The Creed: I Believe in the Holy Spirit
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 29, 2004
Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Luke 4:1-15

This is the third and final installment in a three-part series of sermons on the Apostle’s Creed. Having looked at the sections on God the Father Almighty and on Jesus Christ, his only Son, we come to the third section of this historic creed…

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

I. INTRODUCTION

You know that drawer in your house? You know the one I’m talking about. It’s usually in the kitchen, maybe the den. It’s the drawer that you throw everything into that you can’t find a suitable place for in any other drawer. The junk drawer. That place in the house that holds the most random collection of items you can imagine. My grandmother once won a prize as the member of the audience at a local Buffalo morning TV show because she happened to have a rubber door stopper in her purse. When she was asked later how she happened to have such a thing in her purse, she told us that, knowing about the contest ahead of time, she had emptied her junk drawer into her purse before she left for the TV show.

There can be a tendency to think of the last section of the creed in the same fashion. It’s like that drawer where we throw all of things we can’t find any other place for. Almost as if the Apostles had done their best work on the first two sections of the creed and then decided to string together a bunch of random confessions as part of the third section of the creed.

Starting with the Holy Spirit…

II. THE HOLY SPIRIT

We hear about the Holy Spirit all the time in Scripture--such as in today's reading. Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness where he is tempted for 40 days and 40 nights. The Spirit sustains him there. Full of the Spirit he begins a career of preaching and teaching.

In spite of all that, the Holy Spirit, I would say, is probably the least understood person of the Trinity. We feel comfortable talking about God and Jesus all the time, even if we’re not clear on their relationship to one another. We can talk about them as identifiable characters, as it were. We’re not always clear what to do with the Holy Spirit.

It’s worth taking a look at the origins of our use of the term Holy Spirit.

A. The Holy Euphemism

At first, “Holy Spirit” was yet another in the list of pious Jewish euphemisms. Over the centuries, out of respect for the name of God, and trying to keep the commandment not to take the name of the Lord in vain, pious Jews stopped pronouncing the Divine Name, and instead began to use the euphemism Adonai, which means ‘my Lord’ and which is rendered in English Bibles as ‘the LORD’ usually in small caps. After a while, even that did not suffice, and all kinds of other euphemisms came into use. We see of one in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew—a pious Jew himself—who uses “Kingdom of Heaven” instead of “Kingdom of God” found elsewhere. “Holy Spirit” was one of those. In Hebrew it was Ruach ha-Kodesh “The Spirit of Holiness.” Another name for God.

B. The Shekinah

But in practice, particularly in Christian practice, it began to take on a particular sense. In Jewish thought, there is something known as the Shekinah—the divine Presence of God. It is said that when the Temple—the throne room of God—was destroyed in Jerusalem and the people carried off into exile, the Shekinah, the Presence of God, went with them into exile in Babylon.

So, often the Holy Spirit was used to refer to the special presence of God. Of course, that sounds a little strange because we know that God is everywhere present. There is no place where God is not. Imagine we were to use a somewhat clumsy analogy and were to think of the spirit’s presence the way we think of air: air is everywhere, and yet there are some places where it is specially present and powerful: in a hurricane, in a tornado, in the wind itself.

C. The Breath of God

Perhaps that’s not such a bad analogy after all. Especially when we remember that the word for Spirit is the same as the word for Breath and for Wind. The Holy Spirit, then becomes for us the sustaining breath of God. In the Nicene Creed we refer to the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the Giver of Life”—that which breathes life into us. That which sustains us with the breath of life. God, the Holy Spirit, giving us life as powerfully as if giving us the very air we breathe.

D. Spirit of Relationship

But many of you, or at least those of you who have been paying attention over the past few weeks, may be wondering how the Holy Spirit fits in with the Father and the Son. We talked in the previous two weeks about how to call God “God the Father” was to speak of God in relationship—a relationship with the Son. And to speak of Jesus as “the Son of God” is to speak of Jesus in relationship to God the father. But how does Spirit fit in all this?

In Genesis, we read of God bringing the Creation into being by speaking the words “Let there be light.” God calls the creation into being through speaking the Word. When we speak we use breath to do so. And so, God utters the divine Word, breathing out with the divine Breath. We who are Christians, who consider Jesus the Son, to be the incarnation of the Word of God, might recast this event as God, the Father, speaking the divine Word (the Son), through the divine breath (the Holy Spirit). That God is a unity of Father, Son, and Spirit. That each of the persons of the Trinity is a part of the Creation, and thus a part of our redemption, and our sustenance.

The relation between Jesus and the Spirit is made clear in a number of places in Scripture: conceived by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit descends upon him at his Baptism, he is driven to the wilderness by the Spirit, and is filled with the Spirit in his preaching. In the end, upon the Cross, he commends his spirit into the hands of the Father, describing the connection between Father and Son through the Spirit.

I believe in the Holy Spirit…

III. THE CREED—THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT

And then we come to that apparent “catch-all” section of the Creed as we continue.

A. I Believe in The Holy Catholic Church

This is the one that always throws Protestants. The holy what church? Catholic? No, I don’t think so. Well, we’ve even footnoted the word in our hymnals, so that there’s no confusion. “Catholic” comes from the Greek katholikos, which simply means “universal.” That’s an important thing to confess—that our church is universal. It means that it is not a limited club. We are not restricted, nor can we ever legitimately claim that we are a limited membership organization. We are a church for all and of all. We exclude no one: not on account of race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexual orientation, wealth, class, status, occupation. Nothing. We are the Church and the church is Universal.

