Delivered on August 25, 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. We began two weeks ago thinking of the Nicene Creed as a rule – describing what we say about God and what we share in worship and with each other. Last week, we talked about the history of where it comes from and how, in the year 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine got a lot of people together to talk about how some of us have different thoughts when it comes to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. The Creed comes out of a conversation – and we are called to live our faith out loud in a community, with others, because other people help us see how God is beyond just our own thoughts and experiences. And today, I want to talk a little bit about the main – but not the only – controversy that caused the gathering in the first place. I’ll admit that I don’t understand the nuances behind the issue 100%. Part of that is because we mostly have writings from those who eventually supported the Nicene Creed and we don’t have, in their own words, the thoughts of those who thought otherwise. Part of it is because a lot of this is heavily tied to philosophy and ways at looking at the world rooted in the language, custom, and assumptions about different schools of Greco-Roman thought. And while I consider myself a pretty smart guy, I’m not really deep into philosophy so I can’t unpack – or explain – or share the nuances that others can. My hope is to give you a big picture perspective about why this Creed seems to spend a lot of time talking about Jesus in ways that the Apostles’ Creed doesn’t. And to do that well – I want you to imagine and think about how you would draw God.
If you needed to make a picture of God, how would you draw it? Accept answers.
Sometimes people picture God as an old guy with a beard. Others might imagine just a bright light since how can we really picture the divine? But I’ve often expected that what we imagine God to look like impacts what we think God is. So if God is an old guy with a beard, God will do what old guys with beards do. And that became part of the situation 1700 years ago. People were trying to figure out how God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit relate to each other. During that conversation, a man named Arian put into words what a lot of people practically imagine – saying there was God, the creator, kind of at the top with Jesus and the Holy Spirit below. This meant that Arian – and others – assumed that Jesus was created by God the creator – putting distance between God and Jesus. Those who disagreed with Arian often described this thinking through the words “there was a time when Jesus was not.” That didn’t mean Jesus wasn’t present when the universe was made or anything like that. Nor did it really challenge people’s experience of Jesus in their life since it didn’t really change his story. But it did place a little gap – a little hierarchy between the God, the Son of God, and the Holy Trinity. And that gap was, for those who eventually supported the Nicene Creed, was a bit of a problem. Because that gap implied that God – all of God – all of the Trinity – didn’t experience life as we know it to be. If the Creator aspect of God was a little bit apart from Jesus, then maybe what Jesus experienced – being a baby, being vulnerable, needing to be taken care of, laughter, joy, sorrow, and even death – was something all of God didn’t experience either. And if God the Trinity didn’t experience all of what it means to be human – then what does that say about us who were made it God’s image?
The Nicene Creed affirms that we experience – and God chooses to express God’s self – in three. The’s God the creator; Jesus; and the energy and activity of God that we name the Holy Spirit. And this God isn’t just there but this God chose to experience all of what we experience too. It’s a mystery why God did that. It’s a mystery even how God, the divine, could experience what we do. But when we try to hide the mystery, to make the mystery small, to fully understand God and, in the process making God small and manageable, our relationship to God becomes something other than the complete, loving, and forever thing it’s meant to be. A lot of what God does is mysterious. A lot of who Jesus is a paradox, something we can’t always figure out even if we consider ourselves pretty smart. But we should be careful to not try to explain God by making God small. We should, instead, take God as who God chooses to be. And who we believe God is – according to Christians – is revealed in Jesus; a Jesus who lived; who loved; a Jesus who died; a Jesus who rose; and a Jesus who will be with and for you – forever.