We Believe: Intro (Andrew Meher)

Andrew Meher: you We're starting a brand new teaching series today called We Believe. We're gonna be looking at the basics of what it means to be a Christian and follow Jesus for the next six weeks. And we're going to be doing that through the lens of something called the Apostles Creed. If you've never heard of the Apostles Creed, don't worry, you're gonna know all about it by the end of today. ⁓ And I hope it is helpful to you. I wanna invite you, could you just open up your Bibles? to Matthew chapter 28. We're just gonna read a couple verses in a little bit, but I want you to have that ready. ⁓ We're gonna get into the idea of this in a minute to help us, ⁓ but first I maybe wanna just answer the big question, why a creed? ⁓ Why are we going to understand the basics of what it means to follow Jesus by looking at a creed that people wrote? ⁓ Some of us get suspicious about that and what that means. Why wouldn't we just use the scriptures to talk about it? Well, there's one really practical reason and it's that that's this big, right? You know, how many of you love to read? You think you can read that much in a day? I'm a slow reader, takes me some time. So one reason is practically we need something we can just say and recite and remember to just kind of cover the basics that is theologically, biblically and scripturally sound. That's basically why. we use a creed, but I want to give you an illustration that maybe will help kind of get you into understanding why we use ⁓ creeds and how this can be helpful. How many of you have maybe turned on TV and you came into a movie that looks kind of intriguing, but it's like halfway through and you've never seen it before and you're like, what's going on? Who is that person? What's happening? I heard, right? Who's this character? Are they important or are they not important? Where did they come from? How did they get here? Where are they going? Why did they say that? Why is that such a foreboding scene? You know, the music tells us all of a sudden, ⁓ that seems serious. Is that important? I don't know. Was it important? We don't know because we weren't there at the beginning. We got dropped into the middle of the movie and we're trying to figure out what's going on. Now, how many of you feel like that when it comes to following Jesus? Like, you're like, I have no idea what's going on. I feel like I just got dropped into the middle of a movie. I don't know who this person is. Should I know who that person is? Where did this come from? Where is it going? We start to sound like Cotton Eye Joe. ⁓ And ⁓ it's just like, we get confused, frustrated. Anyone out there? Feel that, yeah? We have ⁓ been given a story, and I don't mean story in the fictitious sense, I mean a story that we live out of. You all have stories that you live out of, right? What are you gonna do when you graduate from high school? How do you know that? How do you know you're gonna go to college? Or is a story you've been told that this is what you do. What do you do after you go to college? Like a good job or a bad job? Okay, what else could happen? You might get married. What else might happen? You might have kids. What else happens maybe after a good long career in your job? See, how do you know all this though? Did you all plan this before you came in and you knew you were gonna say the same answer to me? No, there's a story in our culture and in our world that we live out of. Every kind of behavior and kind of big picture decision you make in your life is based out of some kind of a story. Christians have a story. And when you get dropped into the middle of it, you're kind of like, I don't know what's going on. How can I live out of this story if I don't know it? And the creeds help us live out that story. So what I want to do this morning is we're going to answer five questions. We're going to be talking at the actual contents of the Apostles Creed for the next six weeks, but I wanted to use this morning just to answer five questions. They're this. First, what is a creed? What is a creed? What does it even mean? ⁓ Not the band, by the way. ⁓ Where did this specific Apostles Creed come from? I know some of us might get curious or suspicious, like, Did a group of men just get in a room and decide we're gonna hold it down and no one else gets to ⁓ make a claim about what this faith is and we're gonna decide, we're gonna take the power and take charge of it, right? Where did this come from? There might be some suspicion or some concern in the room. What is the Apostles' Creed about? What's the actual contents of it? Why does that matter? What does the Creed do? What's its function? Why would I even bring it up to you today? And as we're gonna start doing this week and throughout this series, we're actually gonna stand together and we're gonna declare this and pray this and recite this each week during this series. Why would we do that? Why does that matter? And then the final question is, why does this even matter that we're talking about this? What does this mean for us living in the highlands of New Jersey in 2026? And so we're gonna look at those questions very briefly. They're heavy questions, so we're gonna just hit them generally. But what I wanna do is I wanna read two. verses from Matthew 28 verses 18 and 19 here and then we're gonna pray and then we're gonna talk about these five questions this morning. Let's read this, it says, then Jesus came to them and said all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father. and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, as we sang just a few minutes ago, we do honor you as King and Lord. We recognize, Lord, that we might