On Safari With Jesus!
Why read obituaries? Why, the thrill of getting to know someone you only knew of before, of course! That was the case with this remembrance of Jaroslav Pelikan, who authored a number of books scattered throughout my library. He was “delighted by doctrine” and one of his final works was his four-volume Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition:
Judaism has its shema and Islam its shahadah, but Christians, responding to Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” have produced literally thousands of statements of faith across the centuries. Pelikan’s collection includes several hundred of these, among them the Masai Creed from Nigeria. This creed Africanizes Christianity by declaring that Jesus “was always on safari doing good.” It also declares that after Jesus had been “tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died, he lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from the grave. He ascended unto the skies. He is the Lord.”
Jaroslav is my kind of theologian — energetic, smart, pastoral, witty and humble… on safari with Jesus. What a great way of approaching the Christian life — on safari with Jesus, learning to do good, because of the good He has done and is doing, in and for me!