Today’s Gospel began this way.  “There was a man sent from God... as a witness.”  Why did Jesus need a witness?  Couldn’t he have just started off teaching and healing on his own?  Wouldn’t people have flocked to him just the same?  What was essential about John the Baptist?  And if John the Baptist’s role was essential to Jesus then, what about now?  Who plays that role  for us?  To begin answering these questions I’ll describe an experience that you may have shared.

 

            The first time I heard an Indian raga I found it curious but not engaging – not really ‘music’ I thought.  Where were the harmonies, the chords, counterpoint?  I might have given up on it except for Ravi Shankar.  Through his witness to the world of Western music I learned how much it was possible to experience through the ragas.  Ragas can express every human emotion, every subtle feeling in us  and nature.  Also, they convey the mood of a particular time of day or a season of the year.  Through their subtle tones and melodies, ragas project the artist's inner spirit.  According to Ravi Shankar, they can elevate our consciousness to a realm of awareness where we experience the true meaning of the universe.  Now I cannot appreciate a raga at that depth, but I do hear the parallel with John the Baptist.

 

             Without John the Baptist, how many of Jesus’ hearers would have known to listen for more than just the notes in Jesus’ music, so to speak?  It might have been as it is for us when we attend a really interesting lecture.  We learn; our horizons expand perhaps, but we walk out essentially the same.  What a pity to hear Jesus on that basis!  It’s as if we entered a room, looked around, settled down to read, and then left.  What if someone had told us there is a secret panel in the room.  Find it and you can go from darkness into light.  How different our experience in that room would have been!  But one told us!  Think of the dismay in the centurion’s voice, when he stood facing Jesus at the crucifixion and suddenly he realized what he had missed.  “Truly, this man was the Son of God!” he cried.  God sent John the Baptist to save the people from encountering Jesus without realizing who he was and what was possible through him.

 

             What about us?  People in our day are just as prone to hear without hearing, see without seeing.  Who or what will serve as John the Baptist for us?  I suggest that we take the Nicene Creed as our forerunner.  This may seem like an unlikely candidate; for you have probably heard – or even thought yourself – “I simply cannot say the Creed, not with integrity.  I choke on the words ‘I believe’ because I don’t; and I feel phony, pledging myself to what I do not believe.”  Join the crowd!  However, I am going to try to thin the ranks of that crowd.  The Creed can be said with integrity. 

 

            A council of bishops first worked out the Nicene Creed in the early fourth century, when controversies arose about basic theological issues.  The council wanted to impose some orthodoxy.  So, much of what the Creed contains arose in opposition to ideas that do not bother us much today.  Then why do we not drop the Creed and stop troubling our consciences every time we say it?

 

            Martin Smith, an Episcopal priest in Washington, DC, offers an answer in his book Compass and Stars.  He describes visiting the Soviet Union during the time when the Communist regime banned all religious activities, except for the liturgy.  He attended a liturgy in Kiev.  As the congregation began to sing the creed, he felt a surge of energy pass through the church.  The people sang with fervor, as he said, “like the repeated crashing of the waves of an invincible sea.”  He found tears streaming down his face, and he noticed that he was not alone.  For them, he said, the creed was both a “song of defiance and the jubilant celebration of a tremendous mystery.” 

 

            That’s fine, we want to say, for those days.  But why not change the wording so that it is more in keeping with the concerns of our day?  For instance, do we really think of God as a male?  What does it mean to say that Jesus came down from heaven?  How many of us really affirm the virgin birth?  Explain begotten if you can.  Who can make sense out of the image of Jesus ascending into heaven?  Most of us cannot with honesty recite the creed with our rational minds.  We can, though, with our symbol-using minds.

 

            Think of the creedal statements as boundary stones that outline a territory we call home.  In a geographical territory we would want our boundaries to enclose a source of water, some building material, a source of fuel, tillable soil, space for grazing, and room for others – in short, everything it takes to make a happy, wholesome life.  The Creed works like that.  A rich and prosperous spiritual home, for us, must include faith, hope, and charity; love, joy, and peace.  A few, key beliefs mark out that territory for us as Christians: belief in God, belief in Jesus, belief in the Holy Spirit, and belief in the church, the Scriptures and the sacraments.

 

            Let’s take just one.  We can probably all agree that we believe in God; but what do we believe about God?  I doubt that any two of us would agree entirely.  Each of us is developing our belief about God as a life-long process.  We start with the Creed; in other words, with the early history of belief about God.  We build on that with what is given in the Bible and in the tradition of the church over the centuries.  Then we modify that according to our life experience.  We also listen to what friends have to say or to writers we respect.  Through it all we pray.  I am spelling out what we just heard in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians.  He wrote: “Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything....”  In the end we acknowledge that what we believe will always be a work in progress.  Our beliefs are like cartons of milk, stamped with a “good until” date: good until a new understanding shakes me up.

 

            To come at this another way, try a different pronunciation: not believe, but be-live.  I be-live in God, I be-live in Jesus Christ, I be-live in the Holy Spirit and so on.  Living in the territory marked out by these boundary stones, I learn the true meaning of Jesus Christ as surely as if John the Baptist were here in person.  I discover that behind music is silence; behind squalor is beauty; behind grief is joy; behind pain is peace; and behind loneliness is intimacy and bliss.  This is the truth of Jesus Christ, and the Creed, no less than John the Baptist, says: watch for it.