“MY LORD AND MY GOD”
Prayer: O risen Christ, You said, “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.” Mercifully grant that this benediction may be ours; so that, walking by faith and not by sight, we may evermore rejoice in You, and confess You as our Savior, our Lord, and our God. Amen. (Parish Prayers, ed. Frank Colquhoun)
Sermon Text: St. John 20:28-31. Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blesséd are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
Lord, this is Your Word and these are Your words. Sanctify us by the truth; Your Word is truth. Amen.
With this portion of the Nicene Creed:
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds.
In the name of Jesus, dear fellow redeemed: Grace and peace come to you from God our Father, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Amen!
We say the Nicene Creed together in church. In the service bulletin you’ll notice, next to the creed it says: “We Confess the Universal Christian Faith.” That’s what this is: it’s universal, everyone who’s a Christian is able to say this. These are the basics for every Christian, the necessary things to believe.
But why do we say the creed in church? It’s not just “part of the liturgy.” The answer is in those two words, “we confess.” In Romans 10 it says: “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”
So this says that it’s not only about believing in your heart. If you believe in your heart, it says, you will confess it, which literally means to “speak the same,” to speak aloud the same as you believe in your heart, and to speak aloud the same as others, other Christians – and with other Christians.
This is why we say it in church. It’s a together thing. It’s the faith we share. As soon as you have this faith, you’re part of a “we.” The original form of the Nicene Creed begins: “We believe.” In church we say “I believe,” since you aren’t saved by someone else’s faith, no one can believe for you, so you are speaking for yourself, in public: to God, to your fellow Christians, to the world. Just like Thomas saying, “My Lord and my God.” And yet you say it standing with other people, side by side, not alone. Everyone saying, “I believe,” means that collectively it has the effect that what’s being heard by God, by the angels, by each other – even by the devil – is: “We believe!”
The devil will do anything to stifle this. So he comes with his temptations. He beats you down with your sin, keeps you busy with other things, over-whelms you with fears. But especially he works to dishearten you.
One of the ways he does this is to make you feel you’re alone, you’re the only one, you lack support. He uses many things to do this. But especially we want to think about how he makes you as a Christian feel alone in the world. This is a hard temptation. Your faith isn’t encouraged or approved of. How often people work in a place where no co-workers are Christian, or the boss makes it hard to have Sunday off, and it’s obvious your Christian beliefs are considered wrong opinions, not tolerated by others. Alone in the world.
So we see Thomas, he’s alone with his sadness over Jesus’ death. Satan really has his way with him. He’s known as “doubting Thomas” but as Jesus points out, he’s “unbelieving” Thomas. The opposite of confessing Christ is to deny Him. That’s what Thomas is doing. But “confess” in the Bible also carries the meaning of “praising” or “acclaiming” God. When we confess who God is in church, we are extolling Him, praising Him, and this is the aspect that Thomas lacks when he absents himself from the other apostles.
We may not feel like praising sometimes, but when we do it helps our faith. You can say it as a prayer. That’s what even weak faith does: it prays. What Thomas says – “my Lord and my God!” – as if to say boldly “You’re my Lord and my God, I believe in You!” are words he could also say as a prayer in weakness – “my Lord and my God!” – as if to say “You’re my Lord and God, help me to believe!” Satan wants to quiet all this with the oppressive alone-ness.
When we look at how the Nicene Creed came about, we also see a situation where the devil was surrounding God’s people with factors that made them feel alone. It’s called the Nicene Creed because Nicaea is where the emperor Constantine summoned bishops of the church for a council. This was in the year 325 A.D. – exactly 1,700 years ago.
At that time many so-called Christians were following the teaching of a heretical pastor named Arius. Arius taught that although God the Father was eternal and without beginning, the Son of God, Christ, is not eternal, that He did have a beginning. This would mean that Jesus is less than God the Father, not equal to the Father, not eternal. It means that Jesus wouldn’t be God from eternity; that He isn’t able to be Savior, and unable to rise from the dead.
