A Message from Pastor Alexa

On Sunday, we will welcome several new members, and celebrate a baptism. Yay! It is always a profound joy to name the inherent belovedness of one another, remember our own baptisms, and welcome folks into this particular expression of God's family. I hope you'll join us!

As part of that ceremony, we say the Apostles Creed together. We'll invite you to (re)affirm the historic faith of our tradition by reciting the creed; we'll invite you to join your voices with the voices of many generations that have come before us and the many generations who will join in after us. It is a beautiful tradition. 

And creeds were argued over, a lot, by smart, faithful people.

They aren't 'inspired by God' in the same way that we affirm our scriptures to be. These are works of liturgy that the historic church continues to say together, in order to hold ourselves together by wide bounds. 

One of my cornerstone Christian writers is Nadia Bolz-Weber. She shares a story about people in her Lutheran church community who have a hard time with saying the words of the creeds, struggle to participate in the liturgy of the church, because they can't quite believe every word of it. Nadia Bolz-Weber teaches us that the creed isn't mine, it's ours.  There may be days that it is challenging or impossible to believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, and yet, we say it together, trusting someone else in the room, in person or virtual, believes it today on our behalf.

Friends, we are not alone in carrying and living out our faith. We believe together, we have faith together. We recite the creeds as an act of audacious hope and perseverance, trusting together that even in our imperfect, human-inspired words, God will be there with us, leading us on toward glory. The bounds of the church are wide, and God's love is even wider. Let us rejoice!