Christ, the Son of God, and God the Holy Spirit. We are the community of the faithful who have received the Good News of God’s creative, redemptive, and unifying work as told to us in scripture and articulated in these words of the Apostles’ Creed.
The next five questions define the direction our lives are to take, given this identity. They reveal what our attitudes and actions, which comprise our ministry, are to be.
In the first question, words taken from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which describe the early Christians, tell us how we are to carry on the continuity of the Christian faith. We are to learn and preserve the teachings about Jesus, to participate truly and fully in the fellowship of the Church, (the current phrase for that is “radical hospitality”), to
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The dean “replied to all” and graciously included in his response to her, “The Chapel of the Cross has a wonderful reputation in the Church as a healthy, vibrant, committed community and I rejoice that you've found such a community.” When I finished smiling broadly — several minutes later! — I began to think, “That is a lot to live up to! How can we grow as that vibrant, committed community that others perceive us to be?”
You might recall the story Tammy Lee told in her sermon last week of the young doctoral student whom her African-American congregation persisted in addressing as “Doctor.” When she protested to her pastor that she had not yet earned that honorific title, he clarified for her, “We call you, not what you presently are, but what we know you are becoming.”
Jesus does the same for us in today’s Gospel. “You are the salt of the earth. … You are the light of the world.” He is giving us our identity and mission, the amazing role that we are to grow