WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM?

Dear Friends in Christ:

On the Sunday after my week at the diocese’s Jr. High Camp, this question was in our Gospel reading and, during my sermon, I took the risk of asking parishioners for their answers. The question is an important one and there is really no right answer, except the honest answer. And not only is the honest answer the one that really matters, it is an answer that changes as our faith deepens.

During Jr. High Camp, we focused on what it means for us to be members of a beloved community and on disciplines that can help us to grow: community life, Scripture study, prayer and service. At the end of the week, each of us had the opportunity to create a Rule of Life that expressed our individual commitments to action in those four areas and those Rules were placed on the altar at our closing Eucharist and returned to us as we headed home of Saturday. During the session when each of us wrote out a Rule of Life, I was impressed with how quiet we all were and I took that as an indication of how serious we were about the task. At the end of the session, I invited people to share what they had written. One young person shared a commitment to fill in for acolytes who couldn’t serve when scheduled. Another shared a commitment to learn both creeds by heart.

While rote learning is out of fashion, I was very pleased to hear that at least one young person wanted to commit the creeds to memory. Having the creeds in our memory can be a very good thing. The creeds grew out of the early Church’s answering of the question, “Who do you say that I am?” and the creeds are, as one scholar put it, territory to be explored as we grow in faith. What does it mean for us to say, as we do Sunday by Sunday, that Jesus is “of one Being with the Father”? What does it mean for us to say, “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”? How does the Church’s traditional answer to the question help to form our own answers?

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that it is important “to live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” I hope that we are, as a community of faith, committed to living with Jesus’ question and with all the questions that spring from it. I hope that we are committed to helping one another live with all those questions, to seek for our own answers and to let one another’s answers, as well as the Church’s traditional answers, help shape our own answers.

I believe that the disciplines that we discussed at Jr. High Camp are ones that can help all of us, young and old alike, as we grow in faith. Therefore, I invite each of you to develop your own Rule of Life, using a version of the form we used at Jr. High Camp that will be available as we launch our fall Christian Education program on September 11.

Your brother and priest,

Daniel+