This I Believe

I believe in one holy God,
Creator of all that exists,
who forms and shapes creation in all its diversity
and proclaims all things good, indeed very good.

I believe in Jesus, the Christ,
the unique and passionate child of God,
who embodied God’s fullest intentions for human life;
born of Mary, Jesus shares our life;
baptized as one of us, Jesus walks with us;
giving his life in the service of all,
Jesus proclaimed and embodied the coming reign of God,
living with justice, mercy, and humility;
Jesus reached out to those on the margins of society,
seeking to bring them into the beloved community;
being faithful to God, Jesus angered the powers of the day
and was executed as a common criminal,
but God was not content for evil to have the last word,
raising Jesus from death to life again in the beloved community,
God broke the powers of evil and death,
promising that all things would come under the reign of the Christ
in the fullness of time.

I believe in the Holy Spirit
who calls the Church into being
and gives us the strength and courage
to live as followers of Jesus,
who assures us in the waters of baptism
that death is not the end
and nourishes us for the journey of faith at the table of Christ,
and is moving all things toward the reconciliation God intends.

By Wes Jamison

Rev. Wes Jamison is a minister-at-large (meaning he doesn’t have a call to a specific congregation at this point) for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ. He holds a B.A. in Religion and Journalism from Milligan College and an M.Div. from Emmanuel School of Religion. Jamison currently serves as National Field Organizer for the Institute for Welcoming Resources, a joint project of the welcoming church programs and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. He also currently chairs the Open and Affirming Ministries Program for GLAD (Gay, Lesbian, and Affirming Disciples) Alliance. Jamison lives on a farm near Blacksburg, Virginia. He has been in the Search and Call process for over four years now and continues to seek a call as a parish minister.

Responses

Jeff Taylor

July 27, 2010

“the unique and passionate child of God,
who embodied God’s fullest intentions for human life;”

What if Jesus, although an historic figure, was an ideal type in the gospels, created out of a midrash of Jewish tradition, and the hope for an embodiment of the justice that lies therein. That embodiment would be the “coming” of Yahweh’s liberator.

That arrival has not come to pass in centuries because we are looking for it in the wrong place.

Liberation does not come from without. And because we are in bondage—to what we can sense, touch, “see” in a temporal, physical world— we remain in chains.

As long as we can’t see ourselves as being “unique” just like Jesus was, we will stay in our chains.

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Dennis Sanders

July 27, 2010

A wonderful updating and personalization of the Apostle’s Creed. Thanks, Wes.

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The Rev. Wes Jamison

July 27, 2010

Jeff,

You raise some excellent points. Allow me to elaborate? I have always stated and continue to state that I believe we need a higher view of humanity and not a lower view of Jesus. Jesus embodied the fullest intentions of God for humanity and offers us a model for doing the same. Being created in the image of God means that we are filled with the same power to embody God’s fullest intentions for humanity as was Jesus. Through participation in the Body of Christ (the church) and the sacraments and rites of the church, we are grafted into the Body of Christ and become the very Body of Christ in this world, life’s blood poured out for the healing of all. As Jesus was, so we become. We are the continuing presence of the incarnation in this world, the continuing resurrection of Jesus, the Christ.

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John

July 28, 2010

“A higher view of humanity”

I was thinking yesterday about God’s statement in the garden that ‘it was not good that the human should be alone.’ What was God saying, except that God, who was then Adam’s one and only companion, was not a adequate companion for the human. What an odd comment – to call into question the quality of God’s companionship? And yet that is exactly what God was saying – and then God set about creating other humans for the explicit purpose of being companions to one another. The text seems to suggest the conclusion that after Adam, humans were not created explicitly to worship or glorify God, or to work or create, or to bear children, etc., but to be companions to one another.

That led me to conclude that God invested in humans a quality which God did not possess and which God could not assume or adequately express – the ability to be a genuine companion for other humans – apparently genuine companionship is something which only humans can provide to each other.

From this I interpret that God has a “higher view” of humanity, a view that anticipates that we humans can be with one another and we can provide to one another a kind of fulfillment which even God cannot provide without human assistance.

In this light “companionship” becomes a divinely ordained responsibility; in the sphere of human life, we humans are the heart, hands, tears and joys for each other that God would be if God could be. We are God’s tears, whether of joy or grief, shared with and shed for each other.

How blessed is that?

John

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