have various ⁓ depths or shades of understanding to what your kingship or what your lordship means, but today, Lord, and throughout this series, we ask that your spirit would give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to know and understand this story that we claim to live in. called following Jesus. And in your name, Lord, we pray this and ask this, amen. Let's look at this first question. So what is a creed? What is a creed? Webster's Dictionary, very simply, does not describe it as a band. It describes it as a brief authoritative formula of religious beliefs. It's brief. That's real important. Everyone say amen. It's brief. It's authoritative. We can trust where this is coming from and we know it's legit. And then finally, it is a formula of religious belief. So basically, it isn't covering everything, but it's gonna give you the general sense of this is the most important stuff you need to know, and then you can build from there. Does that make sense? Okay, so basically, the word creed just literally means belief. But we're not talking about belief here in the sense of, you you might believe that this is filled with water. But you're not staking your life on that, are you? It doesn't really matter, it's just kind of a fact that you agree with. That's called intellectual assent. We give assent to things all the time. Yeah, okay, there's water in there. I'm not staking the story that I live out out of that. But I'll tell you what story you will stake your life on of what's gonna happen when I drop this. What's gonna happen when I drop this? You said nothing's gonna happen? Okay, when I let this go, you know, one of the astronauts that just got back from Artemis II, she said that she's been like going like this and putting things like a shirt or like a bottle of water and just putting it over here and it's just dropped and she's like, ⁓ shoot, I forgot. Like she said she was on the space station for almost a year and that never happened when she came back, but for some reason with this mission it's been. I just thought that was such a cool thing. But we would kind of be willing to shape our lives around a belief in gravity, right? You're not gonna just walk off a really tall building because you know that that's gonna have serious implications for your life. When we say we believe, which is how the Apostles Creed starts and how this word belief is, we are saying that this is a reality, a story that we are allowing to shape our lives and shape the way we make decisions and shape how we understand the world. When we say we believe, we're not just saying this is a nice thing over here on the side, we're saying this is actually going to shape who I am and how I make decisions. You know, some of you know, like I'm not from West Milford, we moved here six years ago to start what was the Plant Church's West Milford campus and is now Highlands Community Church. And we would not have necessarily chosen to move to West Milford, New Jersey. I mean, we love it here, it's beautiful, but we had no history here, we had no context here. I remember driving up for the first time with Rob Parker, who's the pastor at the plant, and going like, wow, like, we're out here in a place. it's, you know, but I tell you what called me here was because of these words, we believe. And that might be what it means for me to make that decision, and it might be a different decision for different people, but it's based fundamentally on I have to live out of this reality, that God has come into the world in Jesus and that means I have to take that into account for what I do with my life. But the New Testament authors had creeds that often came into the text. In Philippians chapter two, verses five through 11, most scholars agree that the apostle Paul is actually just quoting a formula, a creed, that was used by the ancient church. When he tells the church there in Philippi, when you do this, you should do this, consider Christ in his example. And then you give this quote that is like an ancient creed. That being in very nature, God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking on the form of a servant. And being in human likeness as a man, he died, he suffered. And it goes on to say that he was killed, even death on a cross, and he was raised to life, and God raised him up and seated him and gave him the name that's above every name so that at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. This was like an ancient song or an ancient creed that whenever the church gathered, they would say together, they would pray together, they would sing together. And Paul's like, listen, you know what you believe, act like it. Remember what Jesus did and then he quoted the Creed. There's another one that Paul uses in first, excuse me, Colossians 1, 15 to 20. And ⁓ it summarizes the basics of what Jesus did as well. You can read that sometime in Colossians 1, 15 to 20. And so there's these Creeds, these short summaries of what matters most for those who follow Jesus. That's what a Creed is. So let me read you the contents of the Apostles Creed. This is what we call the core of what we believe as Christians. You'll see it up on the screen. It says this, we believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified died and was buried, he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended to heaven and he is seated at the right hand of the Father and he will come again to judge the living and the dead. