Thoughts for Sunday March 26th

A Thought Exercise: Imagine you're docking a boat. You cast a rope to tie your boat to the dock. Success, you now begin to pull the boat to the shore. Now, ask yourself, are you pulling the boat closer to the shore (i.e., the dock) or are you moving the entire shore closer to the boat? Obviously, the boat is the one moving, not the shore. Faith works the same way! As we pray we find ourselves moving closer to God, God stays God. In other words, God does not become the sum total of all our opinions. God remains God and we draw ourselves closer to God and God's will. C.S. Lewis, when praying for his wife who was dying of cancer, discovered that when he first started to pray for his wife he was praying as if to change God's will. Later, he discovered that in prayer it was not God's will that was being changed so much as his. This exercise brings us into Howell's Lesson for this week, how faith is both personal and communal.

• In what ways can the Creed be (or become) impersonal and in what ways is it deeply personal (i.e., it expresses my beliefs, it expresses my relationship with God)?
• Is there a danger in making faith (what we say we believe when reciting the Creed) too personal? In other words, can you have too personal a relationship with Jesus?
• Howell argues that we live in a culture that is suspicious of truth, I would add especially absolute truths, is this a fair assessment? If it is, then how might the Creed be received by our current culture, how might faith be received? Does our believing in absolute truths make us somewhat counter-culture as Christians? If it does, what are some examples?
• What is the role of the Church (the community of believers) in helping us to believe?

Closing Thought: Remember the Creeds came to be through debate, discussion, prayer and thought. Remember that the Creeds were first recited and professed under penalty of death. Though we may be tempted to think of them as just something we say each Sunday, the first people who said them would have said them with greater passion and conviction. Just think if in this class we can rediscover something of the passion and conviction of our spiritual-forebearers.