Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God in post-Christendom

Thoughts

What is God’s power like?

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The Christ Pantocrator icon from St Catherine’s monastery at Sinai

I’m reading through Ben Myers’ book The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism, and I love what he says about God’s power in the chapter on the word “Almighty.”

The early Christians often compared God to a breastfeeding mother: it is a favorite image in numerous sermons and writings from the ancient church. We relate to God not like loyal subjects submitting to a powerful ruler, but like infants drawing nourishment from a mother… Augustine described the divine power as “maternal love, expressing itself as weakness.”

True power is not the ability to control. Controlling behavior is a sign of weakness and insecurity. True power is the ability to love and enable without reserve. God’s power, like the power of a good parent or teacher, is the capacity to nourish other agents and to help their freedom to grow.

In an age when we are very suspicious of power, it’s important to proclaim how God’s power is so vastly different from the worldly, controlling expressions of power that abuse and oppress people.

Who is the “I” who believes in the Apostles’ Creed?

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In Ben Myers’ short book on the Apostles’ Creed, he has a chapter on the very first word of the creed: “I.”

He reflects a bit on our overly-individualistic age, musing that nowadays “we assume that the truest thing we could ever say would be something had made up ourselves.”

I’ve had conversations with people in our church who struggle to confess the creed, because they’re unsure if they individually really do believe all the articles of the creed.

Can I really be 100% certain about the virgin birth? (It’s usually the “born of the Virgin Mary” part that people have trouble with.)

But confessing the creed isn’t really about being individually 100% certain about historical facts. It’s about belonging to a story. It’s about being part of the great cloud of witnesses who belong to Christ and participate in the life of God. It’s about living the Gospel.

I love how Myers clarifies this:

“I believe.” Who is the “I” that speaks when we make that confession? It is the body of Christ. It is a community stretched out across history… In 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 and to join their individual voices to a communal voice that transcends them all.

So we actually don’t really even need to know 100% what exactly it means that Jesus was “born of the Virgin Mary,” for example. We simply confess this creed and trust that the Church knows, and we are part of her, so we “know” in a way that runs deeper than my ability as an individual to explain.

Creeds as sacramental, not just educational

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I’m reading through Ben Myers’ short book The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism, and in the first chapter he says that the creed comes from the “rule of faith,” which was a distillation of the faith of the apostles, which is rooted “ultimately in the word of the risen Christ himself.”

Myers says this ancient rule of faith had two functions. First, it was educational. It was the essence of the catechesis given to new Christians. The trinitarian confession of faith was memorized and understood so that it could never be lost or forgotten.

But secondly (and more interestingly to me), the rule of faith was sacramental. It was confessed during the baptismal rite itself, like a pledge of allegiance, like marriage vows. Words that perform, not just inform. “In baptism, something is brought into being as the words are spoken,” Myers says, “It is the words, just as much as the water, that make a baptism. By these words a person becomes a disciple of Jesus and a member of his community.”

We confess the Apostles’ Creed every week in our worship gathering, and I find it helpful to think of this action as sacramental, not just educational or informational. As we confess our faith together, we aren’t just reciting some facts about God and salvation history. We aren’t consolidating power (as creeds are often accused of doing – which I understand, because I think it is possible to use creeds in this way. But I don’t think the creeds are inherently instruments of exclusion and power-hoarding).

When we confess the creed together as the church, we are doing something sacramental: participating in the reality we speak of. Confessing the creed participates in the life the creed speaks of. To say “I believe…” is not so much to confess individual confidence but to confess corporate belonging and participation in the Church of Jesus Christ, across time and space. The communion of saints throughout the world and throughout the ages who belong to Christ and participate in the life of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.

You only really see from the inside

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Athansius of AlexandriaI’m reading through Athanasius’ On the Incarnation right now for a church fathers discussion group I’m part of, and came across this lovely thought in parts 27-28.

Athanasius says that one of the ways you can see that death has been defeated by the death and resurrection of Christ is that for Christians, “no longer is death fearsome, but all believers in Christ tread on it as nothing.”

First of all, I’m struck by how he talks about the death of death as a cosmic fact. It’s not just some private experience that a person has (like gnosticism), but when a person becomes a Christian, they personally begin to participate in a cosmic reality that took place in the death and resurrection of Christ: the defeat and death of death itself!

And you can see this participation by the way so many Christians (even boys and young girls, he says!) treat death as nothing, knowing that it has been defeated by Christ.

Secondly, his argument in part 28 made me laugh out loud. He is speaking to those who may still doubt that death has been defeated. Even after seeing so many martyrs go willingly to death, he says,

If, regardless, he still has doubt in his mind that death has been destroyed and brought to an end… let the one not believing the victory over death accept the faith of Christ and come over to his teaching, and he will see the weakness of death and the victory over it.

Isn’t that funny? The argument basically is: Don’t believe me about death being defeated? Become a Christian and you’ll see it’s true!

One of the axioms of the missional theology we train leaders in at Gravity Leadership is that we learn how to live as disciples of Jesus not through detached analysis but through embodied participation in his life.

In other words, you don’t really discover a spiritual truth by examining it from afar. You don’t really see or understand the kingdom of God by moving away from it and analyzing it. You only really see and understand spiritual things from the inside, as you participate in them.

It’s kind of like trying on a new pair of glasses. You can’t really know if they work by looking at them and analyzing them from a distance. You have to put them on your face and participate in the way they bend the light, and see how your eyes respond to it. Only after trying the glasses on do you know whether or not they are helpful to you.

It’s really the same in faith – if you want to find out whether death has been destroyed by the death and resurrection of Christ, there’s no other way to really find out except to “accept the faith of Christ and come over to his teaching.” You’ve got to give yourself over to it before you’ll really understand even the first part of it.

How we come to the table

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My mom sent me this quote from Shauna Niequist on how we come to the table (from her book Bread and Wine):

We don’t come to the table to fight or to defend. We don’t come to prove or to conquer, to draw lines in the sand or to stir up trouble. We come to the table because our hunger brings us there. We come with a need, with fragility, with an admission of our humanity. The table is the great equalizer, the level playing field many of us have been looking everywhere for. The table is the place where the doing stops, the trying stops, the masks are removed, and we allow ourselves to be nourished, like children. We allow someone else to meet our need. In a world that prides people on not having needs, on going longer and faster, on going without, on powering through, the table is a place of safety and rest and humanity, where we are allowed to be as fragile as we feel. If the home is a body, the table is the heart, the beating center, the sustainer of life and health.

This is the posture we are trained into when we participate in the Eucharist. In our church we instruct people to come with hands open to receive the bread, rather than hands grasping to “grab” some bread. We allow someone else to serve us and meet our need as we come in a posture of dependence and vulnerability.

It’s interesting, though, how easy it is for people to slip back into “grabbing” the bread. There really is some training and reframing happening as we remember to open our hands to receive grace as the priest offers us the body and blood of Christ in bread and wine.