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church. All you Protestants relax, it just means whole and unified. The communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body. and the life everlasting, amen. Now what do you notice in that? Is there anything that seems like it's not from scripture? Is there anything that seems like it doesn't belong in there or you can't find the teachings of the scripture in there? No, not at all, right? So it's a short summary of our faith in the most basic way and I should say it doesn't include everything that it's important but in it includes the most important things that all of life in following Jesus is built on. So where did this creed come from? I know this is the question for some of you, the suspicion of did a group of men just get in a room and decide we're locking out all other options and we're gonna ⁓ take charge of this. There are some instances in history where some version of that happened. If you wanna take the more like. We could take the more cynical, suspicious approach and frame it that way. Other people would choose a different way of framing that. That's fine, however you wanna do it. But the Apostles' Creed didn't get formed that way. It actually emerged organically from the grassroots of local communities all around the ancient world. So it actually has its start and its founding right here in the text we read in Matthew chapter 28. What did we say? Jesus said, authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them what? In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What did you notice about the Apostles' Creed? There's three parts to it. What are the three parts? We believe in the Father, Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, right? And the Holy Spirit. And the understanding is, is that This was the who and how ⁓ the early church was supposed to baptize people. People would be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So let's fast forward a little bit to the time that Paul is writing his letters, right? And even just like with a few years after that, there's another text. It's not part of the biblical tradition. It's something called the Didache. And in this little text, it was written somewhere between 65 and 150 AD, depending on what you're using to date it. ⁓ This has a simple baptismal, it's a bunch of instructions on Christian worship and things like that. It wasn't the only rule, but it was a general rule of thumb that some communities use. And we notice that when they talk about baptism, they talk about baptizing. When you baptize, you baptize in the name of the Father, the maker of heaven and earth, and the Son, who is Jesus Christ, who died for our sins, and in the Holy Spirit. So that's happening sometime between 65 and 150 AD. And you start to have these like little grass roots emerging that are using some form of what Jesus said, baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So now let's fast forward a little more, 200 AD. We're still pre what's called the Nicene Creed, if you know what that is. That was formulated by an official church council. We're still pre all of that. And here we have someone by the name of Irenaeus. He's in Antioch. in 200 AD in Antioch, is in ⁓ modern day Syria. This is the church that the apostle Paul was sent out of for all of his missionary journeys. So Irenaeus is linked to, like you can read about the church in Antioch in the book of Acts in the scriptures. So this is a very, this is like an original, like this is one of the OGs. We talk about it. Like this church community has been around since almost the beginning. And Irenaeus is the bishop there and we see, in Irenaeus, a baptismal formula that read, I'm just gonna read it, it's not on the screen. This is what Irenaeus said, when they baptize people, they baptize people in the name of God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who is conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, he rose again from the dead, he ascended to heaven, he will come to judge the living and the dead. and I believe in the Holy Spirit and the life everlasting. That's pretty similar, right? So within 200 years, you have the Christian tradition, and he's not the only one with this version of this. Something like this is emerging all over the Mediterranean world, in North Africa, eventually into Europe, all throughout ancient Near East Asia and further west into Asia. All of these ancient things are used specifically for preparing people for baptism. and for baptizing them and they all link directly back to Jesus' words to baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So that's where this comes from. And then eventually what happens is with just a few modifications just kind of based on how the language was used in different times throughout history, by the sixth century we have the version that I read to you a few minutes ago. But it's changed very little and the additions have not been inappropriate. in how they were framed. Philip Schaff, who's a church historian and a scholar, he says this, as the Lord's Prayer is the prayer of prayers, so the Apostles' Creed is the Creed of Creeds. It contains all the fundamental articles of the Christian faith necessary for salvation. In the form of facts in simple scripture language, and in the most natural order, the order of revelation. It starts from God and the creation, he says, down to the resurrection and everlasting life. So they made it very chronological for us, which is so helpful. It makes it very understandable to help us understand where we are in the movie, if you will. Does that make sense? So we've got this. This is where the creed came from. This is a, not like the council, that were created, this is a creed that was formed and shaped organically at the grassroots level from various church communities based on the words of Jesus to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And