Sermon by Shannon J. Kershner | March 5, 2023

Second Sunday in Lent
March 5, 2023 | 10:00 a.m.

I Believe in God, the Father Almighty
A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 31:1–5, 15–16
John 14:1–14

If you were in worship with us at Fourth Church last week you learned that we have just begun a new sermon series on the Apostles’ Creed. As Pastor Lucy mentioned, this creed probably started out as a baptismal formula — something that candidates for baptism would use in a question-and-answer form as a way to profess their faith as they became new creations through the gift of the baptismal sacrament.

It is one of the oldest creeds we use in our tradition, and it is also one of the most ecumenical creeds we use. For centuries, Christians all over the globe have stated these words as a way of saying who God is and, therefore, who we are in response. So for this Lenten season and the season of Eastertide, we will be walking through the statements that form the Apostles’ Creed. Together we will plumb the depths of what we mean when we say what we say after the phrase “I believe.”

For the truth is that this ancient creed is not simply a collection of statements, a list of phrases that we memorize and speak aloud, sometimes by rote. This creed is actually more like a story. As the Reverend James Howell has written, “The Apostles’ Creed tells a story, in chronological order. God is first, then God creates; then God sends Jesus, who is born, [who lives and ministers, who] dies, and is raised; and then the Holy Spirit dawns on the church and its life” (James Howell, The Life We Claim: The Apostles’ Creed for Preaching, p. 5). The creed is much more of a story rather than a collection of statements, a list of phrases that we memorize.

Furthermore, every time we recite the Apostles’ Creed it is like we are stepping into a great river of tradition — one that has flowed for thousands of years before us and one that will continue to flow long after us until God’s healing of the world is accomplished. Each Sunday, when we begin with “I believe in God,” we are actively becoming a part of something bigger than ourselves. Our faith, our trust, is something within us, but it is also something outside of us. Every time we say “I believe in God,” we are attaching ourselves to something old, to this gift we have been given (Howell, The Life We Claim, p. 2).

Professor Justo Gonzales tells a story about a young Orthodox priest who once told his spiritual adviser that he had difficulties with some of the statements of the Nicene Creed. And even though it is not the Apostles’ Creed, I imagine some of us can still relate to the young priest’s struggle. “Recite it anyhow,” the priest’s advisor replied. Well, the young man came back after a few days and once again declared that they could not in good conscience claim to believe all that the creed said. “Recite it anyway,” the older man insisted.

This pattern went on for several weeks, until finally, exasperated and confused, the young priest asked, “Why do you insist I repeat the creed, when you know there are in it some phrases I don’t really believe?’” To which the elderly adviser replied, “Because it is not your creed. It is the creed of the church. When you recite it, you are not directly saying what you believe. You are declaring what the church believes. And even more than that, you are declaring yourself to be a part of that church, [the living body of Christ and a way God works in this world,] no matter whether you believe every point of doctrine or not” (Justo Gonzales, The Apostles’ Creed for Today, p. 8). This is why we are exploring this creed together, or it is a statement, a story, of what makes the church the church.

So today we are considering the first phrase of this ancient creed: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty.” Now before we go any further, we have to speak of what I always see as the elephant in the room, which is the masculine language for God: God as Father. Now some folks, perhaps some of you, have no issues with calling God “Father.” After all, that is indeed what Jesus taught us to do — both in the Lord’s Prayer (“When you pray, pray like this: Our Father,” Jesus says to his disciples) and in our text for today: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” For Jesus and for those early disciples, to call God “Father” was meant to express a relationship, a kind of intimacy.

And to do so was actually a rather bold claim: that the One who is above all things, in all things, and who can do far more than we could ever ask for or imagine, that the Holy One can be called Father by the creatures the Holy One created — that is a beautiful and powerful affirmation. So for centuries, those of us in the Christian tradition have called God “Father.” And that has made sense for many.

But for others of us, to call God “Father,” assuming that is the only kind of language one uses for God, is more problematic. Perhaps the earthly father one had was not a benevolent one, was not a nurturing one, was not a kind one. So to imagine God as a reflection of your father, just more powerful and all-encompassing, stunts your spiritual connection with your Creator. And for some of us, especially those of us who identify as women, the primarily exclusively masculine language for God has either inadvertently or sometimes intentionally had the effect of planting a little seed of doubt deep in our souls that since we are not male, are we really created in the image of God?

I have heard that preached. But even more so, I have listened to the stories of women throughout my ministerial career who have been harmed by that predominately patriarchal lens, because the men in their lives have used it to “put them in their place.” This argument that Jesus told us to call God “Father” has been and is still used to deny ordination for women as priests and pastors in different Christian traditions. As feminist theologian Mary Daly famously wrote, “If God is male, then male is God.” And if you doubt that language has that kind of power over our imaginations or our sense of self, I invite you to my email inbox the next time I preach a sermon on God as Mother, even though our scripture is also full of language that uses maternal imagery for God, as well.

