Delivered on August 18, 2024.
It’s my tradition after the prayer of the day to bring a message to all of God’s children. And I want to continue today talking about what we started last week – the Nicene Creed. I shared that the Nicene Creed serves as a kind of rule – a written explanation of what we say and teach and share. We, as followers of Jesus, talk a lot about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. But for 2000 years, different people have had different emphasis or focuses on who Jesus is and what to focus on. We hear that during Jesus’ own ministry when the disciples argue with each other. We also hear it in Paul’s letters to early churches when they talk about different preachers going around sharing different things about Jesus. And we even do that today since there are many different flavors of Christianity and we, here, are Lutheran Christians. All these different flavors can make us wonder what rule – what’s the basic outline of following Jesus and who God is – that we can lean into. And so, in the year 325, in a city in what is now Modern Day Turkey, lots of people got together to craft a rule that they hoped everyone would follow.
So I have with me an artistic rendition – an icon – a visual representation of what it might look like. And so what do you see? A bunch of old dudes in a circle, auditorium style, who are together. And that’s sort of where the Nicene Creed comes from. In the early 300s, a lot was going on in the Mediterrean area. The Roman Emperor Constantine had started to grow an Empire and, in the process, started to give Christians special support. Before this period, the Romans believed in different things and this difference in belief had led to Jesus’ death on the Cross. But as more and more people told people about Jesus, more and more people in the Roman Empire started to follow Jesus. The Roman Emperor, after a time of political divison and collapse, wanted to unify all these different people in the empire and felt like their old beliefs was driving people apart rather than bringing people together. So he decided to help Christians build new churches and grow their communities as a way to keep people working and living and supporting each other. But he also thought that all the different flavors of Christianity at the time – and there were many – would cause division rather than unity. He hoped that he could get a lot of bishops and church leaders together to talk about God, Jesus, and come to a consensus – and craft a rule – that wouldn’t answer all our questions but serve as a baseline of what it means to follow Jesus and to believe.
We’ll talk more later about what the issues were that led to these divisions. But, today, I want to focus on just how the Creed came about because a lot of different people came together to talk. And we are called to do the same thing. We’re invite to share with each other our thoughts, experiences, and our faith. We’re invited to listen to what each other says about God and Jesus and being a Christian in the world. We won’t necessary agree on everything but when we do this work out of love and with prayer and with the help of the Holy Spirit, our lives are changed. We won’t always think the way we did and we might discover that what we thought before wasn’t right. But when we talk, together, we become more of who God wants us to be. The life of faith isn’t something we can do on our own. We need each other which is why, when we’re baptized, we’re brought into a community of faith – a body of Christ – that extends beyond all time and place. And when we receive the Creed, we remember that story, that history, and that we are part of a team – and that this team can’t be what it’s supposed to be without our thoughts, our story, and our experiences with God too.