What you should know about the men who came to Nicaea is that they’d lived through a brutal persecution of Christians by the emperor Diocletian and then, right before Constantine became emperor, under a ruler named Maximin. St. Nicholas of Myra – yes, that St. Nicholas, who was a strong defender of Jesus’ divinity – was imprisoned under Diocletian; he came to Nicaea. An Egyptian bishop named Paphnutius had had his left leg mutilated and his right eye put out by order of Maximin, and when he didn’t deny his faith he was sent to the mines; he came to Nicaea to defend Christ’s deity.
Both in the days of persecution, and also when the false teaching about Christ was gaining influence, these Christian bishops could feel alone. There is evidence that the heretical teaching of Arius was more popular; it had more people. It wasn’t easy to confess the truth then. It isn’t easy to confess it now. Just look at the beginning of this creed that we say:
“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” This is the First Article, the article that centers on the First Person of the Trinity, God the Father. It’s about creation, which is the chief work ascribed to God the Father. Even Arius wouldn’t argue this part.
But we envy how nobody in their world even doubted a six-day creation. This was true for 1,500 years after them! Yet today we’re such a minority to believe that God made the world, made all things, “visible and invisible,” as Colossians 1:16 says – all things that you can see, even under a microscope, and all things in the invisible realm, such as the angels.
What we face in our world is not just doubt about this, but a religious devotion to the man-made theory of evolution, this theory that all things came to be through a chance process. It’s not just that it’s taught in schools. Evolutionary thinking today is behind the attacks on marriage and gender, everything God makes. This is acting as if God isn’t the source of anything, but our existence is up to us and this is all there is. Talk about being alone!
But in contrast to this harsh “survival of the fittest,” this hopeless picture of an existence without a loving God, the Bible teaches and we confess in this creed that God is the one who made all things. He is the loving Maker. He reveals Himself to be “the Father,” your Father, who loves you.
How do you know the Father loves you? The Nicene Creed wastes no time. It introduces you to the Son: “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds.” You can only know the Father’s love through His Son. This is where Arius would have a problem.
Even here in the first part of the creed – with the words of creation echoing in our ears – it has us say: He was “begotten before all worlds.” This begotten-ness is not like a birth that has a beginning point, but it is “before all worlds,” not meaning there are other worlds to discover, but it’s speaking of time.
He is begotten, or exists, “from eternity,” that is, before time began in any created world, in our created world. In fact, Christ Himself was working in the creation, with the Father, for it says in Proverbs 8 that He “was brought forth” and was “there from the beginning, before there was ever an earth,” and “was beside Him as a master Craftsman,” and in John 1, “He was in the beginning with God, and without Him nothing was made that was made.”
This should give us the strong sense of oneness between the Father and the Son, oneness between Christ and the creation of all things, oneness of Christ and the Father with His creation – which includes you. You aren’t alone. Any alone-ness you might feel is a lie. He is the Lord of creation, who was nailed to a tree, but became the Lord over death. He is your Lord.
He presents Himself to you in the Word and in His Sacraments, as He presented Himself to Thomas. As He told Thomas to put his hands into the wounds, He invites you to hide in His wounds, by partaking of His body and His blood for the forgiveness of your sins. He pronounces His blessing upon you: “Blessed are [you] who have not seen and yet have believed!”
It’s by His grace, by the power of His Word, that you do believe in your heart, and do confess Him: “My Lord and my God!” When Thomas said this, he was placing himself with the other ten. When you do this, when you say this creed, praise Him even when it’s hard to, confess Him in your quiet life of faith, believe in your heart and confess with your mouth in your prayers and praises, that God is your Father, the loving Maker – you are placing yourself with everyone else, everyone who is in His Church in heaven and on earth, and it’s a roar heard by God, the angels, the world – and the devil too – all of us saying together, to Him: “I believe … my Lord and my God!” Amen!