This year, June the 19th is a Tuesday. You might say it ll be like any other Tuesday or, by the end of the talk, you may not. I don t if you have any exciting plans for the 19th where you ll be, what you ll be doing but wherever you are that day, you might want take a moment to pause and reflect on something that happened on that very same date exactly one thousand six hundred and ninety-three years ago. On June 19th in the year of Our Lord 325, the first ecumenical council of the church published Christianity s very first conciliar creed: the first creed to have been agreed upon by a council of the whole church. That first ecumenical council was called by a person who, I must say, feels in a way sort of like an illustrious relative of ours. His mother, Helena, is the patron saint of this church, so in speaking about Constantine I find myself thinking of him as a sort of nephew who was always a good boy, came from a good family, of course, and so went on to quite a successful career - as the Emperor of Rome. Constantine did a number of good things. He legalized Christianity for one thing, in the Edict of Milan in 313AD. That brought an era of terrible persecution to an end and generally made things easier for Christians. As you know, Christianity is still
regarded as being at least quasi-legal even in our own time. Like pretty much everything associated with the church, there is a range of views about whether legalization was a good thing. I come down pretty strongly on the side of legal Christianity myself but I know of others who believe legalization has made things too easy for us and that we have all gone soft. But as I have said, it was Constantine who convened that first ecumenical council. His intention was to bring together all the bishops in the known world so they could make a really solid decision on some important matters that were brewing at the time. They had a pretty good turn out for a church event. Of the 1800 bishops who were invited - 1000 from the east and 800 from the west - about three hundred turned up. 318 is I believe the generally accepted number, about seventeen and two thirds percent - as I ve said pretty good attendance for a group of bishops. And everybody always says how conscientious they were at the conference. Pretty much all of them went to all the sessions. Hardly any of them slept in or went off on junkets or played golf. They were bishops after all. They met in a very pretty spot on the shores of a lake in Bythinia, what we would call Turkey. I don t know what hotel they were in
but the town was called Nicea, so the product of their labours has henceforth been called the Nicene Creed. It was chosen because, well it was quite attractive as I ve said, but also because it was close to where Constantine lived. He had built a new imperial city for himself which he called New Rome, but everybody else liked him so much that they called it Constantinople. Istanbul was Constantinople. Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople. Been a long time gone, Constantinople. Why did Constantinople get the works? Well, that s nobody's business but the Turks. It may be worth pointing out also that every gal in Constantinople lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople. So if you've a date in Constantinople she ll be waiting in Istanbul. At any rate, they published this Nicene Creed, so-called, and it was based on the Jerusalem Creed 1, a pithy one-liner about the three people we admire the most, the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost, and like a lot of first versions of things they realized after they got home that they had left out a few things. When they gave it a second look they realized the old creed probably did need a bit of a tweak, so they all had another outing, to Constantinople this time, in the year 381, and they fixed er up. 1 I believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and in one Baptism of repentance. Catechetical Lecture 19, Cyril of Jerusalem[2]
The document they produced at this second junket is really good work. I really do enjoy it but I find the name almost impossible to pronounce. It s called the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. It s that word Constantinopolitan. It s kinda silly I know. It s only seven syllables and I should be able to do it. But anyways, I guess everybody else found it pretty difficult as well, so they just shortened it up to The [plain old] Nicene Creed which is probably what it should have been in the first place, and that s good because that is what we say every Sunday. We are going to say it right after this sermon in fact. We always put it after the sermon as a kind of insurance I guess. In case the preacher flies off the handle and says something really outlandish we can all kind of get back on track by reciting the faith of our baptism in this truly historic creed. I know I am presenting this creed writing business as a fairly seamless process but I think it has to be acknowledged that there were a few hiccups along the way. It took a few versions as I ve said and actually the biggest hiccup of all was probably the reason for the council in the first place. It all started with a Libyan priest named Arius who had gone around saying that Christ was a created being, or in other words, that there was a time when
Christ did not exist. This was called the Arian heresy and it upset a lot of people. So, as above, the whole church got together, starting at Nicea in 325, and after about sixty years of working at it, came up with a paragraph, in about 381AD, that explained it all. Pretty good going for a church thing, with our characteristically high level of cooperation and all that. Here it is: We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: I m sure you ll agree it makes absolutely plain that Christ is begotten, not made, - ie. not a creature - and that He existed before all things, since Through Him all things were made. They also had a hard time deciding how Christ is related to the Father. Is He homoousian - the same as the Father? Or merely homoiousian - related to the Father? These two words -
homoousian and homoiousian are so similar that a lot of people didn t think there was one iota of difference between them. But in fact there was exactly that one difference: a single greek letter I, a single iota. In the end they decided agains that iota and made it clear in the creed that the Son is of one and the same being with the Father. When it comes to saying how all three persons of the Trinity can be one God, the bishops struggled pretty much the same way we still do. They tried all kinds of analogies, like saying that the three persons of the Blessed and Holy Trinity are like the three leaves of a clover, for instance. But that turned out to be a heresy called partialism. They tried saying that the three persons might be like liquid, ice, and vapour - the three states of water. But that turned out be the heresy of modalism. This all took a very long time, and in the end they had no choice but to accept a mystery, which is best stated in a completely separate statement called the Athanasian Creed. (It is not really a creed and wasn t written by Athanasius, but let s not go there). The first part of it goes like this:
we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost and so on. It is difficult, if not impossible, for most of us to fully understand. But I guess in the end that is probably what we most need from God, that He be capable of things we find impossible and that by placing our faith in the three persons of the Trinity we may have some hope that the impossible things we so desperately need to have happen sometimes may come to pass. That our loved ones may live through the night. That if they don t, we may find a way to go on. That things will somehow get better in this impossibly conflicted world. That we humans may somehow find a more loving way of living together after the horrors we seem constantly to inflict upon one another. These and others like them are our deepest hopes and they are of the same substance as that great and loving mystery, that three persons live together as one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. So on June 19th, when I look back those 1693
years I m going to try and remember that faith, hope, and love is still what it is all about.