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Beloved
in Christ,
This
year has marked the 1700th anniversary of
the Nicene Creed. A great many Episcopalians today may struggle with,
or simply dismiss outright, the value of the creed. It makes
literally in-credible claims like Jesus’ virgin birth, the
resurrection of the body, and God as an incomprehensible trinity of
persons in one being. It’s weird. It’s confusing. It’s a dusty relic
from a long gone age.
Well,
yes. That’s precisely its point. The creed reminds us more than
anything that God is God and we are not. God is not a concept we
understand, but a mystery we encounter. Faith is not a set of
rational propositions we accept or reject,
it’s a truth we surrender our whole life to. It’s a story we choose
to live in.
To stand
and profess the weird and ancient words of the
creed is an act of resistance in the current moment. The
Christian Nationalism that sits at the center of political power,
like all authoritarian movements on both the right and the left,
depends on the false belief that God’s kingdom can be imposed by
political will or military might. Our strange and ancient creed
reminds us that the kingdom of perfect love is rendered by God and
God alone. Our work isn’t to build it, it’s to join it. The
environmental degradation that has been wrought by our unchecked
faith in the power of technological and economic progress depends on
the assumption that the earth belongs to us. The creed reminds us
that it belongs to God alone.
To
follow the way of Jesus is to accept the liberating truth that your
life is not about you. It’s about joining what God is doing to heal the
world with love. Our strange and ancient creed reminds us that
joining God’s project is not a matter of what I think or prefer, but
what we, together, with the whole people of God across time and
space, surrender ourselves to. Professing
the creed helps us walk the way of the cross with Jesus, that we
might lose our lives to save them, that we might die to the tyranny
of ourselves so that we might finally, truly live, and give our lives
as an offering that more and more might be folded fully into the great
and ineffable mystery of God’s healing love.
Grace
and Peace,
+CWL
The
Right Reverend Craig Loya
Bishop
of Minnesota
Church
in Minnesota
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