to approach, I must not cheat you out of the ministry or service of a sermon. I
SERMON 214
AT THE HANDING OVER OF THE CREED
Date: 3911
The Symbol
1. Now that I am assisting as a minister at the altar, which you are soon going to approach, I must not cheat you out of the ministry or service of a sermon. I will do my best, for the love I have for you, to the extent that my age2 and my inexperience allow, and the fact that I am only a new recruit in the office I have been entrusted with.
The apostle says: Since if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that the Lord raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto justice, and with the mouth one makes confession unto salvation (Rom 10:9-10). This is what the Symbol builds up in you, what you must both believe and confess, so that you may be saved. And indeed, the things you are going to receive in a short enough form, to be committed to memory and repeated by word of mouth, are not new things which you haven't heard before. I mean, you are quite used to hearing them in the holy scriptures and in sermons in church.3 But they have been compressed into a brief summary, and reduced to a definite, tightly knit order; and that is how they are to be handed over to you, to build up your faith and to prepare you to confess it, without burdening your memories. This then is what you are faithfully going to retain, and to give back from memory.4
After this introduction, the whole Symbol is to be recited without any expo¬ sition accompanying it: I believe in God the Father almighty, and the rest that follows in it. You know that it is not customary to write this Symbol down. That being said, the following exposition is to be added.
God created all from nothing
2. All that you have heard so briefly you must not only believe, but also commit to memory word for word and repeat by word of mouth. But it has to