Author: Bob Chapman

This is the weekly bulletin insert from Sermons That Work.

The Nicene Creed, Week 4

To commemorate the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the Rt. Rev. Matthew Gunter, bishop of Wisconsin, has written a series of reflections on the Nicene Creed and its relevance for contemporary Episcopalians. Over the coming weeks, we’ll share his teachings, written mostly in a question-and-answer format.

Isn’t one’s faith about one’s relationship with the living God and with God’s children? Can’t we say, “Love God and love your neighbor,” and leave it at that?

That is indeed Jesus’ summary of the law, and that is no small thing. However, in his context (the time’s tradition and teachings), Jesus had received a great deal about the nature and purposes of God as a son of Israel. While there was no written creed as such, Jesus was part of a people who held certain ideas, i.e., doctrines, about God and humanity. As a faithful Jew, he would have recited the Sh’ma found in Deuteronomy 6:4-5: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

The Nicene Creed gives the word ‘God’ meaning

There is no sufficient knowledge of God without some sort of creed. ‘God’ is a meaningless word until it is given meaning. To say, “Just love God with your whole heart, mind, and soul” only begs the questions, “Who, or what, is this ‘God’ I am to love, and what does it mean to love this ‘God’?” As for loving neighbors, who counts as my neighbor? Do strangers count? What about enemies? And why should I love them? And in what way, to what extent, and at what cost? Why is it so hard to do? Does it matter ultimately? Is there any divine reckoning for our failure and refusal to love? What does it mean to be human? And what kind of world do we live in?

Any answers to these questions are not obvious. That they seem obvious to many of us is because our imaginations have already been formed in a society shaped by the vision of Christianity reflected in the Nicene Creed, even if we have mostly forgotten the source of that shaping. And any answer to these questions takes us into the realm of belief and doctrine. The Creed is the basic Christian foundation for answering them. One might prefer other answers or make up one’s own, but one cannot talk about “god,” “love,” “creation,” or “human beings” without some sort of belief system, i.e., a creed.

Inadequate simplistic pietism

It is inadequate to appeal to a simplistic pietism, whether in its more conservative or more liberal versions, that says, “Don’t bother me with doctrine, just give me Jesus.” We have no direct access to Jesus other than through the Gospels, which are heavily influenced by the interpretation (doctrine) of who Jesus is and why He matters. The Creed is the Christian guide to understanding the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in light of Jesus. It affirms that, while God will always remain beyond our understanding, when we look at Jesus, we see God. And that God has so loved humanity as to enter into our physical reality with our rebellion, our sin, our brokenness, our unlove, and untruth to deliver us.

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Weekly bulletin inserts

This weekly bulletin insert provides information about the history, music, liturgy, mission, and ministry of The Episcopal Church. For more information, please contact us at stw@episcopalchurch.org.

Sermons That Work

For more than 20 years, Sermons That Work, a ministry of The Episcopal Church’s Office of Communication, has provided free sermons, Bible studies, bulletin inserts, and other resources that speak to congregations across the Church. Our writers and readers come from numerous and varied backgrounds. Small house churches, sprawling cathedrals, and everything between use the resources that Sermons That Work provides.

Church of the Redeemer

Church of the Redeemer: Worshiping God, living in community, and reaching out to the world around us. We are an Episcopal Church serving north King County and south Snohomish County, Washington. As you travel your road, go with friends walking the way of Jesus at Redeemer.

Church of the Redeemer is at 6220 Northeast 181st Street in Kenmore, Washington. The campus is a short distance north of Bothell Way, near the Burke-Gilman Trail. The entrance looks like a gravel driveway. The campus is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. And we managed to hide a large building on the side of a hill that is not easily seen from the street.

The Episcopal Church welcomes you.

This is the weekly bulletin insert from Sermons That Work.

The Nicene Creed, Week 3

To commemorate the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the Rt. Rev. Matthew Gunter, bishop of Wisconsin, has written a series of reflections on the Nicene Creed and its relevance for contemporary Episcopalians. Over the coming weeks, we’ll share his teachings, written mostly in a question-and-answer format.

Wasn’t the message of Jesus about what to do and how to be rather than what to believe. Why does the Creed focus on the latter?

The life and teachings weren’t in dispute

The short answer to this question is that the life and teachings of Jesus were not in dispute. The early church already took the teaching and example of Jesus seriously. They were contained in the scriptures, which were already read in worship every week.

The church put love and compassion at the heart of its life and teaching. It organized social services for the poor, hungry, and needy. It founded hospitals. Its teaching reflected the example of Jesus in critiquing wealth and violence. It advocated for hospitality to the stranger and foreigner. The dignity of traditionally marginalized groups like women, children, and the poor was honored in a way unprecedented in the ancient world (though, admittedly, the church did not embrace total equality of women and men).

The church surely did not practice all of this perfectly, always, and everywhere. But none of the above was particularly controversial. It was the emphatic teaching of the theologians most often identified with the defense of the Nicene faith, e.g., Athanasius of Alexandria, Macrina the Younger, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Ambrose of Milan, and others. And these teachers understood that the practice of the church is grounded in its belief.

Not everything decided by the Council of Nicaea is in the Nicene Creed

Not everything that was decided by the Council of Nicaea is in the Creed.

The Council also addressed issues of church organization and discipline, including penalties for clergy guilty of sensual sin (Canon 2) or greed and usury (Canon 17).

Canon 12, reflecting the church’s commitment to peace, established penance for those who “having cast aside their military girdles, but afterwards returned, like dogs, to their own vomit.”

