TRINITY SUNDAY

June 4, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N.J.

 

 

In the year 325 AD, there occurred an event of momentous importance for the history of the entire Christian Church. Summoned by the Emperor Constantine, 230 bishops from far and wide gathered at the town of Nicaea in what is today Turkey – about 55 miles southeast of Constantinople or present-day Istanbul.

 

It was the first but not the last gathering of its kind: an ecumenical Council. In this context, the word ecumenical means “worldwide” or “universal”—a council bringing together bishops or representatives from all the local churches throughout the world. While most of the bishops who actually attended were from the Greek-speaking Eastern half of the Roman Empire, the Pope sent two representatives from Rome, and the Bishop of Carthage in North Africa was present as well.

 

Some of the bishops who traveled along the Roman roads to Nicaea bore the scars of tortures they’d suffered in the last persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. Such a gathering would have been impossible during those years when Christianity remained an illegal religion.

 

Then, local councils met to consider questions facing the Church in specific regions. But now, following the conversion of Constantine, it was possible for an ecumenical council to meet with unprecedented authority to make decisions binding on the Catholic Church throughout all lands.

 

The Council met for two months and issued rulings on a variety of topics, ranging from the method of calculating the date of Easter to ratification of the Church’s four principal metropolitan sees as Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

 

But the most pressing item on the Council’s agenda was a raging theological dispute that been dividing Christians for the previous twenty years or so. In the Egyptian city of Alexandria, the presbyter Arius had been teaching a doctrine that struck many of his contemporaries as heretical and blasphemous. 

 

Both Arius and his opponents agreed that the Son of God had come down from heaven and taken flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary. But Arius insisted that this Son who’d become incarnate in Jesus Christ was not fully divine but a created spirit—the highest of God’s creatures to be sure, but nonetheless inferior and subordinate to God the Father, whose divine nature he did not and could not share. 

 

Those who opposed Arius, including his own bishop Alexander of Alexandria, and Alexander’s successor Athanasius, rightly discerned that unless Christ was truly divine as well as truly human, he could not reconcile fallen humanity to God or communicate God’s divine life to humanity. The Council of Nicaea decisively sided with Alexander and Athanasius against Arius. 

 

And to make the Church’s faith absolutely clear, the Council solemnly promulgated the earliest version of what we know today as the Nicene Creed, beginning “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” (Incidentally, when the Creed was translated into Latin, the first-person plural, “We believe,” became the first-person singular, “I believe.” So, both translations, “We believe” and “I believe,” are equally valid. One just follows the Greek while the other follows the Latin.)

 

To refute the Arian heresy, the Nicene Creed went on to affirm that the Son is “God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father …” That clause represented the first but certainly not the last step in the Church’s definition of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

 

On Trinity Sunday, we give thanks for the Ecumenical Councils and Catholic Creeds given to us as key components of what’s known as the “deposit of faith.” (The Catholic Creeds, by the way, are normally reckoned as three: the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.) A week ago, we celebrated the Holy Spirit’s descent on the Day of Pentecost. The Ecumenical Councils and the Catholic Creeds demonstrate the Holy Spirit’s continuing presence and work in the subsequent centuries, teaching the Church and leading her into all truth.

 

A useful way of thinking about the Creeds is as thumbnail summaries of the teachings of Scripture. As Anglican Catholics we affirm that the Bible contains the definitive record of God’s revelation. It’s “the Word of the Lord,” and it “contains all things necessary to salvation.” But the Bible is a vast compilation of many writings, spanning many different periods and composed by many human authors in many different genres. Left to themselves, different groups of Christians generally come up with widely varying and often mutually contradictory readings of biblical teaching. Scripture is not self-interpreting. We need an authoritative guide to Scripture’s true meaning. The Ecumenical Councils and the Catholic Creeds supply the guidance we need, distilling the universal Church’s Spirit-guided reflection upon the Sacred Texts over the centuries.

 

Our celebration today invites us to reflect on the Creeds’ place in our life and worship. When we say the Nicene Creed at Mass, it’s not as if those of us who make up the congregation are each expressing our own personal faith. That would be impossible anyway, because we all hold slightly different beliefs, and were we to vocalize them all at the same time the result would be a cacophony of discordant voices. No, what’s really happening is that the Church is proclaiming the Church’s faith; and we’re joining in, so that by repeated participation in this solemn liturgical proclamation, the Holy Spirit may gradually lead us into all truth, forming a mature faith within our hearts and minds.

 

A favorite story of mine recounts how a well-known Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian once visited a certain Methodist Divinity School in the South to give a lecture on the Nicene Creed. During the question time that followed, one of the seminarians raised his hand and said, “I’m sorry, but I cannot say the part about Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary. Try as I may, I just can’t bring myself to believe in the Virgin Birth.” 

 

The bishop smiled compassionately and responded in a gentle voice: “Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re still very young. You can’t expect to get it all at once. The crucial thing is not to give up: just keep on saying it, and someday God will give you this faith when he knows that you’re ready. In the meantime, remember that what the Divine Liturgy proclaims is not your own personal faith, but the corporate faith of the entire Catholic Church.

 

The great gift, the great blessing, of belonging to a Church such as ours where we recite the Creeds regularly in worship, is that we don’t have to figure it all out for ourselves and keep on reinventing the theological wheel. As we join in professing the Nicene Creed at the Eucharist every Sunday, and ideally the Apostles Creed at Morning and Evening Prayer every day, we’re brought into a living relationship with the three divine Persons that the Creeds describe. So, let’s never tire of saying the Creeds! Let’s never tire of growing in our union with the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.