Praying the Creed
Lenten Midweek Vespers
March 15, 2017
Zion Lutheran Church + Nampa, ID
Next the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed is probably the best well known and memorized part of the Small Catechism. We say it often enough during church services, and at some other times, where it doesn’t take much more than the words, “I believe…” to get us all going. Typically when we say the Creed, we are doing so not in the context of prayer. It is a confession, a public statement of faith, about God. Typically said not with our heads bowed in prayer, but eyes open, speaking out for the world to hear. The Creed is a statement of faith, each line taken from a different Bible verse. But it can be prayed, and indeed, it should be prayed.
Because the Apostles’ Creed is the briefest and most ecumenical confession of Christianity it was natural for Luther to use it for the instruction of the baptized in the Trinitarian faith. It unpacks Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16). It is a summary of the faith once delivered to all the saints (Jude 3).
The Creed is doxological, or focused on praise, as it praises the Father who gives us knowledge of His grace and mercy in His Son, which the Holy Spirit delivers to us in the word of the faith-creating Gospel. The Creed instructs us in who God is, leading us to thank Him for His Fatherly care, confessing our ingratitude and abuses of this gift, and petitioning for His continual love and mercy in Christ.
In the Catechism, Luther sets out the Creed in contrast to the 10 Commandments. As the Commandments set out God’s Law for His creation, the Creed is pure Gospel. In the Large Catechism, Luther explains, “For the [Commandments] teach us what we ought to do, but the Creed tells us what God has done for us and gives to us” (LC II 67).
First Article
The Creed starts, then, with a confession of faith concerning who God is in relationship to us. He is a Father, He is almighty, and He is the Creator. It’s not just that God is a distant creator, but that He is my Father and Has made me along with all creatures. And this is no nameless deity, He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The fatherhood of God is not a metaphor of His kindness, but it expresses the fact that this God is the Father of Jesus and the source of all things. God can be called “Father” only by those who are in the Son. And not only this, but God the Father continues to sustain our life, to provide for the needs of body and soul. This is an active God, who cares for and is personally involved in the lives of His people. We are the recipients of God’s fatherly defense, guardianship, and protection against all evil.
Praying in light of the First Article, then, focuses our attention on God as our Father, on His care for both body and soul, that He has the power and the desire to be involved in our lives. This matches up with the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, in which we may approach God as a dear child approaches his beloved father, trusting that the father loves his children and works for their good.
Second Article
Which now leads us to the Second Article, which concerns the second person of the Trinity. “I believe in Jesus Christ…” This article is an expansion of the New Testament confession that “Jesus is Lord” and so praying this as a prayer focuses on the lordship of Christ. As the First Commandment teaches, everyone is under the lordship of something or someone. If you’re not under the lordship of Jesus, you will be under the lordship of sin, death, and the devil. Jesus says in our Gospel reading for this coming Sunday from Luke 11, “Whoever is not with Me is against Me, and whoever does not gather with Me scatters” (Luke 11:23). Our Lord is jealous for His people, and He will not share them with any other lord.
To say that Jesus is my Lord does not mean that we make him our Lord or that we have accepted Him as our Lord. It is not in our power to choose that. We do not make Christ our Lord. Rather, the Father has given us Christ as our saving Lord purely out of His fatherly and divine goodness. To have Christ as Lord is to have a God who saves from every other lord would enslave us and bring us death. We confess Jesus’ lordship, asserting that this man is the God who saves us. The outcome of this redeeming work is, as Luther puts it, “that I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.”
In part, this is why we often end our prayers “In Jesus’ name.” We pray in the name of Christ, the name that is given to us above all other name, the only name by which we may saved, the name by which we know the Lord. In Christ, we live by faith as we wait in hope for that day when faith gives way to sight. In the meantime, this article of the Creed tutors us to pray along with the final prayer of the book of Revelation, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20)
Third Article
So we are now left with a question: How is it possible to gain access to the Father’s goodness found in Jesus? How is Jesus made my Lord? The Third Article of the Creed answers that: through the working of the Holy Spirit. We can only call on the name of the Lord in prayer because the Spirit has first called us by the Gospel. Without the Spirit’s work in the Gospel, we cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ or come to Him. We could not believe, much less pray, for even a moment were it not for the Holy Spirit who continues to work faith and preserve us in this faith by the Gospel. That work and perseverance takes place in the holy Christian Church, which is the communion of the saints, by the forgiveness of sins unto the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
This means that our prayers, which are never individual but always carried out in fellowship with the Church, are specifically shaped by a Trinitarian faith. We pray to God the Father through God the Son in the power of the God the Holy Spirit. This guards our prayers from what Luther called “enthusiasm”, or in other words, those who would search for God inside themselves. This comforts us who struggle with prayer as it reminds us that faith is not grounded in what we do, but in the sure and certain wok of the Holy Spirit who brings us to confess that Christ is our Lord by the power of the Gospel. God the Holy Spirit enlightens us with His gifts so that we confess the treasure of redemption won by God the Son and rejoice in the free gift of grace of God the Father expressed in His provisions for body and soul.