Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 21, 2023

I Believe... in the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, and the Life Everlasting

A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 25:6–9
Revelation 21:1–6

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We are at a time of beginnings and endings and new beginnings. This is the end of our sermon series on the Apostles’ Creed.

Next week we will celebrate Pentecost, the beginning of the early church, and yet it will be Shannon’s last day with us in worship, another ending. Beginnings and endings and beginnings again.

There is a beautiful prayer in the Book of Common Worship to use as a blessing in times like this. It begins “Holy God, you are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. All of our beginnings and endings are rooted in your love.”

As we approach the end of the Apostles’ Creed today, we can remember that we’ve been talking about this creed for three months! There’s a lot inside and under and behind this seemingly simple creed. Each phrase is a doorway into a whole room of meaning.

It took 700 years for the creed to develop into the form we recite today. Before that, different versions of the creed were used, often at baptisms, as a kind of summary of the faith.

The creed evolved through those early centuries of Christianity, both in the words used and in the interpretations of what the words meant. (Historical insights taken from “The Apostles’ Creed” in the Book of Confessions, Study Edition.)

In earliest times, for example, God the Father was understood to mean God the Creator. The father of the world created the world. God was understood to be the Divine Parent of Everything.

But by the beginning of the third century people began to speak of how God is like a father to each person. God the Father wasn’t just the creator of everything, God was understood to be our father.

In the fourth century, when controversary broke out about the Trinity, emphasis shifted to emphasize how God is Jesus’ father, Jesus is God’s son, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of both of them. This shifted the focus of the creed to the relationship between the three aspects of the Trinity.

As understandings of the fatherhood of God shifted, at one point the phrase “maker of heaven and earth” was added to reinforce the original understanding of God as Creator. “I believe in God the Father … , maker of heaven and earth.”

Human understandings about things change as we grow as a society and as a world, and those changing understandings are reflected in the history of our creeds and confessions of faith. Christianity is, in some ways, a centuries-long conversation about meaning. And we’re invited into the conversation. Faith is not a simple or simplistic thing. It is dynamic.

Similar shifting conversations have happened in regard to the second part of the creed and the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ.

We say in the creed that we believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. Early interpretations emphasized that this demonstrated Jesus’ humanity. He was born of a woman just like all of us. But later this was invoked to show his divinity by emphasizing that Christ was “conceived by the Holy Ghost” and miraculously born to a virgin.

Now we are in the third part of the creed, taking a look at those things that happen by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Join in with me in saying this part about the Holy Ghost.)

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic church;
the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.

The Holy Ghost, also called the Holy Spirit, is the third person of the Trinity. All of these things happen by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit flows through us all, binding us together with the universal church and all the everyday saints like you and me who make up the church.

I sometimes like to think of the Holy Spirit as God whispering to our hearts, or God giving us an impulse or an idea or a longing to use our God-given gifts for the good of the world.

The Holy Spirit knows our prayers before we speak them, before we even have words for them, which is how the Spirit can intercede on our behalf, as scripture says (Romans 8:26).

The Holy Spirit is God-with-us today, in nontangible form, yet moving us, nudging us. The Spirit gives us the power to create, to persevere, to serve, to heal. The Spirit in-spires us. Do you hear that? To inspire is to take in the Spirit.

God in-spires us for the first time when God puts the breath of life into us and gives us life.

The Holy Spirit is God, just as the Creator is God and the Redeemer is God. This is also an understanding that evolved over time. It wasn’t until the late fourth century that the church officially proclaimed that the Holy Spirit is together and equal in all ways to the Creator and Redeemer, the Father and the Son.

But even before that the Holy Spirit was affirmed in early versions of the creed, when it was used at baptisms as an outline of the faith being professed.

It was in and through baptism in the early church that sins were forgiven and the newly baptized rose from the waters as a new person. In baptism we speak of the symbolism of dying with and being resurrected with Christ. We go under the water into death and rise up again into new life.

Of course, we do it in our church with sprinkles. But it’s the same symbolism. In baptism we are made new. In baptism we clothe ourselves in Christ. And Christ Jesus was all about forgiveness.

On the day of his resurrection, according to John’s Gospel, one of the first things Jesus did was give the Holy Spirit to his disciples and tell them to forgive.

Jesus appeared to the disciples in a locked room where they were hiding in fear. In John we read:

“Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’” (John 20:21–23).

