A Need for a Creed
During a recent confirmation class listening to our young people searching for ways to express their faith, I realized again the purpose of a Creed. In age of individualism is there a need for Creed? Creeds seem dry and dusty in our digital age, but historically they have played an important role in the life of faith. And still do.

Jaroslav Pelikan, is a Yale scholar of Christian History, whose book, Credo, is a monumental exploration of the history of creeds and confession. He describes his sense of wonder in worship that occurs when he recites the same creed that was likely sung that same morning in the Philippines (or somewhere else in the worldwide church), and recited down through the ages from the early church fathers, to Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, to his own grandfather in the 20th century. The creed forms a universal foundation for the Christian faith that unites people across cultures and even across time.

A Creed is the Language of Love
Pelikan, who is Easter Orthodox, contrasts contemporary attempts to make new creeds with what he describes as the language of love. The ancient creed is a way of saying simply, when all other words fail, "I love you." Some contemporary creeds succeed in this effort, but many fail to say the faith in a way that unites the world church.

For Pelikan, one contemporary creed, written in 1960 by the Masai people in Africa, fully expresses the language of love. It bears the obvious marks of its own culture, yet speaks of the faith held in common by all:

We believe that God made good his promise by sending his Son, Jesus Christ,
a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe,
born poor in a little village,
who left his home and was always on safari doing good,
curing people by the power of God,
teaching about God and man,
showing that the meaning of religion is love.
He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died.
He was buried in the grave,
but the hyenas did not touch him,
and on the third day, he rose from that grave.
He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.

With its striking folk images, the Masai Creed confesses the faith in a particular and very personal language of love. Clearly it doesn't speak the same thing as the Apostles' Creed but it does say the same thing.

Now turn from Pelikan to the Apostle Peter. On occasions like this one in Acts, Peter get thoroughly creedal, and it all begins with whispered accusations that he and the others are three sheets to the wind, cold-stone drunk.

There's no surer way to dispel the accusation of drunkenness than by reciting the Creed. You do that, and you can go on your way. Thank you very much. Of course, what Peter has to say is not a creed in any formal sense. Yet his first sermon was a proclamation of a set of beliefs about Jesus that grew out the experience of the emerging Christian community. This set of beliefs - Jesus was crucified, died and was buried, God raised him from the dead and he is now exalted - form one of the earliest creeds of the church.

Creeds reflect our personal Experience of faith in Jesus Christ
I didn't realize until later, but the Apostles' Creed began shaping my faith at an early age.

As a child who sometimes slept on my parent's shoulder during worship, I recall being fascinated when the congregation stood to recite the Apostles' Creed. It was not the theology that caught my attention; I simply accepted the truthfulness of it. What I felt was something akin to wonder. When the people stood to say 'I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth ...,' I had a sense of being caught up in something beyond my tiny self. Saying that affirmation of faith, Sunday after Sunday, regardless of the archaic language or my particular mood of the day, has shaped my faith ever since and grounded it in a living tradition.

When Peter preached that first sermon after Pentecost, he was stating what the early church had come to believe about Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, this was not just Peter reciting his personal beliefs, this was the preacher proclaiming the common beliefs of the Christian tradition of the time.

But, why has Christianity historically has placed such a high value on belief, and from the beginning formulated those core beliefs into creeds to be shared in common by all Christians?

The answer to that question finds its roots in the earliest creedal statements of Judaism found in Deuteronomy 6:4: ("Hear O Israel, the LORD our God is one LORD. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might.") This is known in Judaism as the Shema from the word, Hear. It describes a common belief about God and a personal response, so the creed here is both communal (our God) and personal (love the Lord, your God).

Though Christian confessional statements bear a remarkable resemblance to the original Shema, there is one obvious alteration. The earliest Christians altered their story of God's way in the world in light of their personal experience of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Peter proclaimed a common belief that Jesus was crucified, died and was buried and that God raised him from the dead, because that was the conviction that had captured his heart.

Creeds Unite the Church. Creeds Protect Us
Creeds are important not only because they articulate our personal experience of the risen Christ, but they also serve to unite the church by protecting believers from the tendency toward radical individualism or simply inventing our own faith. When so much else divides, the story held in common by all Christians and expressed in the creed, brings us together. Christians can and do disagree on any number of social issues that are rocking the world, not just the Roman Catholic Church - gay and lesbian ordination, ecological crisis, poverty and debt relief, violence - but in our disagreements we can still maintain unity through our common confession of faith and work toward common solutions.

Of course, the God whom we seek to know, love and serve, who is revealed in Jesus Christ and descended upon the church at Pentecost, can never be contained by any creed. God remains beyond our grasp; we can only comprehend what our minds can contain and they cannot contain the fullness of God.

One scientist, Lyndon Eaves, has suggested that creeds can function as operational hypothesis - the best formulations of what we can never fully grasp. Experienced in this way, creeds, like stories, when entered into faithfully, open up a new world of faithful exploration.

A Creed Describes That To Which I Give My Heart
Finally, William Sloane Coffin, in what may be his last book, Credo, says that a creed is that "to which I give my heart." The task for us all is to take the creed - words on paper - and allow those words to become a living, breathing reality in our experience. According to Pelikan, our faith, embodied by the creeds, is a way to say "I love you." Coffin says it's something we must give our hearts to, our lives to.

So what is it that we are giving our hearts to? That's our functional creed. Is it living after Christ in a way that increases the supply of human kindness? Seeking justice, practicing mercy, walking humbly before God?

Whatever we give our hearts and lives to is our creed.

Peter's story describes not so much what we can comprehend but a God of love who comprehends us and provides for our salvation. That is love, and that the point of the creed. It is also what we celebrate around the Lord's Table today.
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An earlier version of this sermon was published in Homiletics
Sources cited:
Johnson, Luke Timothy. Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters. Doubleday. 2003.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. Credo: A Historical and Theological Guide to the Creeds and Confessions of Faith of the Christian Tradition. Yale University Press. 2003.