St. Andrew's Episcopal Church
Ayer, Massachusetts
Faith, Community, and Love
We Believe: A Simple Exposition of the Creeds
CHAPTER VI. WE BELIEVE IN THE HOLY SPIRIT AND IN THE CHURCH
"I believe in the Holy Ghost"
WE NOW COME TO THE THIRD and last part of the creeds. We have seen that the God in whom Christians believe is the Father in heaven by whose power and will our world and our lives are made. That is the faith of the first part of the creeds. He is the Son, showing Himself to us and giving Himself for us in the life of Jesus. The second part of the creeds deals with this. He is also the Holy Spirit, living and working within us to make us true sons of the Father and true brothers of Jesus.
This thought of a God living and working inside of men as a Spirit is a very old one. The men of the Old Testament knew very well that God is very far above us and our world. He is not shut up in our world. His thoughts and His purposes run far beyond our thoughts and our wishes. They tried to say this in many ways. They said that before there was any world, God was; and if we and our world stopped being, God would remain. They said that from the viewpoint of God the greatest islands are very little things and men like grasshoppers. They said that when everything in the world seems upset, God is not upset. But along with this conviction that God is above us and our world there was the assurance that God is in the world and in men. They saw the signs of the inward working of the spirit of God in the order and beauty of nature. Even more they saw it in gifted men. The skill and imagination of the artist was not of the artist's own making. It was God sharing with men something of His own power to create beauty. Most of all the power that came to the great prophets to know God's will and put it into words was a gift. It "came to them." They could make themselves ready for its coming, but they could not make it come. It was God, working in and through them as the Holy Spirit, who "spake by the prophets." The greatest gift that men could hope for was that God would pour out His spirit on them more fully, making them more able to see with His eyes and love what He loves and do His will.
All these thoughts were in men's minds before the coming of Christ. In His life they saw a man filled with the Spirit. They felt that His coming was the preparation for a great outpouring of new powers from God into their lives. And their hopes were not disappointed. After His death and Resurrection, there came to His disciples, as they met for prayer in His name, a whirlwind of new energy and enthusiasm. It was like a gale rushing through a house after a sultry day, upsetting things that seemed fixed and changing the whole atmosphere. It was like a fire leaping from one to another until all were part of one flame. Men who had shown no gifts of speech began to speak more persuasively than some who had practised long. Men who had spent their lives doing humdrum things, like fishing, or sowing and reaping grain, began to fish for men and sow new thoughts that changed thousands of lives. Quite ordinary men wrote little books that had something in them which has made them the most famous books in the world. Most surprising of all, people who had found it quite hard to live up to the ordinary demands which men make on each other began happily to do more than was required of them. They were more generous, more clean, more kind than any law would require. People of different classes and different races found the barriers between them breaking down and were thrilled with the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
The possession of this Spirit as a power within one's life was one of the marks of membership in the new society that grew up among the disciples of Christ. They were people who called God their Father and tried to live as His sons. They called Jesus their Lord and were pledged to His service. They had a new Spirit in them which showed itself in the way they thought and felt and acted. Men who had that Spirit belonged with them. Others joined them in the hope of receiving more of that Spirit. The New Testament is full of this thought of the present power of God's Spirit working within men.
To believe in the Holy Spirit is not merely to accept the fact that once upon a time new energy came into men's hearts from God, helping them to think better and to live better. It is to believe that God's Spirit is alive and working within us now and that there are great reservoirs of new power from God ready to be used by those who are fit to receive it. We settle down easily to the idea that we have only a certain amount of strength for understanding and for doing. We think we cannot be very different from what we are. To believe in the Holy Spirit is to believe that just as new energy and life are constantly streaming into our world from the sun and from the worlds beyond our world, just as there are huge supplies of energy stored up in coal and iron, waiting for us to use it, so there are endless depths of new wisdom, new powers of loving and making good stored up within us by the long working of God's Spirit and coming to us constantly from Him. The truest Christians are people who live by this faith. They are always seeking by prayer and communion, by making contact with sources of new light and new strength in the Bible and sacraments and in the companionship of the servants of God, to open their lives to the more that God has to give.
"The holy Catholic church"
The Church began as the friends and followers of Jesus. At first they were all Jews. As Jews they had a great deal to bind them together. They belonged to one race. They had a common faith in the God who had made Himself known to their ancestors, who had sent them great prophets to tell them His will and had given them a Law to live by. They knew all the books of the Old Testament and believed that God spoke to them in those books. They went to synagogues to hear the Law of God read and interpreted to them by their teachers, and to pray together. On great occasions they came to their one Temple in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices. But the friends and followers of Jesus had something new in common that began to mark them off from the Jews around them. The new thing was their loyalty to their new Master. They began to think His thoughts and follow His ways. They learned to pray in the way He taught them. They became sure that God spoke to them most clearly through Him. He knew the heart of God's Law for them.