I believe in the holy catholic church…

B. The Communion of Saints

Now, “saints”, as we remind ourselves every All Saints Day, does not refer only to those holy ones among us, or only to those who have been fortunate enough to get themselves canonized. When we talk about the Saints, we are talking about the whole body of the faithful. The “saints” was the preferred title for all the Christians. The last verse in the Bible, in the book of Revelation says, “The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with the saints”—to all the members of the Church.

The communion of the saints refers then to that communion, that fellowship, that unites all the believers of the Church, both living and dead. It is a reminder that we are not Christians all by ourselves. Neither as individuals or as communities. We are not in this alone. We are surrounded by ‘so great a cloud of witnesses’, all those who have come before us and all those who will come after us.

We Christians, particularly in America, aren’t very good at this understanding. Our Jewish brothers and sisters are much better at understanding themselves as a people than we are. I suspect that one of the reasons Jews have been so uncomfortable with the movie The Passion of the Christ, is because even if it only appears to cast the Jews of Jerusalem 2000 years ago in a bad light, those are still their people. Members of the people Israel. In addition, the sufferings that Jews in the past have suffered as a result of anti-Semitic interpretations of the Passion story are still felt by Jews today, even if they themselves have never even experienced the slightest form of bigotry. It is a thing we Christians often miss. We are very comfortable in writing off the Crusades as grievous error, or the Inquisitions as misguided. Is it because we have fallen out of the habit of seeing the connections between those Christians and ourselves? Is it because we have all but ignored the communion of the saints that we do not feel the pain of being in communion with Christians who have caused such pain to others? What would it be like if we felt the connectedness to Christians throughout the ages so strongly that the sins of a past generation might cause us heartache? For one, we might better understand what our Jewish friends go through when they think of the Holocaust, or the pogroms, or any other of those historic abuses. And we might better understand what it means to be in communion with all the saints.

C. The Forgiveness of Sins

This is one of the central tenets for us as Christians. We profess that we live in sin, that we are disobedient to God, and that we are pardoned of that disobedience by God through the self-giving sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. To confess belief in the forgiveness of sins encompasses so much. It confesses faith in Christ and Christ’s saving action. It confesses faith in the fact that God wishes reconciliation with us. That God will not leave us in our disobedience, but reaches out to us, offering us the opportunity, again and again, to enter into right relationship with God.

It is a hopeful statement. God, not our sin, rules the world. God decides, not we, as to whether we will be in relationship. God does not lose faith in us. God does not give up on us. No matter what sins we may have committed, we confess faith in the forgiveness of sins—in the power of God to overcome the separation which we have created through our sin.

D. The Resurrection of the Body

We believe that after death we will all be restored to new life. New embodied life. It’s one of the ironies of history, that so few people believe in the promise of resurrection these days. People scoff at the idea of being raised to bodily life. In Jesus’ day, people scoffed at anything else. Resurrection is equivalent with ‘life after death’—there was no other way to conceive of it. Life is embodied. The only way to be raised to new life is to be raised to new embodied life. Jesus himself reminds us that this life will be transformed, in a different manner than our present life, but it will be embodied.

All this serves to remind us that rather than abandon our physical lives to float around in some spiritual plane of existence, we are returned to embodied life. God does not abandon the creation which God created out of love, but instead redeems it, restoring to it the wholeness it was intended to have. And so, we do not abandon our bodies the way the Greeks believed, who thought the world was evil. We are raised into new life along with the rest of the creation.

I believe in the resurrection of the body…

E. The Life Everlasting

Nor is this new life temporary. It is not a resuscitation. Not a re-animation. God is not a B-movie horror director creating a “Dawn of the Dead”. God is providing new life to the creation that will be incorruptible, imperishable. When we are raised to new life, we are raised eternally, to be in the presence of God. We participate in the Kingdom of God and the life everlasting. In the end, we confess, God’s purposes are fulfilled. The life which God gave to the universe in the beginning is sustained eternally with God.

IV. THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT

You know, now that I think about it, I don’t think that these articles of the creed are a junk drawer after all. Not only are these creedal statements not junk, but they are not in the drawer together by accident or by happenstance. It is not a catch-all for the random articles of faith that we believe.

Rather, these articles of faith, outline with perfect clarity the work of the Spirit.

The Church was formed by the operation of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, when the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to teach and preach to the world. The Spirit descended on the Apostles ‘as tongues of fire’—emboldening them and making of them a community, to reach out to the world in service, charity, and unity.

The communion of saints, that holy fellowship, is maintained as part of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, that mystical bond of Spirit that connected Father and Son, connects each one of us to the other, across the miles and across the generations.

In our healing service liturgy, after our prayers of confession, we state, that “all the brokenness that you have confessed has been blown away with the breath of the Holy Spirit and your sins are forgiven.” The spirit breathes new life, breathes fresh air, into the old cluttered and stagnant lives of sin that we live. The Spirit opens the way for our reconciliation with God.

The Spirit breathes new life into us again at our resurrections, as it did with Jesus at his. Overcoming death and sin by breathing air into our lungs again, as at creation. And sustaining us with that breath for eternity as we dwell in God and God in us.

Maybe those Apostles knew what they were doing with this creed after all. They have borne witness to the power of God in our lives, God as Father, God as Son, and God as Holy Spirit, such that we can be bold to confess:

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