Canon 17 did address a disputed question: to what extent were mercy and forgiveness possible for those who had denied their faith during a recent persecution? Imitating Jesus, the canon declared such people should be “dealt with mercifully.”

But those canons did not address the controversy that had led to the calling of the Council of Nicaea.

Who Jesus was was in dispute

The debate roiling the church was not about Jesus’ moral teachings, but rather who Jesus was and how he was related to God, whom he called Father. And, with that, questions about the basic understanding of God.

The answer to that question had implications for the salvation of humanity and the restoration of creation. The answer to that question also has implications for why the teaching and example of Jesus should matter more than any other human teacher.

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Weekly bulletin inserts

This weekly bulletin insert provides information about the history, music, liturgy, mission, and ministry of The Episcopal Church. For more information, please contact us at stw@episcopalchurch.org.

Sermons That Work

For more than 20 years, Sermons That Work, a ministry of The Episcopal Church’s Office of Communication, has provided free sermons, Bible studies, bulletin inserts, and other resources that speak to congregations across the Church. Our writers and readers come from numerous and varied backgrounds. Small house churches, sprawling cathedrals, and everything between use the resources that Sermons That Work provides.

Church of the Redeemer

Church of the Redeemer: Worshiping God, living in community, and reaching out to the world around us. We are an Episcopal Church serving north King County and south Snohomish County, Washington. As you travel your road, go with friends walking the way of Jesus at Redeemer.

Church of the Redeemer is at 6220 Northeast 181st Street in Kenmore, Washington. The campus is a short distance north of Bothell Way, near the Burke-Gilman Trail. The entrance looks like a gravel driveway. The campus is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. And we managed to hide a large building on the side of a hill that is not easily seen from the street.

The Episcopal Church welcomes you.

This is the weekly bulletin insert from Sermons That Work.

The Nicene Creed, Week 2

To commemorate the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the Rt. Rev. Matthew Gunter, bishop of Wisconsin, has written a series of reflections on the Nicene Creed and its relevance for contemporary Episcopalians. Over the coming weeks, we’ll share his teachings, written mostly in a question-and-answer format.

Wasn’t the Nicene Creed the product of the political machinations of Emperor Constantine?

Constantine, Pontifex Maximus

It is true that Constantine called for a council of bishops to be held in Nicaea. His reasons for convening it were probably complex.

He wanted order in the empire and probably saw the divisions within the church as a threat to that. And conflicting church parties had caused social disturbances in some places around the empire.

As with most times and places before the modern era, this was an age in which politics and faith were seen as inseparable. The idea that whether the church was on the right track in its doctrine and worship could affect God’s blessing on the church and the empire might also have played a role.

The pagan Roman emperors had assumed the role of “Pontifex Maximus” – the guardian of the Empire’s worship and piety. Constantine, who had sided with Christianity and was eventually baptized, might have understood himself as inheriting that role. This would mean he understood himself as at least the guardian of the faith with some responsibility for the church’s teaching.

He is also recorded to have expressed concern that the disunity represented in different factions teaching different things about the nature of Jesus and of God was a potential scandal compromising the church’s witness and contradicting Jesus’ prayer that the church should be one.

Did writing the Nicene Creed stop division?

The emperor opened and, to an extent, participated in the Council. However, it is unclear whether Constantine was directly involved beyond pressing for a “workable” compromise among various theological factions.

It is the case that once the council “settled” on the Creed, Constantine did put the weight of the empire behind what was now considered the orthodox position. But he also eventually pardoned Arius.

And his son, Constantius, promoted the teaching of Arius that the Nicene Council had condemned. Arianism might have actually been the more politically astute option. It was a popular position at the time. It was more philosophically respectable. And it would have ingrained into the cosmos an unquestionable hierarchy of all being—God, Jesus, emperor, people, that would have been helpful for shoring up power in an empire that had been fractured among multiple co-emperors.

The idea of two, or three, co-equal persons in God didn’t have the same implications!

For several decades, different emperors supported different church factions until 380, when the emperor Theodosius I declared Nicene Christianity the empire’s official faith. The following year, he also convened the Council of Constantinople, which slightly revised the Creed into the form we affirm now. 

Clarity and unifying power of the Nicene Creed

The legacy of Christianity’s enmeshment with empire is, in many ways, problematic. But that does not necessarily compromise the legitimacy of the Council of Nicaea or the Creed it affirmed. One might even say that the clarity and unifying power of the Nicene Creed appears to be a work of the Holy Spirit.

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Weekly bulletin inserts

This weekly bulletin insert provides information about the history, music, liturgy, mission, and ministry of The Episcopal Church. For more information, please contact us at stw@episcopalchurch.org.

Sermons That Work

For more than 20 years, Sermons That Work, a ministry of The Episcopal Church’s Office of Communication, has provided free sermons, Bible studies, bulletin inserts, and other resources that speak to congregations across the Church. Our writers and readers come from numerous and varied backgrounds. Small house churches, sprawling cathedrals, and everything between use the resources that Sermons That Work provides.

Church of the Redeemer

Church of the Redeemer: Worshiping God, living in community, and reaching out to the world around us. We are an Episcopal Church serving north King County and south Snohomish County, Washington. As you travel your road, go with friends walking the way of Jesus at Redeemer.

Church of the Redeemer is at 6220 Northeast 181st Street in Kenmore, Washington. The campus is a short distance north of Bothell Way, near the Burke-Gilman Trail. The entrance looks like a gravel driveway. The campus is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. And we managed to hide a large building on the side of a hill that is not easily seen from the street.

The Episcopal Church welcomes you.