TRINITY SUNDAY, 2025

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

 

Good morning, and Happy Father’s Day to all the dads among us. Congratulations to all the young people being recognized on this “Honor our Youth” Sunday. And, last but not least, a blessed Trinity Sunday to all!

 

Elizabeth and I have just returned from a two-week pilgrimage to Turkey. Our first time there, and I hope not our last. It’s a beautiful country with friendly people, and amazing food! This trip was organized by The Living Church magazine to commemorate the 1,700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which formulated the earliest version of what we recite today as the Nicene Creed. And Nicaea was one of the towns that we visited—known today as Iznik—about 55 miles southeast of Istanbul.

 

Summoned by the Emperor Constantine, 230 bishops from all over the then-known world gathered at Nicaea for the first assembly of its kind: an ecumenical Council. In this context, the word ecumenical means “worldwide” or “universal”—a council bringing together bishops from all over the then-known world.

 

Some of the bishops who traveled with their entourages along the Roman roads to Nicaea bore the scars of tortures they’d suffered in the last great persecution under the Emperor Diocletian, just twenty years before. Such a gathering would have been unthinkable as long as when Christianity remained an illegal religion.

 

In those days, local councils or synods met to consider questions facing the Church in specific regions. But now, following the conversion of Constantine in the year 312, an ecumenical council could gather with authority to make decisions for the entire Church throughout all lands. The Council met for two months and issued rulings on a variety of topics, ranging from the date of Easter to ratification of the Church’s four principal 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 seven or eight years. 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. So Jesus was the incarnate Son of God. But Arius insisted that this Son of God who’d become incarnate in Jesus Christ was not fully divine but rather 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 thus sided decisively with Alexander and Athanasius against Arius.

 

And to make the Church’s faith clear, the Council solemnly issued 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.”

 

To refute the Arian heresy explicitly, the Nicene Creed affirmed that the Son is “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father …” That clause represented the first step in the Church’s formal definition of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as one God in three Persons: co‑equal, co-eternal, sharing one and the same divine nature.

 

On Trinity Sunday, we give thanks for the Councils and Creeds handed down to us as key components of what’s known as the “deposit of faith.” A week ago today, we celebrated the Holy Spirit’s descent on the Day of Pentecost. The Creeds and Councils reflect 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 Episcopalians we affirm that the Bible contains the definitive record of God’s revelation. At the end of each reading, the reader says, “The Word of the Lord.” At my ordination to the priesthood, I was required to swear an oath that I believed the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.

 

But the Bible is a vast compilation of writings, spanning many periods and composed by many human authors in many literary 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. And the Councils and Creeds supply the guidance we need.

 

Our celebration of Trinity Sunday invites us to reflect on the Creeds’ place in our life and worship. A key point is that when we say the Creed together, we’re not simply giving a collective expression to our personal faith as individuals. No, what’s really happening is that the universal Church in heaven and on earth is proclaiming its faith, and we’re being invited to join in. The Church’s proclamation of faith will continue until the end of time whether we join in or not. But when we do join in, week by week, year by year, the Holy Spirit gradually leads us into all truth, forming in us a mature faith capable of transforming our hearts, minds, and wills—and of withstanding all the challenges that life in this world can throw at us.

 

The great blessing of belonging to a Church where we regularly recite the Creeds in worship is that we don’t have to keep on reinventing the theological wheel. As we profess the Nicene Creed at the Eucharist every Sunday—and ideally the Apostles Creed at Morning and Evening Prayer every day—we’re drawn into a living relationship with the three divine Persons that the Creeds describe.

 

So, let’s never tire of faithfully reciting the Creeds! They point us towards our fulfillment, consummation, and bliss in union with the one God who is a community of three Persons bound together in love. For God is love. The one divine nature that the three Persons share is none other than love itself.

 

It follows that just as the one true God is a community of Persons bound together in love, so, as we share in God’s life through Word and Sacrament, we begin to realize our identity as the Church. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity thus describes not only who God is, but who we’re called to be as creatures made in God’s image. For the Church’s highest calling is to reflect in its own life the pattern of God’s life as a community of persons bound together in love.