you will see later creeds like Nicaea and those things. Don't worry, you can Google it later if you don't know what that is. You'll see them use a very similar formulation to this original baptismal formulation. So it's all rooted in the same framework about how Jesus said this. So what's the creed about, right? I read it to you a moment ago, but like I said, just like a movie, the creed has some important characters and themes that you should know about. There's really only one character that is super significant, and then there's a couple side themes and side plots, if you will, that are all built on it, and the one character is God. We have one God. Going all the way back to Deuteronomy six, that the Hebrew people when they came out of Egypt, who's this God that saved us from Egypt? Well, hero Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. You shall have no other gods before me. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. This is the, it's called the Shema in the Hebrew tradition and this is the starting, this is the God who said that there's one God that we worship. we will have no other gods and we're to love this God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. So this is one of the challenging things that the initial Jewish community were claiming is that that God has now come and become human and has been here among us and not only has that God been here among us, that God rescued us and has redeemed us and not only set us free but also the Gentiles, that's you guys unless there's anyone who has a Jewish ancestry. The Gentiles, it just means the nations are all free. There it's free in Christ and can now come to Christ. And even more, now God, the Holy Spirit, has been poured out upon the church and is empowering us to faithfully follow Jesus. So there's one character in the Creed and it's God. God who is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And then we have the church. That's anyone who is following Jesus, has joined the community and entered into baptism and is following Jesus. By the way, shameless plug for that baptism class. If you're someone who's like, yeah, I think I'm following Jesus, but you've never been baptized, I wanna invite you to come to that. Because Jesus' own command was to baptize people when they're following. It's part of entry into his life. Jesus himself was baptized actually, and we're walking in that same water in a way as Jesus did. So if you wanna, if you're curious, you can come out to that class. There's no commitment to get baptized, but it gives you a few weeks to discern that and see what this is all about. We use literally the Apostles' Creed in that class and just have some conversations and talk through that. So come join us. We'd love to have you for that. But this is how we enter the story. The church. is empowered by the Spirit to live in this Jesus-shaped way of life. That's what we start talking about when you see the communion of the saints. How do we live as a Catholic church? Not big C Catholic, little C Catholic, just whole, unified. How do we be unified? I feel like the church right now is very un-unified in some ways, right? It takes the power of the Spirit in order to do that, and submission, I should say, on the part of all Christians to the Spirit. in order to come into unity and be led by the Spirit. But then the Spirit's also leading to this other theme, which is the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting. This story is going somewhere very specific. At the end of history, we see that Jesus will come and judge the living and the dead. Another way of putting that is Jesus is going to set everything right. Everything that has gone wrong is going to get set right. Jesus is the only one with the wisdom to be a righteous judge. All of us, we would judge on our own agendas and our own biases and it wouldn't go very well. We do this on a daily basis, right? Jesus is the only one who judges rightly. But then we also see at the end of history, in coordination with the work of the Spirit, we will be raised to life. And this is hard to think about. I'm not just talking about you'll be on this floating cloud and your spirit will be off in the cloud. The scriptures teach very clearly that it will be a bodily resurrection. It'll be like a new body. but it will be a resurrected body and life everlasting is where this story's going. So this is what the Creed is about. This is what we've been invited to through baptism to enter into the story of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the one God in three persons that is calling us to live by the Spirit and faithfully follow Jesus and be a witness to the world, to that good news. So that's what this is about. That's what the Creed is about. And we're gonna be getting into the what is it about over the next five Sundays after today. And we're gonna look at various parts of the Creed. ⁓ But that leads us to the next question. That's great, so what does the Creed do? Why does it matter that we know what this is? How is it helpful as a lens? Hopefully one thing that's emerging for you already if this is new is that it's pretty instructional and educational. Has anyone learned anything this morning so far that you didn't know about what the biblical story is? Some of you are smarty pants, that's all right. ⁓ I learned a lot, man, let me tell you. But one of the things the creed does is instruct us. We need to know where we're at in this movie. We need to know what's come before, what God did, what God is doing, and what will God do. It helps orient us to what's happening. we're considering following Jesus, we better know what it is we say we believe. What is this reality