Here We Stand, pt. 2
June 16, 2013
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
“Hear O Israel: the Lord is one.”
That’s one translation of the shema – a title that comes from the Hebrew imperative “hear!” as
in, “listen up!” What follows is the fundamental statement of faith, the creed
or confession, if you will, of the people of Israel: there is one God, we
belong to that God, we shall love that God, and we shall pass this faith along
to our children.
As we consider together this summer the creeds and
confessions that mark us as a distinctive people of considered and articulated
faith, I find it helpful to be reminded that we are not alone in this. Beginning
with the earliest expression of monotheism, the people of Israel give voice to
their faith.
Indeed, as Walter Bruggemann puts it, the people of Israel,
in this speech, bring something new into being. Through their faithful
testimony they speak a new reality into being. The utterance of the people,
their confession, brings about the world they inhabit. For Brueggemann’s
theology of the Old Testament, “faith consists in a willingness to live in the
world of this utterance, and to accept as reliable its speech as testimony.
Such speech – spoken regularly, in season and out of season – recruits persons
into this community and into its faith.”[1]
In this manner, the community’s confession of faith not only
describes the world, but also it summons it into being. Gandhi famously invited
his followers to “be the change” they wished to see in the world. For people of
the word and of the book, we speak the world we long for and in our speech we
summon it forth.
That’s why confessing the faith matters. It is, of course,
not the whole of our faith nor of our summoning, but it is where we begin. For,
in the beginning was the Word.
Last week, I kicked off this summer with the confessions
with a brief look at the earliest creeds. One of the great joys of being in
ministry at Clarendon is the wealth of gifted theologians in the community. So
before jumping ahead a millennia to the Reformation, I’m going to invite the
Rev. John Green to take us a bit deeper into the early creeds.
*****
Christians throughout our history have given voice to the
faith and expressed it in creeds and confessions. I had a lovely brief
conversation on this with our friend Kevin Ogle, who will preach here in a
couple of weeks. Kevin is ordained in the Disciples of Christ tradition, a
tradition that proudly proclaims “no creed by Christ.”
Good Reformed Presbyterian that I am, when Kevin articulated
that foundational principle of his tradition I couldn’t resist asking
immediately, “so, which Christ?”
That, of course, is always the heart of the matter. For we
all want to believe that we are being faithful, that we are living faithful
lives, that we are, indeed, following Jesus. But clarity on just who that Jesus
is becomes crucial when our following leads us in vastly different directions.
Everyone who claims to be following Jesus lays claim, also, to the idea that
their church is the true church.
Such was the case for Europe during the Reformation era.
Almost all of the people – and, significantly, all of the rulers – were at least nominally Christian. As the
Reformation bled across the continent, families and towns and kingdoms split
into Catholic and Protestant factions. Once begun, the urge to “protest” is
hard to stop and quickly the Protestant factions splintered as well into
various factions each striving to be “more true” than the others.
The urge to purity had often tragic consequences not only
for minority Christian groups who were often vilified, but all the more so for
Jewish communities who were often the victims of pogroms.
In Scotland our Presbyterian forebears joined cross and
sword in the battle to build the true kirk. Back in January, Martin and I stood
on the street outside the walls of the castle at St. Andrews. On the roadway
you find the letters GW carved into the stone. They mark the spot were
Protestant reformer George Wishart was burned at the stake by the Roman
Catholic archbishop Cardinal David Beaton.
Beaton was a poster-child for the rampant corruption of the
Catholic Church in Scotland, and was reputed to have fathered eight children
despite his vow of celibacy and lack of a wife. The martyrdom of George
Wishart, the last in a line of reformers who died at Beaton’s stake, inflamed
the passions of his followers. A few months after Wishart’s death, a small band
of reformers broke into the castle, killed Cardinal Beaton, and left his body
hanging out a window.
John Knox became chaplain to the reformers at St. Andrews,
preaching the Reformation tenants that he had learned from Wishart. They
occupied the castle for less than a year before it fell to a French warship in
league with the widow of King James V of Scotland, the French Roman Catholic
Mary of Guise.
The struggle to win the Reformation in Scotland was long and
bloody, and over the next dozen years Knox spent time as a galley slave on the
French ship, and several years in exile in Calvin’s Geneva. While in Geneva,
Knox, impassioned by his dealings with Mary, wrote his famous, or infamous,
tract The First Blast of the Trumpet
Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
By 1560, upon the death of Mary of Guise, the French
Catholics were withdrawn from Scotland and John Knox stood before the Scottish
parliament “to make known to the world the sum of that doctrine which we
profess and for which we have sustained infamy and danger.”[2]
With those words, Knox introduced the Scots Confession, and gave birth to the
church we have inherited.
Among its many doctrinal statements, the Scots Confession
lifts up, in particular, the sacramental essence of the church. For Knox and
his co-authors, the marks of the true kirk are these: the right administration
of the sacraments and the right preaching of the gospel.
For that reason, for a long time, the Presbyterian Church
ordained those who would serve it as pastors to the office of minister of word
and sacrament. The Scots heritage is one reason that I question our decision at
the most recent General Assembly to change the title of the office to “teaching
elder.” But, I digress.
I hope the teaching that John and I have tried to do this
morning accomplishes at least two things: first, I hope it underscores just how
rich and complex is the history of our confessions; second, I hope it lifts up
both the gifts and challenges of these documents.
From the Scotts we receive the compelling reminder about the
centrality of word and sacrament to our common life, but we also receive from
the great John Knox the continuation of the patriarchy and its structures of
power and domination that have done far more damage to the gospel of love than
all the other heresies the creeds and confessions attempt to address.
As we explore our history and, all the more so, as we work
together to articulate the faith for our own time and place, I hope above all
that we’ll proceed with the humility of those who stand in a long line of folks
who had the courage, creativity and faithfulness to speak the faith, and who
also had the brokenness and blindness of the human condition that needs the
faith.
That is the reality we stand in, certainly, and we join our
voices to speak a new reality into being knowing that our speech will always be
limited and provisional.
I suppose, in the end, that is also why we confess. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
11:01 AM
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