Matt Chandler - The Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints

If you have your Bibles, let’s go ahead and grab those. Mark chapter 12 is where we’re going to camp out. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you. As always, I would rather you see that I’m not making any of this up but rather pulling it straight out of the Bible. At this point, we’re ten weeks into our study of the Apostles' Creed—the idea of «together we believe.» One of the unique things that begins to happen now in the Creed is that, up until this point, the Apostles' Creed has given us a picture of who God is. Right? That God is Triune in nature: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—three in one. Although that may be confusing to us, it certainly is not confusing to God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. When they speak, they speak of their relationship with one another seamlessly in a way that could be confusing to us, but it is certainly not confusing to them. Now, what begins to happen in the Creed is that the idea of God being three in one starts to shape how we see our relationships with one another. So now we have this kind of vertical understanding established, and the Creed begins to turn to the horizontal implications of that vertical understanding. That’s what we will see happen in the Creed today. I’ll start with Kevin Vanhoozer, who is a prominent theologian. Here’s a quote about how our understanding of God begins to affect our understanding of one another: «Because God is three persons in relationship, the only way we can realize the Imago Dei in humanity…» I’ll stop there. Maybe you’re not a Christian or don’t have much of a church background, or perhaps you do have a background but just haven’t been listening. The Imago Dei means that you and I, as human beings, have been made in the image of God. Because we’ve been made in the image of God, we are more valuable than the rest of the created order. We know this at a basic level. I have two dogs and three kids. If there’s a trade, the dogs go. It’s not like, «Should it be Audrey or Gunner?» You know that it’s a no-brainer—my three children are far more valuable than my two dogs. That doesn’t give me the right to be cruel or brutal to anything in the created order; rather, I’ve been made in the image of God. Because you and I, as human beings, have been made in the image of God, God is at work among us in a unique way. Vanhoozer would argue that the only way we can realize the Imago Dei—the only way we can realize the purpose for which we exist as humanity—is to form a community of persons in loving relationship. He would define that as the church. The church then is the community of God, not only because it has been created by the Triune God but also because the church shares in the Triune community itself. If I could distill Vanhoozer’s thought, I would simply say that the Trinity means that God, in essence, is relational. God is a relational God; He exists in relationship. Therefore, it’s not a stretch to understand why you and I were created for the glory of His name—in right relationship with Him and in right relationship with one another. Our God is a relational God, and if we begin to look at what He does, this relational God forms people. It’s important to clarify that when you start talking about the people that God has created, everyone has God as their Creator, but not everyone has God as their Father. You tracking? So we are all created by God, but He is not the Father of us all. Are you following me? I’ll try to clarify that as we move on. When God creates a people, that people—according to both the Old and New Testaments—are those who are in right relationship with Him. Those who are in right relationship with Him are specifically called, in the Old Testament, God’s friends, the sons and daughters of God, priests, God’s assembly, the people of God, the bride of God, servants of God, God’s flock, and subjects and citizens of God’s Kingdom. All of those titles apply to the people of God—not specifically to individuals but to the collective people of God throughout the Old Testament. Then, as we move into the New Testament, the big debate in Jesus’s day is how to distill what the prophets taught and what the law taught. The question is: what is the greatest commandment? If there is a commandment that sits over and above all the other commandments, what is the thing that I must focus on for the fullness of life, to please God, and to live the richest, fullest life possible? Horizontally, what must I obey? Well, we’re going to see Jesus answer that question here in Mark 12. So if you have your Bibles, let’s turn to Mark 12. We’re starting in verse 28, and one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another. Seeing that Jesus answered them well, he asked Jesus, «Which commandment is the most important?»