that we say we live out of? You know, we live in a world where resurrection sounds insane. That it's different in a modern world. know, science kind of governs everything that we understand. And God is not against science, I want to be clear about that. But sometimes we've decided that our own understanding is what's real. How much we can understand. Man, I've gotten into such a universe astrophysics nerd world since Artemis II launched. I'm all about it. And the more I'm reading, the smartest people in the world, like astrophysicists and stuff, they're like, we don't know what's going on, is what they're saying. So basically, science isn't bad, but we need to acknowledge we can't explain everything. And it gets crazy. And there's stuff we've gotta acknowledge about the God who made this. whole universe and this whole cosmos can do stuff that we don't understand. And so there's a reality that we're invited to live out of that might look a whole lot different than what stories are being taught around us. The stories we grew up with, the stories in our neighborhood, the stories in our culture. What are these stories? And we're gonna be challenged. This is what discipleship means in following Jesus. We're challenged every day to go, wow, I'm living in this area of my life out of an old story and if I am following Jesus what I'm saying is I'm actually gonna now live under the reality of the story of Jesus and that might mean I have to change the way I operate in this scenario. That's hard and that's scary, but that's good news. Look around, you've got this community of believers that's gonna encourage you and lead you through and walk with you in it. So we gotta enter the story. That's what this is all about. The story of what God is doing, has done, is doing, and will do, and that's what we're invited to live out together. But we have this creed of this instruction of understanding, and it's shaping how we understand how we're supposed to live, but it doesn't just instruct us, it also forms us. If you start showing up to worship regularly enough, if you start reading scripture in a community with your life group or other followers of Jesus, if you start ⁓ praying the creeds or praying prayers of confession, and you're not just like saying it, but you're actually trying to like live out of it, let me tell you, it starts to shape and form your life. I use this example a lot, but if you start trying to work out or go to the gym or go walking, or ride a bike or just some kind of physical activity, you'll find that your endorphins after a while start kicking in, right? and you get this endorphin kick. And then what you begin to realize is you start kind of craving that endorphin kick and you want to go for that run. Maybe some of you want to go to that run if your head's broken. I don't know. I don't want to go for that run. But maybe some of you want to ride a bike. Ryan wants to go for that run. I know that. And I know Tim wants to go for that run. ⁓ Maybe you ride a bike or, man, I've really felt good after that. I'm going to go out and work out again. Or I'm going to go for a walk again. We feel good. Those endorphins hit. But you didn't start with this desire to exercise and do all these things, right? You actually started by forming a habit. And the habit shaped your desire to exercise more. We've got to understand, we live in an age of authenticity where we go, well, if it's not what I'm feeling, I can only do something if I feel it. Because I need to be true to myself. And we live out of this understanding that the most authentic and honest thing I can be is when I'm true to myself like that. And that can look like so many different things. But what we learn from so many different avenues of life and in scripture is that we're actually become shaped, our desires that we are desiring are actually shaped by whatever habits we're feeding. And so for us, if we're gonna come into desiring looking at the world in this different way, this way that we've outlined in the creed, when we begin to shape habits where we say this regularly, pray it regularly, ⁓ bring it into discussion, in community regularly, it begins to get in there and shape and form how we see the world. We use the Apostles' Creed every morning at breakfast with their daughters. It's just become a thing for us. It takes two seconds. They know it inside and out, but what's really funny, my four-year-old especially, like we'll be talking about something else or, you know, like recently we had a dear friend and mentor, loved one in the last year die. And you talk to your kids about death. We kind of hide death away a lot of times in our culture, I think, because we're afraid of death if we're honest. Everyone doesn't know what to do with it. But as Christians, we say, we believe in the resurrection of the body. So it actually changes, we grieve, ⁓ my gosh, I was so sad when Lisa Plunkett died. But I know I'm going to see her again at the resurrection of the dead. And man, you gotta, in those moments when you lose those loved ones that were walking with Jesus, you gotta really like, no, do I really believe this? And we're challenged to let that shape our reality. And it is hard, my friends. But we have to train ourselves to do so. Stanley Hauerwas, theologian, says it this way. We can only act within a world that we can see. And we can only see the world rightly by being trained. If you don't have language for something, no, it's there. Some of you have been to therapy and you've probably experienced that and then someone one day, maybe your therapist said to you, yeah, that's called gaslighting and suddenly you could see something that you just couldn't see before. You have