Confession of Faith

The Triune God

I believe in God.  I believe that God exists.  I believe that God is love.  I believe that God is one and yet three.  Through the divine mystery of the Trinity, which escapes the full comprehension of human minds, God exists as one substance in three holy Persons eternally begotten of one another and in perpetual communion with each other and with all creation.  Before His departure for Heaven, Christ decreed that we are to baptize believers in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and so we treasure these three as the Holy Trinity, the ideal shape of community and unity, the three Persons of God.

God the Father is almighty and reigns over all creation, which stems from the Lord’s hands.  The Father is beginning and end, a provider throughout the past, present, and future.  The Father breathed this world into existence and endowed it with the essence of God, and all prayers flow upward as whispers of praise for the Father’s majesty.  Seeing the fallen and broken state of the world and its inhabitants, the Father sent the Son, so that all things might be made new through Him.

The Second Person, Jesus Christ, the Son, is the perfect and complete embodiment of both humanity and divinity, present at the moment of Creation and born as the great gift of God to a human mother, Mary.  Fully God and fully human, knowing all the travails of both, Jesus lived a perfect and sinless life, died a perfect and terrible death, and rose from the grave, defeating death in the process and reconciling humanity to God.  During his time on earth, Christ gathered to himself disciples who would carry on his teachings, founding the Church, Christ’s earthly bride.

The Third Person, the Holy Spirit, is the Advocate sent to us by Christ in his physical absence.  Eternally effervescent and untamable, the Spirit inspires worship, conveys prayers, and speaks in the hearts of all believers, guiding them to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world.  The Spirit is present at times of anointing, affirmed by the laying on of hands.  Just as the Spirit descended like a dove from Heaven at the time of Jesus’ baptism, so too is it invoked in holy ritual, particularly the process of ordination.  Brimming with charisma and passion, the Spirit is the ally of any who would seek to execute the will of God on earth.

And so these Three, eternally bound and begotten, reign over the cosmos and all its inhabitants, perpetually creating and sustaining and preparing for the great peace ever on the horizon, in which we shall see the Lord’s face, and all truths will be made plain.

Creation and Fall

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth by mysterious means with unspeakable power.  Hovering over a primordial waste, the Lord spoke creation into existence, inviting the new earth, seas, and skies to bring forth life and participate in the creative act.  Through the Son, life and light were granted to all peoples of the earth, and the Lord saw all of this and saw that it was good, placing humans as the caretakers of the creation.  The humans were endowed with the Image of God, bearing the standard of their Lord and Master like the signet on a coin.

Though God made all things good, humanity fell from the perfection of the Lord.  In the face of God’s glory and wisdom, pride swelled in the humans’ hearts, which soon yielded to temptation, and when humanity fell to this pride, with it fell all of creation.  While lion and lamb might have lain together before, now upon each other they turned, and the song of creation collapsed into discord.  The human heart bent inward upon itself, and all would be doomed to fall short, as all of humanity turned away from God and fell into the habit of sin.

Sin and Atonement

Though God is perfect, the creation is fallen, perpetually bending inward into itself rather than upward to God.  As Paul wrote to the Romans, all fall short of the glory of God.  All sin, and the natural consequence of sin is death.  Still, Christ reaches out to us.  As both fully God and fully human, Christ is able to reconcile humanity to God in spite of our sinfulness, modeling perfect love for us and atoning for us through his sacrifice upon the cross.  Through Christ, all things are renewed, and all sin is laid aside.  The natural death to which humanity is condemned is undone, and a promise of eternal life is granted to all who will accept the sacrifice that has occurred.  Through Christ, humanity is justified once more before God, and salvation is assured.  Through Christ, we are freed from the bondage of sin so that we may serve God obediently and seek the Lord’s will in our lives, pushing ever to become more godly in our actions and accepting God’s aid when we falter in doing so.

We reenact this process of salvation through the two ordinances of Baptism and Communion (also called Lord’s Supper), the rituals which Christ left behind to commemorate the sacrifice that took place on Calvary.  Through Baptism, we die and are buried with Christ, only to be raised again as disciples.  Through Communion, we reaffirm the sacrifice of Christ by symbolically partaking in his blood and body.  These rituals remind us of the sacrifice which has already occurred on our behalf and point toward a future when all things will be made whole once more, when death shall die and sin shall be no more.

Eschatology

Impermanence is an unavoidable part of the human condition, and we must acknowledge that all humans are mortal and will pass from this plain of existence through the process of death.  By the same token, the world itself is temporal, not eternal, and will pass away in time.  Still, God, as a mighty and merciful act, extends to all humanity the life eternal through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  A promise is given that all of creation will be redeemed and renewed through the actions of Christ and led into a perfected age in which all trial and tribulation will be washed away.  Though humans cannot know the time when this will occur, we hope for the fulfillment of this promise, remaining steadfast in our faith and awaiting the time when all things will be made right.

The Church

The Church is the great body of believers on earth that, ideally, functions with Christ as its head and has its every ligament knit together by the Holy Spirit.  Though all those in the Church possess different skills and gifts, they share a unified objective: to live out the will of God on the earth.  This is fulfilled through worship and missions.  The Church celebrates the work of God in the universe with the commemoration of the Sabbath, meeting together to sing hymns and songs of praise, pray for and with one another, and to listen to the reading of God’s Word, the Bible, whose timeless truth still moves the hearts of the willing.  The Church is also called to work actively for the betterment of the world around it, seeking to live into God’s perfect kingdom by showing the love of the Lord to those in need, particularly those on whom the larger society has turned its back.  While all things will be made right in the eschaton, it is still the duty of the Church to minister to the needs of this hurting world in the intervening time, even though the Church cannot perfectly meet this need by its own power-- only through God’s.

Here lies the great problem of the post-messianic world.  While the Church waits anxiously for the return of her bridegroom (that is, Christ), it is subject to the leadership of mortal humans, who are then subject to the whims of their own bent hearts.  Just as the world is fallen, so too is the Church, yet it is still the instrument through which we, as Christians, must work.  Just as our prayers and worship seek to invite Christ’s redemption into the world, so too must we look to this institution, building it up in love and seeking to restore it to purity in preparation for the real royal wedding.  The Church stands now as a mixture-- the knowledge and wisdom of the ages colored by sinful hearts.  Blessing and burden mingle together throughout its millennia-spanning history, as so many of the world’s greatest triumphs and greatest tragedies have been brought about (or blamed upon) God’s Church.  Though she is continually battered and beaten by men seeking power, and though she has gone astray many times, she is our home and our mother, God’s earthly bride and an instrument for the sanctification of Creation.

When it comes down to it, I believe.

I believe that God is active and present in this world.  I believe that God loves this world, and --through the sending of the Son, the blessing of the Holy Spirit, the establishment of the Church, and the promise of the perfect age still to come-- that love is made known to the world.  As Christians, we must show that love constantly.  Through worship and mission among the Church Universal, we live our faith to the world.  We pray to God the Father with the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we know that these murmurs of faith do not journey up to Heaven pointlessly.

I believe my God is real.

Amen.