide use until
a few centuries later). Then, just
before Holy Week, the catechumens would come before their bishop and, one by
one, be expected to recite the Apostles’ Creed as well as the prayer we call
the Our Father, and to answer questions put to them.
St Augustine, a learned and socially prominent
figure, would have had to submit himself to this process of instruction and
preparation before he was baptised by Bishop Ambrose of Milan in 387. By that
time, the persecutions had ended and Christianity was now the official religion
of the Roman Empire, but the church still regarded the ability to say and
understand the Creed as a necessary qualification for baptism, and only then
could the new Christian participate in the Mass and receive the sacrament.
So the Creed functioned then as it does now, as a
sign of Christian identity. However, the
place of the creeds in the life of the church has changed considerably. For the early church, the Creed (specifically
the Apostles’ Creed) was used as a core curriculum, so that the novice
Christian could understand the identity and the saving actions of the three persons
of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Creed in the early church was for the
classroom, not for communion. It did
not have a place in the liturgy of the church.
Where the creeds came from is a long story that can
only get a brief answer in a short homily. The Apostle’s Creed was not, as was
charmingly claimed, written by the original apostles. However, we know from scripture that the earliest Jesus
followers had statements of core belief that proclaimed Jesus as Lord (Christus
kyrios) and which contain the building blocks of Christian belief.
Remember
Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my
gospel. (2 Tim 2,8)
The Apostle’s Creed probably came together over
time as a synthesis of these scriptures and teachings around them.
By the fourth century the Apostles’ Creed had become
a way to instruct new Christians and to distinguish them from pagans. The Nicene Creed, as Gregory Dix noted, was
written to answer theological debates among Christians – was Jesus human or
divine (answer, both)? Thus the Nicene
Creed, with its more robust Christology, works well in the Eucharist, whereas
the Apostle’s Creed is sufficient for services of the word and for the daily
offices. By the sixth century the Nicene
Creed had found its place in the mass following the gospel, where it still
lives today, though before the Reformation it seems that the people recited the
Apostle’s Creed while the priests said the Nicene Creed.
Today, I think it’s fair to say that we know and
say the Creeds (Apostles and Nicene) almost exclusively in liturgy. They don’t really have a secure home
elsewhere in the life of our church. We
have communion, but we don’t really have classroom. Why
did this happen? The practice of infant
baptism meant that instruction was shifted to the process of confirmation, which
was once a precondition for first communion. Confirmation in turn lost much of its importance
as the Anglican church gradually adopted the practice of the open table, so
that we do not ask people to believe before they receive. One could argue that it’s more grace filled to
invite seekers to first encounter Christ in bread and wine and then seek instruction
in the faith, but this puts the onus on the church to explain our faith after
the fact, rather like giving someone driving lessons after they’ve been on the
road. And, since we see fewer and fewer
new believers these days, we have largely lost the skills of catechesis, the
instruction of new Christians.
Even so, in liturgy the creeds still function as a sign
of belief and of Christian identity. We
say them together, and while the rubrics don’t tell us to, we stand by custom,
paying the creeds the same honour that we pay to the gospel and to the
processional cross. By tradition we
turn and face the altar, eastward in most churches, east being the direction of
sunrise and the direction from which Christ is expected to return. Some of us make the sign of the cross as we
confess our belief in the resurrection.
So the act of participating in,
even performing, the creeds is collective, so still a sign of our identity,
though perhaps not of unity. Not all of
us, myself included, could recite either creed perfectly, nor could many of us
explain the articles of the creeds, even following the old catechism printed in
the Book of Common Prayer.
Barbara Brown Taylor once said that we say the
creeds together because there are days when we might not believe all we say,
and so rely on others to believe for us, and vice versa. While
this statement would likely startle early Christians like Augustine and
Ambrose, it does at least have the merit of being honest. Western Anglicans are, after all, a 21st
century church which sometimes seems more comfortable living the questions than
it does having all the answers. Believing
and reciting ancient creeds can seem charmingly archaic in our postmodern
age.
However, our task is not to be relevant but to be
faithful. The creeds tell us that a
good and gracious God created all things.
The creeds tell us that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth, that he has conquered
sin and death, and that he gives us the hope of the resurrection. The creeds assure us that the Holy Spirit is
amongst us. The creeds unite us with
those who have believed and proclaimed the gospel over the long centuries. These are the beliefs that I would offer to someone
seeking to learn our faith.
Let me finish with a final thought as to what the
creeds are not. Some churches and
Christians call themselves creedal in a way that suggests that others are not true,
faithful Christians. I dislike this use of creedal. And in that spirit, let’s notice some of the
things that the creeds do not say. The
creeds say nothing about how to do liturgy, they are silent as to the number
and nature of the sacraments, and the creeds do not tell us how to govern or
structure our churches. The creeds tell
us that the world was created but not how or when; they allow us to believe in dinosaurs. The creeds say nothing about gender, about
marriage, or about preference. And the
creeds do not tell us that Christians should rule society.
So the creeds are not weapons to be used in church
culture wars. The creeds simply tell us that Jesus Christ is Lord. And for us, at this time, as it was for
Augustine and Ambrose and all those before them, that is surely all we need,
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