language for it, and it's the same for our Christian faith. What the creed does is help form us to have eyes to see this new reality. But it doesn't just instruct us or form us, it also helps us declare the good news. You ever feel like you're like, ⁓ what do I believe? I don't know. And you get nervous. So what do Christians believe anyway? And you don't know what to say. Quite honestly, it can be just really helpful to have simple language to say, well, this is what I believe. if you're asked. It's also really just gives us good news, a good language to declare to ourselves and our friends around us right now. Because sometimes you're having a season of life that's pretty dire and you need someone to be able to speak good news to you. You need to be able to speak good news to yourself. You need to be able to say that man, the bottom feels like it has dropped out of life but I know God has worked, God is working, and God will work. And so I can have the bottom dropped out, I can grieve, I can be in this state, this season of confusion, and I can be okay with not feeling like I'm in control because I know God has moved, God is moving, and God will move. And so the creed becomes good news for us for those reasons. That leads us to the last question. Why does this matter? Hopefully by now, some of that has become ⁓ readily. apparent to you, why does this matter? And there's a lot of reasons why we could talk about why this matters. I just want to highlight two this morning that I think are super significant for us right now in the time and place and history we live. The first one, why does this matter? We didn't make this up. I don't know about you, but that's good news to me. Especially standing up here talking. Imagine if I made this up. Some of you know where I'm going with this. We should all just leave and get brunch. If I made this up. The fundamental reality of saying those first two words in the creed, we believe, is not based out of something that I have to conjure up. Or man, I'm not saying I hope this is real, that God the Father Almighty is the creator of heaven and earth. We're not saying that, we're saying we, we're saying God has already, I am just receiving and walking faithfully in what he has already done. I am not captive to some kind of like ⁓ situation where I am like, you know. making this up, we don't have to worry about the whole did this happen, did it not happen, we are walking and standing on something that is real and has a history and comes from real stuff that happened in the world, like when we say Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, a real historical person that we can. and we can name and we can say all these things about them and what that meant. And there's real stuff, there's a God actually entered into a time and place in history and moved and I didn't make this up. And I can stand on it not because I'm just hoping against hope that it's real, I can just stand on it because I can trust that God's already done the work. And I can walk faithfully now. ⁓ Ben Myers says about this, ⁓ baptism, nobody is invited to come up with their own personal statement of belief. All are invited to be immersed into a reality beyond themselves, to join their individual voices to a communal voice that transcends them all. This kind of rubs against our American kind of rugged individualism, right? Where like I... I came into this on my own two feet. And we gotta get real when we come to Jesus and say, I was thankfully carried into this because I couldn't bring myself in. None of us have the strength to do this or live into this on our own strength. But we didn't make this up and that's good news. And so that's part of why the creed matters. When we declare it, when we pray it and say it, we're saying it with a confidence of like, I didn't make this up. I didn't come up with this and I'm like, I'm hoping this is the right way to put it. I hope this is an appropriate way to talk about what God's done. But there's a second reason, and this might be even more significant for us in our region, in our community these days, and it's this, it's that we do not need to be afraid. There is something about stating that God created everything. God then came into history when it fell apart and has redeemed it and saved it and is gonna spear it and pang right one day. And that God is present with us by the spirit empowering us to live faithfully in the life of Jesus. There's something amazing about the fact that we don't even fear death. that can help us not be afraid in everyday situations. Some of you are aware, some of you are painfully aware that it was just announced by the Board of Ed in town here that one of our elementary schools is gonna be closing. It's the second one in three or four years, I believe now. There's all kinds of complicated ⁓ funding reasons for that. The Board of Ed is working hard, ⁓ doing a lot of stuff, fielding a lot of questions. But I was at the Board of Ed meeting when when they announced this and they extended, they usually have a limit on how long public comments can be made and they suspended that, let as many people speak as wanted to speak and man, let me tell you, people were in pain. We got people in our church community right here that are in pain. We've got people that are, I heard speak that are afraid. There's so much anxiety, uncertainty. What does this mean? There's so much anger, grief, sadness. I heard a lot of people too react and kind of cut people off and interrupt during that meeting with, well what can we do? Well what can we do? And what I began to notice, people are grieving and there's a lot of pain, so it's understandable, hear me. But I also noticed that a