The Church
Readings: Leviticus 20. 22-26, Ephesians 4. 1-13, Matthew 28. 16-20
What is the Church? We talk about coming to Church, sometimes we might even talk about being part of a Church of the Church. But what is the Church, what are we actually talking about when we use that word.
In some ways the end of the Creed feels a bit like an add on. A bit like the list of items at the end of the Apostle’s Creed but expanded a little. To me it’s always felt a bit like ‘oh, and all these other bits too’. But in studying it the past few weeks I’ve realised it’s part of a cohesive whole, it’s not just tacked on.
The Creed starts with the Father from whom all things come, and from whom the Son and the Spirit proceed. Then moves to the Son who comes ‘for us and for our salvation’ and then moves to the Spirit who draws us into the life of God. And so the natural progression is to what that looks like on earth, and what we hope for in the world to come. The natural end point is to speak of the Church, redeemed by the Son, by Jesus, brought alive and empowered by the Spirit.
As the Creed states ‘We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins’. And we’ll come to the final part which you may already be saying in your head, we’ll come to that next week. Now in some ways it would make sense to spilt this bit up into two, Church, baptism. They’re certainly worth a sermon each, but I’m going to hold them together, because they belong together in many ways. And were going to do them in reverse.
Because since the very start of the Church to become a Christian you’re baptised. Plunged down into the water, into Jesus’ death, and raised from the water into the new life that he gives. And as Anglicans we believe certain things about this, things which add to the Creed. As the 27th of our 39 Articles of Religion declare Baptism isn’t just an outward symbol, as some hold, but ‘a sign of Regeneration or new Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church; the promises of forgiveness of sin, and of our adoption to be the sons of God by the Holy Ghost, are visibly signed and sealed’. Baptism is to be grafted in, made part of that universal body, to be forgiven of all sin and to be adopted into God’s family. To be baptised is for the Spirit to be at work to apply the completed work of Jesus to us and to begin that work of renewal in us.
And when you’re baptised you’re named, and you’re baptised into a name. At my baptism the priest would have said ‘Samuel Theodore, I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen’. We’re named. It’s us personally who this is happening to. But our surname, our family name is missed out, because you’re baptised in the triune name, in the name of the Trinity. In Baptism you’re being grafted into a new family, adopted into the family of the one who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s not just his name now, it’s our family name. We’re his.
I’m a Patterson. And if you spend enough time around me and my family you’ll start to notice that there are various things where we’re alike. Not just physical likeness, but traits and habits and quirks. The same is true for us who are baptised in the name of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We’re to start to reflect his traits, his character.
And even when we mess up we’re part of that family. We don’t get kicked out when things go wrong. We believe in one baptism. If you seriously mess up, go off the rails, and later come back, you don’t need to be rebaptised, you’re still part of the family, still forgiven, still covered by God’s grace. All that happened in Baptism is still at work in you, you don’t need to be readopted. That work of God begun in your baptism is still at work in you.
So what is this family into which we’re baptised? That’s the Church. The Church isn’t a building we now go to, or a gathering we add to our diaries for every Sunday (and other days if you’re keen), it’s a body, a family. And the Creed gives us four characteristics of the Church; one, holy, catholic and apostolic. With the exception of ‘one’, all of those are theological terms and we’d best unpack them and why they matter.
But let’s start with one. We believe in one Church, as Paul says in that letter to the Ephesians, ‘one body’, he’s using different language but meaning the same thing. To be a Christian, whether you realise it or not, is to be part of the one Church. Jesus died to make us one people. In the early Church this mattered because it affirmed that there weren’t Jewish believers and Gentile believers as different groups, they were part of the one body, one Church. Jesus himself says this when she speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd, that he will bring all into one flock. And in our current day it matters because we look rather divided in our denominations. You’ve got Baptists and Methodists, Roman Catholics and Anglicans, Lutherans and Presbyterians, and so on. But what the Creed affirms is that even with those outward differences, we are part of one Church. All true Christians, regardless of their denomination, are part of one Church, one body. And whilst perhaps we can’t worship together as we’d perhaps want for various reasons, disagreements on aspects of doctrine and belief, nevertheless, all true Christians are part of the one Church. Whilst we may be outwardly divided, yet we are spiritually united. As Paul writes we are part of ‘one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all’. What unites us as the Church is far greater than what divides us. And the Creed goes on to describe what this one Church is.
We believe in a holy Church. Holy simply means to be set apart. The Greek word behind the word church is ‘ekklesia’ which literally means ‘called out’, we’re called out from the world, set apart for a purpose. But to be holy also means to be pure, free from sin and evil and corruption. And it’s important to note at this point that this isn’t an aspirational list of qualities, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if we were one, we should work towards that, wouldn’t it be great if we were holy, we’ll add it to our five year plan’. These are actual realities. We are one, united in Christ by the Spirit, regardless of outward differences, and likewise the Church is holy, because Jesus has purified us as a people for himself. Through the cross we are made holy. Much like our salvation doesn’t depend on us, us being saved isn’t down to what we do, rather what Jesus has done, so it is with the nature of the Church, not dependant on what she does, but on what Jesus has done.
Nevertheless, with that being the reality, we are called to live into that reality. Much like our faith in Jesus should change us, it should result in outward changes, lives lived differently, so it is with the Church, being made this, we should start to live into it. As God says to his people in that passage from Leviticus ‘You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own’. Now that looks different for us from the Ancient Israelites to whom that was first addressed, but nevertheless the core part still stands. We are to be holy, because God is holy. Like Jesus, because we are part of Jesus’ body, part of his people. Set apart, living differently. And this is perhaps the one we might wrestle with the most because it so often feels like we’re failing in this regard. We don’t need to look very far in our church and in our history to spot a lack of holiness, a lack of purity, and instead sin and corruption. And it should break our heart.