The comradeship among the friends and followers of Jesus was so strong that it was not broken even by His death. Even in their dismay and fear they clung together. When they were granted a sight of Him alive again, and when the new enthusiasm and power of the Spirit took hold of them, their comradeship was stronger than it had ever been. They met together regularly for prayer. They broke bread and shared a cup of wine together as He had done at His Last Supper with them and were one with Him in spirit as they did it. They shared with one another whatever they owned. The things He had said to them and the things He had done were repeated so often that their memories held them fast. It was not long before they were scattered from Jerusalem by the persecution of the Jewish authorities, and then they took the great step of beginning to admit into their comradeship men and women who were not Jews. The book we call the "Acts of the Apostles" gives us little glimpses of the Church in its earliest days. In the Epistles of St. Paul we have the very letters which he wrote to the congregations of Christians which he had founded in some of the cities of the Roman Empire. These are the best evidence we have as to what the Church was in the first years of its life, after it had broken away from its mother, the old Jewish Church.
Nearly two thousand years separate the Churches we know from that earliest Church. Much more has happened in these centuries than we can even suggest here. Very soon the leadership of the twelve whom Jesus had chosen was taken over by others chosen by the Church because they showed special gifts of the Spirit. It was not long before these leaders were divided into the three ranks we know: bishops, presbyters or priests, and deacons. The two great sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper were firmly established and other rites were added, such as Confirmation, the laying on of hands; and Ordination, the setting apart of men for the ministry. Services of worship grew and are still growing. Hymns were written and are still being written. A comradeship which was first numbered in hundreds came to be numbered by thousands, then millions. What was at first a little sect of Jews became a society much larger and stronger than the Jewish nation had ever been. A religion persecuted by the power of the Roman Empire became the official religion of that Empire. Instead of being a dangerous thing which men joined at the risk of their lives, membership and office in the Church came to be an advantage to men who wanted power and wealth. Governments, which had tried to destroy the Church, sought to use it for their own purposes, often very far from Christian. When the Church became very large and strong it was harder to keep it together. Before many centuries had passed the Eastern and Western parts broke apart. We still have the results of that division in the Roman Catholic Church of the West and the Orthodox Churches of the East. Four hundred years ago there was a great breaking up in the Catholic Church of the West, that is, in Europe. Partly because the new nations wanted to be free from the control of the power the great bishops of Rome had gradually assumed, partly because many believed the Church needed to be brought back to the more simple and inward religion of the New Testament, great sections of the Church split off into separate bodies. The Church of England, from which our Episcopal Church is an offshoot branch, broke away from the Roman Church of the West at that time. It kept more of the ways of worship and ways of government that marked the Catholic Church of the West than many of the other Churches that split off at that time. It has always had leaders and members who believed we should be more like the great Churches of the West and the East that are usually called "Catholic" and others who thought we should be more like the reformed Churches, which are usually called "Protestant." Since the time of the Reformation, about four hundred years ago, there have been many other splits in the Church. So we have Congregationalists and Baptists and Presbyterians and Methodists and Quakers. All of those many kinds of Christians have come to the United States from every country of Europe and give us the confusion of Churches which we see around us.
Because the Church is so sadly divided we find it hard to know what we believe when we say, "I believe in the holy Catholic Church." The Church is called in the New Testament "the body of Christ." That means that just as the body men saw when He walked and talked with them was the means by which He spoke to them and helped them, so the Church is the means by which His living Spirit still speaks to men and helps them, teaches them to pray, offers them forgiveness and blessing. Another New Testament name for the Church is "the household of God." It is the home of those who have been led by Christ into a life of sonship towards God and brotherhood with one another. Men have said rightly that if the Church is the body of Christ or the household of God, then it must be holy, or God-like, or Christ-like. But the lives of the people who make the Church have never been altogether holy or Christ-like. The Church has always had some very bad people in it and the saints have been always a small part of it. What can we mean then by calling the Church holy? We mean that the Church stands for God-likeness or Christ-likeness, and offers to men the helps to Christ-likeness. It stands for this even when the people in it are very unchristian. It offers men ways by which to become Christ-like, even when the very people in charge of these helps are very poor ministers of Christ. That does not mean that we can be careless about the wrongness of the people in the Church, especially when it is our own wrongness. Just as there are citizens of a nation who are disloyal and many others who are slack; just as there are members of a family who are very poor sons or sisters or fathers; so there are many members of the Church who are at heart not in it and hurt it more than they help. But the Church is kept alive by those who are honestly trying to be true to what it stands for. They do not give the Church its holiness. That comes from Christ and His Spirit. The true members of the Church are those who let Christ and His Spirit work through them.
