It was one of my doubting mornings. One of those where you feel the wear of doubts and disclaimers about your faith and you just want God to do something to show he's really there and not some imaginary bird on an imaginary island. Yeah, it was one of those mornings.
So my morning prayer became a bit of a pretentious tantrum with the Sovereign, and I did just that: show yourself. SPEAK! If I were humbler, calmer, less doubtful I might have put it in the better "Speak Lord, for your servant is listening." But God knows better than most that some days I'm less refined and make up for the refinement with volume. SPEAK!
So God spoke.
"What? You mean you heard his voice?"
Well not like you might be imagining. But the thing is, those who seek often actually do find. Particularly when what they are seeking is what God is offering: his Spirit. "How much more," Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke, "will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit for those who ask for him?" And when your crying for faith, for something to stir against the doubt, really what you are asking for is the Holy Spirit.
At first it was quiet. Like a moment of sheer silence (Elijah found God there, btw). A gentle draft blew the drape over the table behind our baptismal font. I was hoping for that voice from above you might have thought I was speaking about when I said God spoke. Oh that would be nice. I believe I've only experienced that once in my life. Not this time. This time things were all quiet; no earthquakes, lightning clouds, or heavenly visions.
So I moved on; not from faith, but in my morning prayer. I moved on to the Apostles Creed and it was there that I heard a voice speaking, stirring, preaching as I confessed those words. The ancient communion of saints, the long tradition of the faithful before me, they in those words were in fact confessing to me. It was from them that God spoke. "Whoever listens to you," Jesus also says in Luke, "listens to me." Here's what I heard:
In doubt, let the creed open your faith.
Start with God the Father of all things, Creator of everything. The most basic belief in the existence of the Divine is tied to our own creation. You are a creature, there must be a Creator. The Father is the easiest and most natural belief you have.
Then confess Jesus. Notice how much longer it is, how spelled out it is. The length may be a consequence in part of theological issues, but even that reveals something. The heart of the matter rests on Jesus and so it takes more time to talk about him. God is fully revealed (as Father, Son, & Spirit) in his incarnation and resurrection. The center of faith and the revelation and story of God therefore goes back to him. Take time telling his story. We take time confessing Jesus, because confession of faith and the outcome of our faith hinges on the Godhead in human flesh. This is the story that we must go back to in our doubt, when things seems confusing or overwhelming, when nothing seems real this is where God was so real you could touch him. And confessing Jesus no longer allows confessing the Father to be only a belief in the distant creator, but in the over-involved creator of the Hebrew faith.
And if our faith has become infatuated with this incarnate Son, then we confess the Spirit. It only follows that if Jesus rightly calls me to faith, then this Spirit that his first followers so adamantly relied on was real too. And this Spirit precisely leads people into the holy life of faith. Belief in Jesus by the Spirit enlivens all the Spirit's activity in your life. Thus now you confess the church of which the Spirit joins you to and operates from. And if you are a part of the true church, you are in communion with all the saints whose faith of old is born anew in you, and if you are of the holy church and in fact a holy person (saint literally means holy one) then you must have the promise of forgiveness of sins and resurrection to life everlasting. For these God promises hand in hand for those he has saved and joined to his body known as the Church.
And like a good Lutheran the amen rings out, faith again assured that this is most certainly true!
By the end I found myself clinging physically to the cover of our baptismal font, a great symbol as my faith was then and there clinging to the baptismal creed. In my doubt I had said the words of belief, and they stirred belief in me, they dragged me from doubt. They began with a simple belief, focused in detail on the central story of Christian belief - which is somehow the most outlandish and yet most believable, and from there promised everything I feared was just a thought.
"Wasn't that still just a thought?" you might ask.
No. It was the answer to my prayer. It was the Holy Spirit for a hungry soul, it was a voice saying "Don't let those doubts hold back your faith", it was the silence being broken with the words "I believe". It was God, the voice of the saints, and a lonely sinner caught up in one desperate prayer. That's not a thought, that's an event.
And even if it doesn't convince you, don't think that is simply because you are skeptical, because I was rather skeptical at that moment too. And it opened everything for me.
Peace in Christ readers!
