Sunday Service - 18 Oct 1942

In the Gospel for last Sunday we had the story of the healing of the Sick of the Palsy. A man, bedridden, suffering from paralysis was brought to Jesus in a bed carried by four men. As a large crowd had come to hear Jesus there was no way of getting into the room where Jesus was. So the men who carried the sick man made an opening in the roof of the house where Jesus was and let the bed in slowly. Jesus, seeing their faith, said, ‘Son be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.’ Later on we read that He healed the man of his bodily sickness also.

As many of you are aware we had the Clergy Synod last Tuesday in Colombo, and on Thursday and Friday we had the Diocesan Council. A very important subject came up for discussion at these meetings. I hope you know something of the Scheme for Church Union in South India. A scheme has been drawn up for bringing about a union between the churches working in South India. The Anglicans, members of our own Communion, form the majority of the Christians in South India. Then there are the Methodists and the members of the South India United Church who owe their loyalty to the Congregational and Presbyterian Churches. You find a part of the S.I.U.C in Jaffna in Vadducoddai, Manipay and other places in the American Mission field.

According to our scheme four of our dioceses in South India, Madras, Tinnevely, Travancore, Cochin and Dornakal, are to separate from the Church of India, Burma and Ceylon and form one church with the Methodists and the S.I.U.C. For the last 20 years representatives of the Uniting Churches have met and discussed the Scheme for Reunion, and now they have put forward this scheme before the churches. A number of our own Bishops have taken part in the discussions and have helped to draw up the scheme. When the scheme is passed by the various Councils of the Uniting Churches, the new Church will come into existence in 1945. I am glad to say that our own Diocesan Council passed the scheme by a large majority. In our meetings both at the Synod and at the Diocesan Council we discussed the differences in doctrine and practice that exist between our own church and the other churches.

I want to refer to one of them. In our own churches, we give a great deal of prominence to the Creed – the Apostles’ Creed which we recite at every morning and evening service, and the Nicene Creed which we recite at every Communion Service. The Creeds are accepted by all the Uniting Churches as the basis of our doctrine, but some of them object to reciting them at every service. Even at the Service of Baptism they think that the newly baptized person should not be expected to recite the Creed. The recital of the Creed should not be a condition for baptism. They would certainly teach everyone the Doctrine of the Church with the Creed as the basis, but they do not want the recital of the Creed obligatory on all. There are Christians in our own churches who are not happy about the recital of the Creed.

What is the Creed? Why do we have it at every service? Why do the others object to it?

The word ‘Faith’ is used in the New Testament in two senses.

1. Faith is an activity of the human personality. It is having confidence in some person, principle or truth. It includes belief, but goes beyond it. It implies not only an intellectual assent, but having complete confidence in God’s power, wisdom and righteousness. The sick of the palsy and the men who carried him had complete confidence in Jesus and in his power to heal and to save. There are two things required for this faith to operate in us. i)There must be in us a sense of sin, a sense of utter weakness and helplessness and a sense of need and something wanting. ii)Secondly, there must be the trust and confidence in God as the one who will satisfy this need. There must be the desire and the urge to go to God as the one who will satisfy our need. The sick of the palsy realised that his sickness was perhaps due to his sin, or that in a general way sickness and pain in the world were due to the sins of the people in the world. From what he had heard of Jesus he was certain that Jesus would save and heal him. So he went to him in spite of the many difficulties. He felt his utter weakness and helplessness and had confidence in the saving power of Jesus.

It is this faith that is required of all of us. It is this faith in Jesus that marks us out as disciples of Jesus. Every person who comes to Jesus with the consciousness of his sin and his utter helplessness is a Christian, even though he does not know Jesus sufficiently to be able to accept the doctrines of the Church about Him. There are numerous instances in the Gospels to show that this is the kind of faith that Jesus was happy to see in persons. It is not the intellectual grasp of any doctrine about the person of Christ. The faith that Jesus commended is that which prompts a man to come to him with full trust and confidence that he has the saving power in Him.

2. There is another sense in which the word ‘Faith’ is used. It is referred to as ‘the faith’ in the epistle for today. It means a body of doctrine, a distinctive set of convictions about God and His activity towards man. The doctrines of the Church about God are based on the Scriptures and they are summarised for us in the Creed. The Creed is a statement of the substance of the Church’s corporate faith. As members of the church we are invited to accept the Creed as the symbol of our individual faith and as the basis of our own individual religion. I spoke of faith as an activity of the human soul. There is no doubt that the Creed – the statement of the Church’s corporate faith – strengthens our faith in God, which is an activity of the human soul. To have ‘faith’ in God (the primary meaning of the term is to have implicit confidence) we must know the nature of God in whom we have placed such confidence and to whom we could flee for help.

The creed teaches us about God and His activity towards us. As a child accepts on trust from his parents the truths about God, we too have to accept from the Church the truths it has preserved for us throughout these centuries about God and His love for us. If some of its clauses present difficulties (as doubtless to many people they do), it must be remembered that the difficulties are inherent, not simply in the Creed, but in the witness of Scriptures to which the Creed implicitly makes its appeal. To the rationalizing mind there are many difficulties, but we must remember that the Creed is the result of the experience of men and women who lived in close contact with God.

Many of us do not give sufficient time to study the full meaning of every clause in the Creed. Even when we study, we may not be able to grasp the meaning fully. But we can accept the Creed as the Church’s corporate faith and endeavour to understand its meaning more and more, not merely by study, but by the experience of our Christian life.

In reciting the Creed in our corporate worship we are publicly witnessing to the Church’s Faith which we have accepted as our own on trust. It does not mean that we have assimilated fully the meaning of every clause in the Creed, or that it has become part of our own individual faith. It is an expression of our acceptance of the Faith of our Church regarding God and His activity towards us and our desire to make it our own.