Nicene Creed - 3

Preaching the Creed III

22 June 2025

Mel Eyeons

I recently had a visit from a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Undeterred (or perhaps encouraged, who knows?) by me explaining to them that I’m an Anglican lay minister, they proceeded to ask me if I believe that God intervenes in the world.

What they were working up to was an explanation of their vision of the end of the world, of course, and they departed without a convert.

It got me thinking, though, since I, along with the Christian Church as a whole, do indeed believe that God intervenes in the world, and that this belief is at the heart of our Christian faith.

This belief in God’s intervention is made clear in an apparently small phrase during the Creed which tells us that Jesus “...was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man”. 

The Creed takes great care to make sure we understand the true impact of this by first pointing out in multiple ways that Jesus is indeed God – “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father”.

This is not someone who only appears to be God, or someone who is part God and part human, some especially inspired prophet, or simply a very good man, to mention only a few of the different ideas about Jesus that have been suggested and rejected over time.

Jesus is and always has been God, the Creed tells us, and this is important enough to be reinforced several times.

As Corinne referred to last week, it’s not easy to understand the nature of God as Trinity, so we have to use human ideas like Father and Son, which can muddle things as we automatically think about how human relationships work.

I remember once someone getting confused about why people would pray to Jesus instead of directly to God. I tried to explain that Christians believe Jesus is God, but it wasn’t easy to get across the idea that the Father and the Son are one God.

Jesus being God incarnate is fundamental to our faith, though, and one of the greatest mysteries that the world has ever encountered: that God should want to come down to his Creation to live among us and be one of us.

Why exactly, we might ask, should the all-powerful Creator of heaven and earth decide to become small, limited and vulnerable?

Yet this is what our faith teaches us, and mystery of the Incarnation challenges us to accept the unbelievable: that we are so precious to God that God came to share our lives.

We mainly think about the Incarnation at Christmas, of course, and among the well-loved Christmas readings is John chapter 1.

Verse 14 of that chapter is usually translated, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us”. I’m told, however, (not knowing any Greek myself) that literally translated, this verse says, “He pitched his tent among us”.

I love this image of God among us, apparently one among many in a field of tents, joining in with everyday life, wanting to be part of the community, and not keeping far off.

It also draws on the idea of the Tent of Meeting or Tabernacle described in Exodus 33.

This tent was God’s earthly dwelling place with his people as they travelled through the desert to the Promised Land.

In that case, though, the tent was pitched a little way outside the Israelites’ camp, whereas now God’s tent is pitched among us.

The Incarnation is not simply a nice idea, though, or a piece of interesting theology. Instead, it has real implications for all of us.

To start with, as in the idea of God pitching a tent a tent among us, it means that God is not watching from a distance as we go about our lives.

God has entered into our lives, into sorrow and suffering, into laughter and work, into all the ordinary things that make up our days.

Today’s Gospel reading shows us the nature of this in a dramatic way, as Jesus meets a man in great need.

Tormented and chained up, he was no doubt an object of fear for many of the people around him, perhaps used as a cautionary tale to frighten children into good behaviour.

Yet, Jesus’s first response is not fear or disgust or judgement, but simply to ask the man his name.

This contrasts with the way this man has lived for years: naked, alone and tied up, living more like an animal than a human being.

It’s the demons who answer, perhaps because the man has even forgotten his own name, but still, Jesus recognises that here is a human being who deserves respect and dignity.

The second response is to free the man from his torments, to restore God’s image in this person, to heal and help and set things right.

God-in-Jesus comes not just to see and experience human life, but to help – not just that Gerasene man but all of us.

How and when this help will come can be a mystery, and sometimes we ask with the psalmist, “how long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?”.

Yet today’s psalm also tells us that God “has not despised nor abhorred the suffering of the poor; neither has he hidden his face from them; but when they cried to him he heard them”.

And what the example of Jesus shows us is that every need, every sigh and sorrow, every disappointment, frustration and tear, matters to God, as do our joys, triumphs and laughter.

We are never alone. There is no place, no season, no sorrow, no weakness that God has not entered.

We do not have to go out looking for where God dwells, because God’s tent is pitched among us.

A second implication of the Incarnation is that our ordinary and everyday lives can contain holiness.

As the Creed reminds us, Jesus was born of both the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.

Mary wasn’t powerful, wealthy or well-known. She was young and ordinary.

But she was open to God. She listened. She believed. She was obedient.

Mary met God unexpectedly, in the middle of her everyday life, and everything was changed.

And we too may encounter God in any place – in messy kitchens, in long traffic jams, in busy offices, noisy classrooms, or even in damp tents, as well as in beautiful churches and acts of worship.

The poem In No Strange Land by the Victorian poet Francis Thompson reminds us of this as he speaks of the eternal in the middle of everyday life. I won’t read the whole thing, but the second half goes:

The angels keep their ancient places;—

Turn but a stone and start a wing!

’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,

That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,

Cry,—clinging to Heaven by the hems;

And lo, Christ walking on the water,

Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

A third implication of the Incarnation, and my final one for today, is that in taking on a physical body, God showed that all of life matters – not just the spiritual parts.

There is an interesting tendency among some religious people to think the body and physical things don’t matter.

Some even see bodies as in some way especially evil or shameful.

Christianity has struggled with this tendency from the beginning, yet it’s an odd one for a people who believe in a God who made our bodies and came to earth in one.

God is interested in more than just our thoughts and prayers and worship, vitally important though those are.

Our souls are not the only important thing about us, and we see this in the actions of Jesus.

Throughout the gospels we see Jesus healing the sick, feeding the hungry, turning over tables in the pursuit of justice, and making sure his disciples rest, as well as teaching and preaching, and praying.

And if the physical matters to God as much as the spiritual, and if our bodies are as important as our souls, then what we do matters.

It matters how we live, how we treat others, and how we care for our world.

Jesus came as a body so that he could redeem bodies.

And now, we follow him with our whole selves, not just with our minds, but with our hands and feet and hearts.

So, as we stand to say the Creed shortly, may we all feel the weight of it.

May we be reminded afresh of God’s love in choosing to come to us.

May we look out for God at work among us.

May we find the holy in the everyday.

And may we offer ourselves, body and soul, to the worship and service of God.

Amen.