STATEMENT OF FAITH
Rev. Dr. Jared Witt
I believe that the three-fold God is closer to us than our own breath. Of course we are usually unconscious of our breathing. I believe that this three-fold God is the light that makes everything visible. So – better to see things in God’s light than complain that we are left only with traces. Otherwise, you’re trying to catch your peripheral vision square.
Yet in the humble, crucified face of Jesus Christ, the light of God’s glory shines. This face is the world’s joy, and mine. This face is the freedom of God to dwell among us in time and space. This is the face that gives God’s people confidence and courage to bet on Jesus’ way of life. This is the face of concrete gladness within the world. Lest the world be left without this gladness, God pours out the Spirit on the church. And this “body of Christ” is a continuation in space and time of Christ’s own gladness.
No longer in a singular face, but now in many faces, God’s gracious and forgiving presence animates the church. Facing one another, we’re learning to live together as a sign of God’s arriving realm. As a community, we traffic neither in the “back there and then” nor merely in the “some day.” Today is the day of God’s gracious favor towards the world. Let us be glad in it.
Of course we couldn’t choose this path were it not for the Spirit’s gifting us with faith, hope and love. And of course we couldn’t stay on this path were it not for the Spirited, body-oriented sacraments of a bath and a meal. For a fragile, wavering people, the wetness of the water and the materiality of the meal is, in fact, the point.
The church is the community called to sing and pray and love in wonder. This is our way of sharing in God’s triune richness. In a more hum-drum way, we are the community empowered by the Spirit to keep alive in the world the jarring, surprising, and unlikely stories of Scripture. Here in the testimony of Israel and of the early followers of Jesus, God speaks a lively word into our midst. And because we recognize our faith tradition as one “wisdom way” among many others, we stay open to good news from all angles.
In the depths of our lives the Spirit enables a language of prayer to develop that is shot through with desire. And our life-long prayer-project is editing the rough draft of what we most want to say. We have, I suppose, from now until we die.
And by God’s grace and the Spirit’s help, we are learning to say “Yes” – “Yes” to God’s grace and forgiveness, and to our neighbors’ needs, and to all of fragile finitude itself –“Yes.” “For the Son of God, Jesus Christ . . . was not ‘Yes and No’; but in him it is always ‘Yes’.” (2 Corinthians 1:19).
I suspect that this ultimate, definitive, resurrected “Yes” cannot be said; only sung.
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