Nicene Creed - 1
The Rev’d Edward Cearns
Genesis 11 1-9 John 14 8-17
Pentecost
First Sermon of Nicene Creed Series Year C, 8 June, 2025
As far back as AD325 controversy was raging with the rise of Arianism, that is, the belief that Jesus as entirely distinct from God the Father and a rejection of a Trinitarian understanding of God; Father; Son and Holy Spirit.
The council of Nicea was summoned by Emperor Constantine to resolve this crisis of belief by seeking to formalise the teaching of the church into one creed. The product of the Nicene Council was the only authoritative ecumenical statement of the Christian faith accepted by the vast majority of churches.
Creed, coming from Latin via the middle English, ‘Credo’, which translates as ‘I believe’, is now celebrating its 1700th anniversary, However, over the next five weeks, rather than focussing so much on the history, we will be looking at our story. We will take the opportunity to think about how our lives in this time change when we declare that Jesus Christ is God from God, Light from Light, Very God from Very God.
This morning I want to share about the Holy Spirit’s challenge to how we see & treat one another & the creation. And ask what role can an ecumenical creed play in that expression of love and relationship? Or why does a church need it at all?
The creed starts with “I believe” , rather than “we believe” but it’s said together as the body of Christ. They are articles of faith in which we enter into a relationship with God. The Holy Spirit given to us by God is the one who enables us to live the life we declare in the creed. And so we remember and call on this same Pentecostal moment at the significant blessings of confirmation and ordination.
In John’s gospel today we have heard the disciples asking to be shown the Father and Jesus retorts, perhaps in exasperation ‘well if you are seeing and believing in me then you are seeing and believing in the Father’, because I am in the Father and the Father is in me’.
Belief therefore seems critical for action to be possible. ‘Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. It would seem that belief is not just a cerebral activity but one of faith in action.
To believe is more than adhering to a set of concepts, but to belong to a way of being. But what happens when that way of being doesn’t seem possible anymore? Having journeyed with a parent with dementia, I was struck by Sally Magnusson- the Scottish journalist and long time presenter of BBC Songs of Praise- sharing her own experience of her mother’s dementia diagnosis. Sally asked a theologian what happens to belief when a sense of a person’s identity is slowly removed? The response came; that the person is known by God and identified in their full humanity.
I wonder if, when we say the creed, we are recognising and entering into something deeper than belief; the reality that we experience in the living God.
This relationship with words and language takes on a different form in our Genesis reading, where people of the earth initially shared one language. What is not clear is whether they shared one creed, one set of beliefs. But they are certainly of one mind in their motivation to build a tower to connect with the heavens.
It would seem at first reading that the author of Genesis considers pride in such a motivated structure to be dangerous. So, God intervenes by enabling confusion of language and division, and named the product of their pride as a tower of Babel (which means confusion). This was necessary to create helpful and rich diversity. After all, different individuals give permission to different experiences and understanding. Indeed the Nicene Creed itself has been translated across the centuries with all the different nuances that it brings.
We’ve just heard some examples of the beauty of the variety of language.
In the collection of work “Behind the scenes of the Old Testament,” John Walton reasons that rather than a counter cultural text to Mesopotamia / Babylon, the Genesis reading shows a recognition of cultural practice like constructing ziggurats, which are pyramidal structures. Therefore, in this reading, it is less about the ambition of humans to aspire to God and more about enabling divinity to connect with the people. The pyramids were seen as doorways or stairways from heaven to earth rather than the other way round. We can speculate that Genesis implies that being of one people is not about human ambition but about unchallenged thinking. Thinking as one, does not necessarily mean we will get it right. Diversity of language and culture was therefore necessary to ensure that the whole truth is revealed.
It is compelling to me that this diaspora is being celebrated in this month of Pride: the beauty of confusion and diversity empowering the splendor of creativity and well-being. Next Saturday, Jesus Green will be full of celebration of those differences. It is an opportunity to celebrate the progress made towards a fully inclusive society & protest & lament where we have failed to live up to the beauty of the Spirit. The rainbow is after all a spectrum of colour rather than one.
So often across the centuries and still today we blame others. Rather than seeing difference and cultural context as beautiful and precious, we have used our words and beliefs to colonise and demonise those different from ourselves. Yet the purpose of the Nicene creed was to ensure that we are filled with the spirit of love, the creative and outflowing of God. Not to point fingers, but to point forward to enable us to live in the light from light, the very God from very God.
We have the chance today to go out, filled with the Spirit as people of the Way and living word. Our creed counts for little if we fail to live up to its promise.
I’m reminded of the hymn:
Wherever you travel
I'll be there, I'll be there.
Wherever you travel
I'll be there.
And the creed and the colour
And the name won't matter
I'll be there.
Amen