Sermon

Sunday, May 20, 2007

First Ecumenical Council

The Creed

Several years ago, I was asked to do a baptism at another church because the priest had a death in the family and had to leave town suddenly. So, as I entered the church to do the baptism, I didn’t know anyone—not the parents, not the Godparent, no one. I asked someone to point out the Godparent and went to speak to her about what was involved in the service. I told her, it’s pretty simple, I’ll ask you some questions, the answers are right in my book, and then you’ll say the Creed. “The what?” she asked. I said, “The Creed, the thing we say in church every Sunday, I believe in one God.” She shook her head, none of this was registering. Resisting the urge to become upset at this sad state of affairs, I told her, graciously, “The Creed is in my book too, you can just read it from there.” And in my mind, I wondered, “Doesn’t every adult know the Creed from memory, after all, it is the basic statement of what we believe? Certainly shouldn’t a Godparent, one who is about to speak on behalf of a child being baptized, shouldn’t a Godparent know the Creed? After all, if she is now being entrusted to teach this child she is baptizing the Orthodox faith, how can she possibly teach it is she doesn’t know it herself?

We began the service and as we got to the Creed, she took my book and began to recite, “I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” When she got half-way through the Creed, I heard, “who for us and for our salvation, came down from heaven and was incarcerated by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man. Crucified for us under Pontius Pi-LA-te.” I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry, as her version of the Creed had the Lord incarcerated rather than incarnate, and crucified by a form of women’s exercise rather than the procurator of Palestine. I used to laugh when telling that story, thinking it was a one–time aberration of the Creed. It’s hard to tell this story without crying now, because I hear incarcerated rather than incarnate at about one out of ten baptisms here in Tampa, and I hear Pontius PiLAte at about one out of three. That’s a pretty sad commentary.

Today, the church commemorates the 318 Fathers of the First Ecumenical Counsel in Nicea in the year 325. The First Ecumenical Council is significant for two reasons: It was the first time that the Oecumeni, the whole of the Christian church came together to dialogue about issues of the faith. 318 Bishops of the church from all over the world came to Nicea, in present day Turkey, at the invitation of the Emperor Constantine. The early centuries of Christianity were marked by persecution and heresy. During many of those years, the church had to be underground for fear of persecution—torture and execution of faithful Christians. Consequently, because the church was underground and communication was slow, heresies crept into the church. People were arguing theological points and not coming to agreement. In different cities, the faith was not only practiced differently, but the basic message of what do Christians believe was different. So these 318 bishops sat down for months, not for days or weeks, but months, and hammered out universal agreements as to what the church held as truth. The result of the First Ecumenical Council in Nicea was the statement of faith we confessed this morning, the Nicene Creed. That Creed was edited into its current form in the year 381, making it the oldest Creed in Christianity. The Catholic Church later added two words to it, while the Protestant Church significantly shortened it. Why is that fact important? Because the Creed is the statement of faith in what we Orthodox believe. So that when someone asks me, “Aren’t all Christian churches the same?”, the answer is obviously “no” because the Creed is different from church to church. The basic statement of what each church believes is different. The Catholic Church added the words, “And the Son,” or Filioque in Latin, to the phrase, “and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Creator of life who proceeds from the Father (to which they added “and the Son”). To which you might ask, what’s the difference, two words, what does that even mean, the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, or the Father alone. Perhaps to the average Christian that doesn’t sound like much of a difference. But when asks what do you believe, I say the Creed, the Nicene version of it. Any change, even two words, represents a change in the statement of what we believe. Hence we can’t say we’re all just the same—if we were, we’d all have the same Creed, every word of it.

There were a total of seven Ecumenical Councils between the first in 325 and the seventh in 787, and they are commemorated on various Sundays throughout the year. And from these seven Ecumenical Councils, we have received much of the doctrine, dogma and tradition that we practice today, including the sacraments in their present form, the services, in their present form, the Bible in its present form, and the canons or rules of how the church is governed, as well as traditions that we as faithful Orthodox Christians practice.

