Dear friends in Christ at Peace and Grue,
While the confirmation students are still working through the Ten Commandments, we are going to jump ahead to the Apostle’s Creed, as we continue to work our way through Luther’s Small Catechism. If the Commandments reveal we do not have life in ourselves, the Apostle Creed tells us where life comes from as God makes himself known to us, raising up the you who can say “I believe.”
A creed is a statement of belief. A concise summary of who and what God is about. It is a very sum-mary of the Bible. In the order of worship, the Creed comes between the sermon and the prayers of the church, just before the liturgy of Holy Communion. For Luther, the chief function of the Creed is to summarize God’s grace and mercy, describing all the things that God has done, is doing, and will do for us.
Although one goes logically from creation to redemption to sanctification (being made holy), Luther in the Large Catechism said we actually experience God in reverse: “In all three articles God himself has revealed and opened to us the most profound depths of his fatherly heart and his pure, unutterable love. For this very purpose he created us, so that he might redeem us and make us holy, and moreover, having granted and bestowed upon us everything in heav-en and on earth, he has also given us his Son and his Holy Spirit, through whom he brings us to him-self. For we could never come to recognize the Father’s favor and grace were it not for the Lord Christ, who is a mirror of the Father’s heart. But neither could we know anything of Christ had it not been revealed by the Holy Spirit.” (Book of Concord, pp. 439-40)
Luther’s Small Catechism focuses on the Apostles’ Creed which goes back to an ancient Roman baptismal creed. Immediately before receiving baptism in the name of the triune God, the person being welcomed into the Christian faith was asked, “Do you believe in God the Father?” They were then asked, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” and finally “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” And the per-son would respond, “I believe…” followed with each article of the creed.
When we confess “I believe,” we testify to and claim the Christian faith as our own. So what about those times when we find it difficult to believe. In those times we rely on the confession of others. We say, “Okay, the church confesses this, and I pray with them so that God will see us through until such a time as I can really say, “This is most certainly true", which hints at where we will be going next.
The Creed has a trinitarian structure, not only because it contains articles on the Father, the Son, sand the Holy Spirit. When we say the Creed, we speak to the Father, with the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. We dare to speak to God at all only because we join our voices with the voice of Jesus who prayed to the one he called his Father. And we do so in the Spirit who carries our voices to God who promises to hear.
More about that next month. I hope you are having an enjoyable Fall,
Pastor Dan