In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.

This is the first of a series of fifteen sermons at Sunday Choral Evensong by the clergy of Saint Thomas on the Apostles’ Creed. The sermons will take the whole creed, phrase by phrase, right to the end. By then, we hope to have produced a useful exposition on this creed, the creed of Holy Baptism, which will be a summary of the bedrock faith of the Church of Jesus Christ.

In the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion, as with the other mainstream traditions of Western Christianity (such as the Roman Catholics and Lutherans), we use two creeds regularly in our worship. The longer one, the Nicene Creed, is used by Episcopalians on most Sundays and Major Feasts at the Holy Eucharist. This Nicene Creed, in a slightly different form, is used in Eastern Orthodox Christianity as well. The shorter Apostles’ Creed is used at Holy Baptism and at the Anglican Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer (also called Mattins and Evensong).

The Apostles’ Creed was not composed by the Twelve Apostles. But the creed is fairly called the Apostles’ Creed for at least two important reasons. First, all its affirmations may be found in the New Testament Apostolic writings. Second, as far back as we can go, especially in the early Church at Rome,¹ baptism was administered in the form of three questions concerning 1) God, 2) Jesus Christ, and 3) the Holy Spirit. The person being baptized answered these questions in the affirmative, using statements that began to become what we know as the three paragraphs of the Apostles’ Creed.

So the Apostles’ Creed is a summary of the faith that is taught by the Apostolic Church in the Gospels, Letters and other New Testament writings that were written in response to the Person and Work of our Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God. When it begins with the words, “I believe,” which is the concern of this first sermon in our series, we must understand its context; namely that a man, woman or child is about to declare adherence to the Gospel of Jesus and the faith of Christ’s Church, and then, on the basis of that declaration, to be plunged into or sprinkled with the water of Holy Baptism in the words Jesus prescribed, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (or Spirit)”

So “I believe” means much more than, say, “I believe that God exists,” or “I believe that what I am saying may be true.” When you consider the price that the Apostles and those they baptized and brought to the Church paid for their faith – a matter sometimes of life or death for the first 300 years of Christianity and in various times and places ever since – when you consider that price, then you realize that “I believe…” meant also “I trust,” “I commit,” “I stake my life,” on what I am about to declare.

Saint Thomas Aquinas himself affirms that knowledge of God which is trust in and love of God surpasses knowledge about God. Thus the uneducated grandmother knows more about God through faith than the philosopher who reasons about God without trust in Him. To believe in God, and not just to believe that God exists, is the crucial decision in a person’s life.²

We spend a great deal of time and energy at Saint Thomas teaching the faith, as best we can, with what we hope is clarity and intelligence. We believe that the Gospel of Christ and the faith of Christ’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is the Truth in the most profound and satisfying sense of what we mean by Truth; and this faith has ramifications and connections to every branch of knowledge and pursuit of truth. For in Christ Jesus we have seen the Truth as beginning and ending with his Person and his Work. This is not a shallow, pat, closed-mind answer to the deep questions we all have about life. The Christian faith is open to question and challenge at every point. After all, it makes claims that put it in the open market of discussion. But questions and challenges, I believe, lead not to a dismissal but truly to a deepening of faith. For the Church believes that in Christ God has disclosed himself in terms that human beings can know in a most basic way as the start of a pilgrimage into an unfathomable mystery beyond all human words. That beginning may be known in such a Gospel testimony to Jesus as this from the introduction to Saint John: The Word was made (or became) flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.

“I believe,” because it involves personal response and commitment to what God has revealed of himself in Jesus Christ, is a matter not only of the mind but equally of the heart. The education of the Christian mind is vital; the faith is not a mere matter of feelings or emotions. But the commitment of the Christian heart is perhaps even more primary; and it is this movement that will animate the mind’s education. A great Archbishop of Canterbury and theologian, Saint Anselm, wrote: “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that unless I first believe, I shall not understand.”³

There are certainly three questions involved in Holy Baptism. 1) Do you believe in God the Father? 2) Do you believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God? 3) Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit? And there are certainly the answers, which make up the affirmations of what we rightly call The Apostles’ Creed. But this is not a test that we fail if our understanding be limited; if we are not theologians like Saint Paul or Father Austin. It is a question that involves sincere commitment to what we believe according to the light God has given us and to what is in our inmost heart, a question to which we can say, “Yes. I believe.”

One of the most vivid illustrations of what I am trying to say about “I believe” in the sense of the first words of the Apostles’ Creed came to me about thirty years ago, when it was my privilege to baptize a great intellectual and scholar who was near the end of his life. He had made a long pilgrimage to get to that point. As a scholar he had known many things, far more things than I shall ever know. But now his heart moved him to embrace Christ’s Gospel. When we got to the three questions of the Creed of Holy Baptism, he closed his eyes and turned his face up, clasped his Prayer Book to his heart, and simply began, “I believe…” and went right through each phrase of the Creed. That, I think, is what Jesus, the Twelve Apostles, and the faithful in every time and place of the Church mean when we take up those same words. I believe.

In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.

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¹An older, shorter version of The Apostles’ Creed was known as the Old Roman Creed. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, pp. 89, 1181.

²Aquinas On the Apostles’ Creed.

³See The Episcopal Church’s Lesser Feasts and Fasts, Third Edition, “Anselm,” p.202.