Sunday's Sermon

How Many Gods?    The Rev.Dr. Patricia Ramsden

    

    Sometimes when I preach, I put on my pastor’s hat like when I preach on grief or the pain we feel in life.  Sometimes I put on my prophet’s hat, like when I preach on God’s call for his love and mercy to come into our world and our responsibilities to make that happen.  Sometimes it’s my preacher’s hat when I talk about how we need to go about living out the life of faith and what the scriptures teach us about how to do that.  And sometimes I put on my teacher’s hat, my theologian’s hat, like during these next several weeks when we are going to delve into questions of who God is and what difference that makes to us and the faith.  

    Over the next few weeks we are going to look at the Nicene Creed - the earliest creed written down about our faith - and why it’s still so important for us today - why we still use it today - and why it’s the most widely used creed in all the Christian world.  Afterall, it was written centuries ago in 325 and then revised only once in 381.  

    Back then Christianity was still young and talking about - arguing about - what form the faith would take and who exactly Jesus the Christ was in relationship to God - and who God was in relationship to Jesus.  Nothing could be more fundamental to the faith than the answer to those questions.  And they are still questions that people ask today.  

    Was Jesus truly God or just a man with a special knowledge and relationship to God? 

    If Jesus is God, is he equal to God the Father or was he a lesser God? 

    Or was Jesus another way of understanding God, a different method of God revealing himself?  

    And, finally, if Jesus is God, do Christians believe in one God or more than one God?  And how or why? 

    The Nicene Creed was written as the first - and some would say - best answer to those questions - questions that both Christians and those interested in finding out more about Christianity asked then and still ask now.  

    The emporer Constantine was more than interested in these answers because the debate threatened to tear the church apart, so he called together more than 300 Bishops from across the empire to pray, argue, listen to the Spirit of God, pray, and use logic, read the scriptures, and pray and come to some conclusions about how, in the end, Jesus was related to God and to us.  

    One of the first arguments they looked at was the one that said that there is just one God, above all of our knowing who wanted us to have a glimpse as to who He was and is, so he revealed himself first as God the Father; then when that didn’t quite do it, he revealed himself as God the Son and finally as God the Spirit.  All revealed something about the one God who we cannot know fully.  And they came in sequence and were not all God at the same time.  They were revealing God one at a time, but not at the same time.  One disappeared as soon as the other showed up.  

    God the Father stopped being as soon as God the Son showed up on the scene.  And the same thing happened to God the Son when God the Spirit showed up.  They were all different ways - different means - different modes - of knowing God.  

    But that created problems too. For instance, if God the Father ceased to exist when God the Son showed up who was Jesus praying to?  Why did he consistently pray to God the Father if God the Father no longer existed?  

    And could God even cease to be in one form to take on another?  Did one God disappear so another could take his place?  The answer of the Council was no.  God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit were not just different ways of knowing God.  They were God - as Godself.    

    

    A theologian named Arius had a different interpretation.  And his interpretation still has some popularity today among people who aren’t Christian - and even some who are.   

    Arius argued that Jesus was divine in some sense but that He was less than God the Father - that there was a heiarchy in heaven.  God the Father, he said, was really in charge; God the Son was the messenger of God the Father and taught us about Him and showed us the way to Him and saved us from God the Father’s wrath over our sin and interceded for us, then God the Spirit was third in line.  

    In the end, Arius’ opinion was rejected.  

    The creed is clear. 

    Jesus is not a second rate God under the authority of another God we know as the Father - the Jewish God of the Hebrew scripture.  Jesus is fully God, of the same substance as the Father, equal to the Father in every way.  And he was fully man, experiencing all the joys and sorrows and pain that we experience.  He was one with God and one with us.  

    And the Son always existed.  He did not come into being at a specific moment in time when Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  Rather, He took off His robes of glory to come as one of us and be as one with us.  

    God, the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit all have existed since before the beginning of time as equals and as one God.  This is the mystery of the Holy Trinity.   Three in One.  

    And it is a mystery of the faith.  It is something that is difficult or even impossible to explain in our realm of limited understanding as human beings.  It is beyond our logic.  And so we sometimes fight against its truth, for we have been taught that logic can explain even the mysteries of the faith if we only try hard enough.  But that simply is not true.  

    Our logic is limited, for we are, in fact, finite creatures with a finite understanding trying to understand the infinite,  And so, at times, it is tempting to say like Arius, there must be three gods, not One God with three persons intertwined and equal.  

     The mystery of the faith comes down to this.  In the end, we cannot fully know or comprehend God in all of God’s fullness, for by His very nature God is beyond us.  We accept God and God as a holy Trinity, three in one and one in three, as Truth beyond our understanding of truth.   And we accept it through the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, through an understanding of scripture, and through our limited logical arguments seeking for an understanding of divine nature.

    So the creed begins with the statement “We believe in one God.”  Let us stand and say the creed together in all of its mystery.  

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