Oh Lord. Just as I was sitting down to write something about the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, this happens. Another scandal, another all-too-credible account of abuse in the Church of England, yet another story suppressed for the sake of the reputation of the institution. By the time this column is printed, that scandal will have been succeeded by a new one; each changing place with that which goes before. I wouldn’t say that Jeffrey John’s prayer for the church from 2001 has supplanted the Lord’s Prayer in the top 10 Prayers Most Prayed, but it must be getting close:
Lord, do something about your Church.
It is so awful; it is hard not to feel ashamed of belonging to it.
Most of the time it seems to be all the things you condemned:
hierarchical, conventional, judgemental, hypocritical,
respectable, comfortable, moralising, compromising,
clinging to its privileges and worldly securities,
and when not positively objectionable, merely absurd…
Every Sunday in church we stand, look to the east, towards Jerusalem, and say the Nicene Creed. Every single week we say in one voice what we believe about God, about Jesus, about creation and redemption and the Holy Spirit, and about what will ultimately become of each one of us.
When the service is Common Worship, we begin the creed with the words, “We believe in one God…” It’s “I believe…” at the earlier service. If you’re at a sung mass and hear it in Latin, it begins Credo in unum Deum. I believe. That “I” is a corporate “I”, the voice of the Church for the last 1,700 years. It’s okay: you can still come to church and receive the sacraments if you’re not certain you, personally, believe every word. When you stand up and speak, you’re joining with the body who has proclaimed this creed through the ages. What is belief except holding on, trusting things we can’t prove? The creed doesn’t require us to believe that everything in the Bible is historically verifiable, nor that since Adam’s fall all humanity is subject to God’s wrath and condemnation. It does ask us to say we believe that Jesus is completely human and completely God, the original theological victory that led to the creation of the creed. And even this bedrock assertion invites wonder as soon as it is made.
This is just as well, because people have always had doubts and strange notions. Even theologians have doubts and strange notions. Out in the parishes, very few people, for instance, seem to believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. The resurrection of the dead? What would that entail? Imagine a parish visit. I am having tea with two children, their mother and the cat. “They wonder whether Jesus might have been in a coma, or unconscious, and came round in the tomb,” their mother tells me. “Many people have wondered that over the centuries,” I begin, and then try to talk about how different the dead are from the living; how very, very different when you see them and touch them. We talk about how the disciples thought they were seeing a ghost, and Jesus asking for something to eat to prove he wasn’t. In the end, we decide, it’s a mystery, like so many things in the universe.
Some people tend towards materialism, some towards spiritualism. Most people in my parishes want to be buried next to their kin, not so that they will all rise together when time shall be no more, but so that their bodies will repose forever in the same chalk and clay. Some believe in reincarnation. Some believe that we are entirely spirit. The church fends off heresy with the creed and the people go out with their own beliefs. Did God create everything? Even wasps? Is everything that happens God’s will? How does that work then? Doing theology on the hoof is a lot more exciting for me than doing it in the university. And yet if I hadn’t spent a lot of time in the university, could I manage to visit and preach in these parishes? I’m thinking now of the student in a seminar who said, outraged, “I can’t go back to my people and tell them that the resurrection is just a symbol!” “What do you mean, ‘just a symbol?”’ retorted the professor, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate. “Symbols are all we have. Symbols are what we are. Christ is the symbol of God. We are the symbols of Christ.” Which brings me back to Jeffrey John’s prayer, which goes on:
Lord, we need you to overturn the tables, judge us and cleanse us,
challenge and change us,
break and remake us.
Help us to be what you called us to be.
Help us to embody you on earth.
Help us to make you real down here,
and to feed your people bread instead of stones.
And start with me.