Holiness matters for us individually, we’re to become the people God made us to be, rejecting sin and evil and the temptations of this world, being changed into Jesus’ likeness. And it matters for us within the body, as the Church, because we’re to encourage one another to holiness. Many of Paul’s letters exist because he’s addressing a lack of holiness in the Church. But our holiness also matters in our witness, it matters to the world. Because our lives together are meant to reflect Jesus, reflect the God in whom we believe. And if we’re to reveal what God is like by our holiness, what sort of God do we reveal when we lack in holiness? Either one who isn’t holy, or who turns a blind eye to our lack of holiness. If we aren’t holy, living differently, noticeably set apart, it’s little wonder people don’t take our message seriously. Holiness matters for us as the Church.
We believe in a catholic Church. And that’s with a lowercase c. If the last one causes us to wrestle with it because of the tension it holds, this one causes the most confusion. When we say catholic in the Creed we mean catholic with a small c, not Catholic with a capital C as in Roman Catholic. To believe in the catholic Church is to believe in a universal Church. That’s what catholic means, universal, according to the whole. It’s the opposite of being unorthodox or schismatic. It means to hold the faith that the whole Church holds, passed down from the Apostle’s, and we’ll circle back to them in a moment.
And once again we’re back to unity. Because we’re not just united with our brothers and sisters in different Christian churches here in Milford Haven, or even in Britain, being part of the catholic Church means we’re united with our brothers and sisters in Christian churches across the whole world. We’re part of that universal Church. And not only that but united with our brothers and sisters Christians all down the ages, from the Apostles, to today, and all who will come after us. To be a Christian is not to stand in isolation, but to be part of a universal family of people from every time and tribe and nation and language. And so our faith is in accordance with that whole, the witness of that whole church. To be a Christian is to be part of that catholic, that universal Church that goes beyond place and even time.
And finally we believe in an Apostolic Church. Now different parts of the Church interpret this bit slightly differently. Some, including contemporary Anglicans, would use it to point to the idea of Apostolic succession, the fact that since the Apostles, hands have been laid on the next generation of leaders in Ordination such that you should be able to trace even my Ordination via the Bishop who ordained me, through the Bishop who ordained them, etc, right back to the Apostles. As Anglicans we’d point to that as part of being Apostolic. But it’s bigger than that. Much bigger.
To be truly Apostolic is not just about a succession of hands placed on heads, but rather to hold to the faith in it’s fulness as handed from the Apostle’s down the ages to us. That’s what Apostolic succession is meant to secure. To be Apostolic is to hold firmly and faithfully to what they taught. And you might be thinking, why what they taught and not what Jesus taught? Shouldn’t it be about Jesus? But that’s pretty much what this is saying. Jesus never wrote anything down, the Apostle’s and those who came shortly after them did. It’s the Apostle’s who taught what Jesus did, and proclaimed what he had done. It’s the Apostle’s who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, passed on what they had learned and experienced and come to know through Jesus.
And the Creeds, particularly the Nicene Creed, act as a really helpful guide rail to keep us within that Apostolic faith. Because whilst you might be tempted to just say ‘all I need is me and my Bible’. It’s just me and my Bible and I’ll work it all out. To do so is to cut ourselves off from the Apostolic faith, and almost to cut ourselves off in our study and learning and discipleship from the wider Church. We’re basically saying, I don’t need any of my family, don’t need their wise counsel, I’ll work it out from scratch. But such an approach is utterly alien to the Christian Church and faith as it has been down the centuries. It’s always been at the very least guided by the Creeds and various confessions that mark out what certain denominations believe.
And the Nicene Creed as a guide isn’t some late invention that has nothing to do with the Bible. We can fall into the trap of thinking, here’s Jesus and the other bits the New Testament records for us, and then there’s this massive chasm and then we get to church history, there’s this disconnect. But that’s not true. We’re talking a few generations. And despite what some suppose, that at the Council of Nicea the Emperor Constantine worked to meddle with the faith such that there’s a complete disconnect between the real Jesus and what we now have, as popularised by the Davinci Code, that’s not true. And we know it’s not true because we have records that he tried to meddle, and that the Bishops wouldn’t let him. For those Bishops gathered from across the world, the deposit of faith, the doctrines and texts passed down from the Apostles were too important to let him meddle. To be part of the Apostolic Church is to hold the faith that the Apostle’s did, the Church is only the church insofar as it proclaims the faith proclaimed by the Apostles. If we’re not doing that, we’re not truly the Church.
But also to be Apostolic is to be missional. The word Apostle means ‘one who is sent’. Just as the Apostle’s were sent by Jesus into the world to share the Gospel, so are we. In being faithful to our calling as the Church, we are to go, to be sent in Jesus’ name to share the Gospel. And if we’re not doing that we’ll wither and die. Not just because we’re not getting more people in the pews, but because we’ve fallen short of our calling, we’re withering on the vine. To be Apostolic is to be sent.
My brothers and sisters, in baptism the completed work of Jesus is applied to us personally and we are adopted into God’s family, sealed with his name. And the Church is that family. It’s not just a place we go to or a thing we attend, it’s the family to which we belong, a body of which we are part. And so we gather as that body week by week, gather in this place to be taught that faith, to encourage one another in holiness. It’s a body of which we are part, united across denominations and geography and even time; both one and catholic. A family united by the Spirt, united in our shared faith as handed down by the Apostles, set apart to reflect God’s likeness to the world, sent out to proclaim his Gospel; both apostolic and holy.
To be a Christian is not just to have a personal relationship with the God of the Universe, although it is that and what an amazing thing that is, but it is also to be part of a family, God’s family. A people united in Jesus both now and forever. And for that may all glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be forever.
Amen.