So what, then, do we do with “I believe in God the Father Almighty?” Well, first, we do want to remember what I said a few moments ago — that the primary purpose of the language is to indicate a relationship between creature and Creator, a relationship that is intimate, caring, loving. “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself. So that where I am, there you may be also.” That kind of sense of being home in God, of abiding in the very presence of God, was what Jesus conveyed to his disciples each time he used the language of “Father.”

Second, it might help those of us who struggle with this first statement to have a deeper understanding of the historical context in which this creed came into being. It came into being during the time of the Roman Empire. In traditional Roman society, the figure of father was not first of all a loving figure but rather a powerful one. The father of the family — the paterfamilias — ruled over it as master, and he was often a distant figure. Furthermore, he was the paterfamilias of the entire household — women, children, slaves — all of whom owed him a certain obedience and service.

Therefore, the naming of God as “Father” was truthfully a subversive claim, for it both affirmed the power and authority of God while also limiting the power and authority of earthly fathers in ancient Rome, the paterfamilias. To say “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” you were at least limiting, if not relativizing, the authority of those whom the existing social order had placed at the very top of the pyramid of power. When a slave or a wife who had been ordered to be submissive to the head of the household professed “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” that person was claiming their countercultural reality that they actually belonged to another household and that their ultimate obedience was to their Creator, not the one with whom they lived (Gonzales, The Apostles’ Creed for Today, p. 16).

Again, Gonzales writes,

By declaring God to be “Father,” the Creed was undermining fatherhood as it was then understood. Slaves, children, wives, and all others subject to the paterfamilias were claiming a Father above this earthly one. But over the centuries, the sharp cutting edge of this faith has been blunted. When we call God “Father” or “Mother” or even “Father/Mother,” we must keep in mind the power those statements have to subvert our common notions of parenthood. (Gonzales, The Apostles’ Creed for Today, pp. 16–17).

Who knew that just this one beginning statement of our ancient creed was more of an act of rebellion, an act of defiance? Well, we do, now.

But that rebellion, that defiance, runs even deeper. Each time we say “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” we are making an intentional statement about who and whose story actually claims our lives, over and against or above everything and everyone else. One scholar claims that in the time in which our Hebrew scripture was spoken aloud and written down, if you had asked someone on the street, “How many gods are there?,” that person would have answered, “Well, plenty, but we serve only one.” I might argue that is still a struggle for us today.

One of our theological giants, Martin Luther once suggested that whatever your heart clings to is really your god. Therefore, the questions before us each day are always, To what do we cling? What ultimately matters to us? What motivates us? Are we attached to something that is big enough to be God — “I believe in God, the Father Almighty” — or are we hooked on what in biblical times was called an idol?

Just last week conservative commentator and Episcopalian priest Tish Warren wrote in a New York Times newsletter about our continued tendency toward idolatry. Now for Reverend Warren, she was primarily speaking about our idolatry of guns, of violence. But in the column, she said this: “The idea of idolatry is not, necessarily, having false gods that we can name — or sculpt, for that matter. Instead, it is a term for disordered love. It describes a devotion to even good things that is excessive or obsessive.”

“It conveys to us that well-meaning people who desire worthy things can seek them in ways that harm themselves and others, that we can be driven by longings that we may not know, understand, or be able to articulate but that determine the shape of our lives and our society. The sixteenth-century Protestant theologian John Calvin famously said that ‘the human heart is a perpetual idol factory.’ We are constantly devoting ourselves,” she continued, “to what will make us feel secure and safe, things that promise to provide what we most desire and need” (Tish Warren, “The Wages of Idolatry,” New York Times, 26 February 2023).

Thus, one way to hear this first phrase of the Apostles’ Creed is that it might help us keep our perpetual idol factory in check. For every time we stand to say “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” we are saying we do not believe nor do we put our trust in the god of capitalism, or the god of consumerism, or the god of power, or the god of selfishness, or the god of apathy, or the god of addiction, or the god of fear, … I could keep going, but I imagine you could name your own idols for yourself.

No, every time we rise in body or in spirit to proclaim “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” we are claiming that we trust that only the God of life, of creation, of redemption, of newness, of forgiveness, of justice, of mercy, of grace — that that God, the one Jesus called “Father” is the only one who gets to define us and tell us who and whose we are. Every time we proclaim that first sentence in the story of the Apostles’ Creed, we are making a choice, a real-life choice, about our priorities and about where we will invest our time, our energy, our money, and our hearts (Howell, The Life We Claim, p. 14).

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty.” That beginning phrase of our story is a phrase of subversion and of rebellion in a world that is still not whole but one in which the Holy One, Father/Mother of us all, still reigns and to whom we all belong. Amen.