lot of that is like this knee-jerk reaction that we do when we're afraid, when we're anxious. And in my experience personally, when I make decisions and try and make stuff happen when I'm fearful and anxious, usually not a lot of good comes out of it. And it doesn't end up actually helping people. It might create a whole new problem. And so here's why I'm bringing this up right now. It is because our church, other churches in this community, Christians that live all over the area, we have this opportunity to process through our pain about this situation, our disappointment, our uncertainty about this situation in light of the fact that Jesus is going to return and set all things right. In light of the fact that Jesus will raise the dead and give us life everlasting. That actually, that God wants to take everything wrong and turn it for his good. And for our good, he says. And so we cannot shy away from these real issues that are happening in our communities, right? But we get to come to those issues anchored in these words of we believe. We get to be anchored in this risen Jesus who says, don't be afraid. A little earlier in Matthew 28, before Jesus says this word to baptize, he is raised from the dead and the first words in Matthew's gospel he says to anyone, was Mary Magdalene who saw him and they bow down and they start worshiping and he says, do not be afraid. When the risen Jesus gets. present among us when we believe that this is real as the Creed calls us to we get to really receive those words of Jesus do not be afraid Do not be afraid and when we can live out of that and believe out of that man It changes how we're gonna engage these complex issues happening in the highlands right now Because it's not just the West Milford school district. It's it's school districts all over the highlands that are experiencing this But we can come to these problems, not with all the answers and not saying, we know what to do, but to say, well, we're not afraid. It's more than a lot of people have these days. It means we can listen to a lot of people that are in pain and hurting, can talk with them, maybe pray with them if they want that. It means we can ask questions maybe from a place not of anxiety, but of trust that God can bring about something new. And it just changes the way we see reality and work with things. It reminds me of ⁓ Julian of Norwich. She was a Christian mystic in the late 1300s, early 1400s. She probably lived somewhere between 1343 and 1416 in Norwich, which is a small city north of London. she was in probably way more tumultuous of a time, I'd imagine, than we're experiencing right now. The Black Death was happening. If you know anything about the Black Death, that's pretty serious. ⁓ There was a peasant revolt that also happened during the same time in her lifetime. There was massive social unrest in England actually. Society was about to collapse. Like just completely implode. It was a disaster. And she was asking in the midst of that questions about the world's brokenness, about sin, about hell. And she's like, God, like what's wrong with you? You ever ask God that? What's wrong with you? And she has this, you can read this, her account. She has this incredible series of, I think it's 17 visions of the risen Jesus. And in these visions, she just begins to learn and see things from Jesus' perspective about what God is doing in history. And Jesus doesn't give her some kind of secret that the Bible doesn't give, but this is what she gets left with after all of this and she has these encounters with Jesus. and sees who Jesus is and that Jesus is going to work all things together for the good of those who love him as the scriptures say. She just writes these words. She's right, after that I understood that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall For us, the Creed anchors us in the life and the reality of the risen Jesus. to see things from a different perspective, to live and behave out of a different reality, to enter into serving our community, not from a place of fear or anxiety, but a place of love and compassion and confidence because we know that all shall be well. So as we begin this six week journey together of exploring what it means to follow Jesus through the lens of the Apostles Creed, I want you to keep that in mind that this matters for your neighbors. Not just that they know the right truth, but that they encounter people who are living out of this reality. So what I wanna invite you to do is would you stand and as we pray the Apostles' Creed with me, I wanna invite you to declare and confess and pray the Apostles' Creed with me. And what you're gonna hear from our team who's ever hosting on Sundays is when we close the singing and the music part at the first part of our worship gathering, we're gonna use this as a prayer and a declaration to close our time of singing together. Each week. during the series and then you might hear, just like we did with our prayer of confession during our Lent series, and then you might hear us from time to time in the future use this on a somewhat regular basis to help anchor us in this reality. But let's pray this and declare it together. I'm gonna invite the worship team to come forward and we're gonna declare this together as we prepare to take communion. We believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord. Who is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day, He rose again. He ascended to heaven, and He is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again. to judge the living and the dead. We 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.

Matthew 28 · chapter mention Matthew 28:18 Matthew 28 · chapter mention