The Church as the body of Christ and the household of God is holy. It is also "Catholic" and "apostolic" and "one." Catholic means universal, "for all." God is the God of the whole world. His household is meant to be large enough to take in all men. It is not just for Englishmen or white men or people like ourselves. Christ gave Himself for all men. If the Church is his body, it must give itself to all men. "Apostolic" means to carry on the same life that was in the Church of the first Apostles. It does not mean that the Church can never change. Everything that lives must grow and change as it meets new conditions. The Church has changed a great deal since it began. But if the Church is not to become something else it must keep true to the life and spirit of those first friends and followers of Jesus in whose comradeship it began.
When many different Churches stand apart, refuse to worship together, even claim that they alone are the true Church, there is plainly something very wrong. It is not only a waste of strength and money to have rival Churches living and working in the same places. It hides the truth that there is one God and one Christ and one Spirit. It is false to the purpose of Christ which is to unite men in one brotherhood as the sons of one Father. There is a movement now to reunite the many bodies of Christians. But it moves very slowly because millions of men of many minds move slowly and the way is not easy to find. As things are, we have to live and pray and work in some one part of the Greater Church which God wills. When we say we believe in "the holy Catholic Church" we give our loyalty not only to the part of the Church to which we belong, but to the Church for all, the Catholic Church. We pledge ourselves to work and pray for it.
The life of the Church has two sides to it. It is both a "receiving" and a "giving" life. We join the Church to receive what she has to give us from God and Christ and His Spirit. She give us the truth about God and all our knowledge of Christ. She gives us the Bible and the leadership of her ministers. She gives us the sacraments and the companionship of others in prayer and service. All these are sometimes called, in old language, "means of grace." That is a way of saying "helps to Christ-likeness." This help comes to us in many ways. It may come through our parents or our friends. People may receive it who are not full members of the Church, just as people may benefit by the life of a nation simply by living in it without being regular citizens. But the surest way to have these helps is to enter fully into the life of the Church. People get the best food for their bodies who go to their meals regularly and do not depend on the food they might happen to find hanging on trees or lying on the ground. Those whose spirits are best fed are they who use most faithfully the helps that God offers us in His Church.
The life of the Church is also a "giving." It is made up not only of the people who join in taking what God gives, but of those who join in giving what God asks. He asks our trust or faith and our loyal service to His kingdom. The Church would not live at all if men did not give. Giving money to support the Church is only one small but necessary part of it. She needs men and women to give themselves to the work of the ministry and teaching and caring from those who are sick and in need. Above all she needs people who give themselves to the serving of God and men in every calling.
"The Communion of Saints"
The Church is a "communion." We sometimes hear our branch of the Church spoken of as "our communion." Communion is having deep things in common. It is a "meeting" of spirits. Bodies, that take up space, meet by touching. Minds or wills or spirits meet by having things in common. If you and another person had nothing at all in common you could not meet at all no matter how much you touched one another, or how near you were in space. If the words you spoke meant nothing to the other person, if the things that made you laugh made him cry, if what looked red to him looked blue to you, you could not meet him as well as you could meet a horse. You would be hopeless strangers to each other. The fact than you can meet people and understand one another is because you can think the same thoughts and see the same sights and laugh at the same jokes and like the same people and work at the same problems. The more you have in common the closer you come together. We use the word "communion" to name a very close meeting of the spirits. People who enter into communion with one another do not merely meet on the outside edges of their lives, like people who talk about the weather together; they meet at the center of their lives, in the deepest things. That is the reason that the word "communion" is used ordinarily in speaking of religion. People who share the highest and holiest things are brought nearer together by that than in any other way. There is nothing that has bound men together so closely as real religion. The friends and followers of Jesus were brought very near together and held fast together because they had Him in common.
Having the holiest and highest in common is what is meant by the "communion of saints." To belong to the communion or fellowship of those who are joined together by Christ is to be a part of a great unseen society. That communion reaches way beyond the here and now. It includes all who have ever been brought near to God by Christ. It ties our lives up with lives that have passed out of this world into the hidden life of God's everlasting kingdom. It is a bond between earth and heaven.
Continue to Chapter VII. We Believe in Forgiveness and Life Everlasting