I’m not going to ask for a show of hands as to how many people can recite the Creed from memory. I’m not going to ask how many people can understand and articulate what is in the Creed so that if you were presenting it to a stranger or defending Orthodoxy to a critic you could make a coherent presentation. But I am going to point out that without a working knowledge of the Creed, a statement of 207 English words, one would be hard pressed to articulate what it is we believe as Orthodox Christians and one would be hard pressed to defend Orthodox in the face of criticism. It’s amazing how well versed people of other churches are in their theology and in the Bible, that even though many of their arguments are faulty, they dance circles around us because we do not know enough to defend what it is we believe. And when our children see us wilting when it comes to articulating what we believe and when they see others confident in what they believe, it is no wonder many of them leave Orthodoxy for other churches.

The Creed is a list of doctrines, preceded by two words: I believe. The “I” makes it a personal belief. We don’t say “we believe,” because that leaves room for one to hide behind the belief of someone else. We say, “I believe,” because the faith is something that is, and needs to be, personal to each of us. We may be members of a church, and we need the church because the church helps us to live out what we say we believe in—the church offers the one baptism for the remission of sins through the sacrament of Baptism. It helps us to await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come through Holy Communion. Every funeral and memorial service are reminders that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. The sacraments being perfected by the Holy Spirit demonstrate that the Holy Spirit is the Giver of Life, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified. So the church helps us live out what we say we believe in. Ultimately, though our entrance into heaven will not be as a member of the community, but as an individual standing before God being judged worthy or unworthy of His heavenly kingdom, and that will be based not on we or you, but on I.

And let’s take the word “believe.” To confess I believe in something rings rather hollow if the belief doesn’t affect how I act. As part of my confession of faith, if I say I expect the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come, does that translate into action in my life? Does anyone spend any amount of time meditating on what these words mean, or are they just a wrote phrase that comes out of our mouths at every Liturgy? Belief without action is really not belief at all. Belief, conviction, must translate into action. Otherwise the belief is trite, rather then true. So as Orthodox Christians, the Church calls upon us to confess our faith weekly at the Liturgy (and actually daily in our prayers) as a constant reminder of what we believe in the hope that that will translate over into what we do. After all, if you believe that Christ will come to judge the living and dead, and that includes each of us, perhaps that will figure into our decisions to do certain things, when we recognize that we have to give account for them.

When we recite the Creed at Liturgy and in other services of the church, this is an action in which ALL are called to participate. We should not remain silent during the recitation of the Creed. The Creed is not supposed to be recited by the priest, or the chanter or the choir, but by all those in attendance.

The Creed, of all the things we know about our faith, should be the thing we know the best. Sometimes when I visit people in the hospital who are about to die, they search for something meaningful to say in their final moments. I’ve wondered on occasion what I would say if I knew that I had only a few moments to live. And I’ve concluded that if I have a chance to say what amounts to my final words, I would say the Creed. I would hope at the end of my life, this would be the most meaningful thing to me, to say, I look to the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.

Of course, the Creed has no meaning if we don’t know what it is, or can’t pronounce all the words correctly, or if we say it only occasionally, or if we never pause to consider what it means. At some future retreat, I will dedicate it to the Creed so that we can study it in more depth.

This morning, we will briefly recognize the students of our Sunday school and our Greek school and their teachers. And I hope that as our students go through their years of Sunday school, that if they learn nothing else, that they will learn how to recite the Creed from memory, and more importantly, that they will be able to recite it with understanding and with conviction. Because without a Creed, there would be no Orthodox church, because it is the Creed that makes Orthodoxy a universally practiced faith. And without a Creed, there would be no direction or order for our lives, because without a statement of belief in what we hold as true and where we are going, there would be no direction in our spiritual journeys and no substance to them either. I hope each of us can make it a point to memorize the Creed and understand it, so that you can not only articulate what you believe to others when challenged, but so that you have some direction for yourself and confidence that the statement of faith that has guided our church for nearly 1,700 years will be an effective guide for your spiritual life as well. Amen.