Once again, the disciples inhaled the in-spiration. They were filled with the Holy Spirit and sent to bring forgiveness, to anybody and to everybody.

They were sent to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and they were sent to forgive. In forgiveness we are healed. To believe in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting means to believe in transformation. It means to believe in healing, ultimate and infinite healing.

To speak of resurrection and eternal life, we have to speak of death. And that is a delicate thing. Most of us are afraid of death, either our own death or the death of our loved ones.

Many of us have lost loved ones, and we know the depths of grief. To speak of our hope in resurrection and our hope in eternal life should never be used to judge our grief or anyone’s grief.

Our hope is not meant to avoid or avert the real and reasonable human experience of grief in response to loss. Grief is part of life, and it’s something we must go through. We can’t go over it or around it. If we try, it’s likely to jump up and surprise us or to sneak out sideways and hurt the people around us.

We approach grief and fears of death with tenderness, knowing that these are healthy human responses to painful parts of life.

There is a beautiful talk by Irish priest John O’Donohue called “Love Is the Only Antidote to Fear.” (The following stories and O’Donohue quotes are from notes of a talk by this title given in 2004 at Greenbelt Festival in the UK. The talk can be found online, but is no longer available at Audible.com.)

In it he talks about the many things we are afraid of — one big fear being the fear of death.

O’Donohue found a meaningful metaphor for death as he was thinking about birth. He said, what if we got it all wrong about death. What if we’ve got it backwards. We think of death as an ending, but what if it is a beginning, like birth is a beginning.

He describes an imaginary conversation with a baby before it is born. If we could talk to a baby and tell it what’s about to happen, it might go something like this.

We’d say, listen, baby, here’s the scoop.

First, you’re about to be expelled from the shelter of the womb where you have been formed.

Second, you will be pushed along a passage where you feel at every moment like you are being
smothered.

Third, you will arrive out into a vast vacancy, that is cold and bright, probably filled with merciless light.

Fourth, the cord that connects you to the mother heart will be cut.

Fifth, no matter how close you ever come to anyone in your life afterwards, you will always be deeply alone.

Sixth, you’re going on a journey for which there is no map.

Seventh, you can’t turn back, and eighth, anything can happen to you on the journey.

If we could tell this to a baby, we can imagine that they might well panic. They might say, Oh, it’s been so great in here, but it sounds like now I’m going to die.

But really they’re about to be born.

Perhaps death is also like this, O’Donohue says. We only see the destructive side of it, but really we’re being “born again in a way that the loneliness of space and time no longer have a hold over us.”

In this new life, there is no loneliness. This brings to mind some of Jesus’s teaching about eternal life.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus makes long prayers to God on the night of his betrayal and arrest, before he goes out to the Garden of Gethsemane with his disciples.

First, he tells his disciples that they are about to be scattered and it will seem that they have left Jesus alone (John 16:32). But he is not alone, he says, because he and God the Father are one. God is with him, and he is with God.

Then Jesus prays that all people may have eternal life. And he defines eternal life in a very interesting way. When I found this scripture I had to read it again and again. “And this is eternal life,” Jesus says, addressing God the Father, “that they may know you.”

No more loneliness. No more being scattered. “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Jesus oddly speaks of himself in the third person here.

In John’s Gospel this eternal life begins in this life. It’s a quality of life in which we know and are known. Jesus’ prayer goes on to describe a radical togetherness, a unity with God and Christ: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22–23).

This is eternal life, and this is a promise that is everlasting.

In Isaiah we read that God “will swallow up death forever [and] will wipe away the tears from all faces” (Isaiah 25:8).

And in Revelation we read that God will dwell among mortals and “will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more” (Revelation 21:3–4).

The promises are repeated and we are reminded. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” God says (Revelation 21:6).

Sometimes birth may feel like an ending. But it is, of course, also a beginning. And we fear that death might be only an ending. But perhaps it is also a beginning of freedom and love and union with God.

That doesn’t diminish our grief, nor should it. But perhaps it reminds us of God’s love. Because, as the Book of Common Worship reminds us, all of our endings and our beginnings are rooted in that steadfast and eternal love God has for each of us, and for us as the church, the communion of saints.

May we be in-spired by that love, the holy breath of God, the spirit of forgiveness and the promise of new life, eternally known by and knowing God. May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church