Nicene Creed
Sermon One
Full-Text of Homily - We Believe
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, as we look back upon your history to see your work through your church in every age. We pray your Holy Spirit would be with us that we may ponder, read, mark, inwardly digest your holy word, that in our faith and faithfulness, we may, too, share in this faith given to us by your Son and passed along by your church, by your Spirit. We pray now in the name of Jesus. Amen.
I bring you grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and from the Lord our Savior, Jesus Christ. We are going to begin a series today and carry it on for quite a few weeks, working our way through the Nicene Creed. You have been saying the Nicene Creed for a long time. It’s high time that we unpack it and look at it.
This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. And so I figured, what better time is there? This anniversary only comes around once every 1700 years, right? Today, we look at the initial phrase, we believe.
I remember sitting in a classroom and my seminary systematics professor boldly stepped forward proclaiming, “unconfused, undivided, inseparable, indivisible.” He was beginning a lecture on Cyril’s Chalcedonian Definition.
I’m going to try not to speak as fast as him. This professor spoke like you were listening to a podcast, so at about 1 1/2 times speed. And we read everything, including the footnotes for him, because that’s what he quizzed you on. And so to say, we were often confused as well about where he was going.
He began this lecture, and I knew all of those words that he started with. I still know some of them. You probably know all of them, but maybe not arranged in that order. And I have to say, after that class, I ended up in the library trying to make sense out of Cyril and out of these words and Chalcedon and all of these things. And so I found myself in a corner of the library that I wasn’t used to being in.
You see, when you go to the library at a seminary, there’s one section that everybody knows. The Dewey Decimal System, or the system now taken over by the Library of Congress, places the letters that go before all the books in a library. When you look them up on the computer, Biblical Studies. That section is BS, and that’s where every seminarian goes.
And so I went to a different section that day, trying to make sense out of what my professor had placed in front of me, trying to make clear my confusion. And so I went to the section on Christianity, particularly the section on Christianity that was on the Early Church Fathers, 0 to 600 A.D. If Bible study is B.S., what might Christianity be?
Well, it’s BR, obviously. And so I went to section BR 65.5. It’s a couple of rows down at the seminary, down in the basement where the dust and the spiders live. No one is ever down there. And it’s there that I saw all of these names that we had been talking about in class. There was Athanasius and there was Cyril, whom I mentioned. There was Augustine and Basil, and Gregorys of all kinds. And I was able to take off the shelf there, Cyril’s on the Two Natures of Christ, which is where he makes the argument that I was relaying to you and my professor tried to relay to me. And then to that book, I added other books. Soon this one book became a stack. And then that stack became a passion for the Early Church. I found in those pages voices of the church, voices that could help me make sense out of the confusion of the faith.
Things I didn’t know, they were able to shed light on for me. In reading them, there was clarity. Not that every father would speak in the same way. Indeed, we don’t speak all in the same way, but we have one faith, one Lord, one God, and Father of us all. And so across history, we find this faith that draws us together, that answers our confusion with the clarity found only in the Holy Scriptures.
And so that’s what we want to do today. I don’t have a BR 65 section to take you to. And I’m not going to try and quote old dead men to you. But what I hope to do is walk us through just a little bit of what we believe and why we believe it. As we think about what we believe we heard from the Epistle of James, “You believe that God is one, and you do well, so do the demons, and they shudder.” What we believe is part of what it means to believe, to have knowledge and understanding. James is quoting from the passage we first heard from Deuteronomy, Chapter 6.מַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינִוּ יְהוָה אשחָד. Listen, O Israel, the Lord our God Yahweh, the Lord is one. This is in the Scripture, the very first creedal statement of the faith.
We probably haven’t done ourselves any real services in using words like creeds or confessions, having never defined them or thought about them. Let me offer one. When we use the word creed, I want you to think about a short statement that teaches us or refers to God and how He has made Himself known in the Old Testament, as we come to know God. He is one. He is Father. But as we have seen, the Father has made Himself known now through the New Testament in His Son, who too has sent with the Father His Holy Spirit, and so the creed is a trinitarian statement of faith.
And it’s meant, and this is key, it’s meant for worship. You look at the Deuteronomy passage there. It’s meant for worship, for the worship of God’s people that may begin in the temple, but quickly expands to the family and to life. Talk about God when you sit down and when you get up, when you come in and when you go out, when you rise and when you sleep set the Word and set the Lord as frontlets and as markers upon your hands and on your doorposts, that this faith would lead us wherever we go. Deuteronomy is the very first creedal statement.
We have the Nicene Creed, now one of three major creeds used throughout the church. A confession is different. The confessions, like the Lutheran Confessions in the Book of Concord, are a much longer description of the faith that gets into many, many details about how the faith might be lived out, various doctrines and practices. It will include a teaching on God, most certainly, but that won’t be the only thing. And so creeds are about who God is, who he has revealed Himself to be, as we worship Him.
So they’re meant for us to use here to memorize and to learn. And so what we believe matters. It matters who God is and who he has revealed Himself to be. And that makes demons tremble because they know that the Creator of the world is the one who is the Redeemer of the world in His Son, is the one who has sent His Spirit into your hearts, crying out, Abba, Father, that you too might be filled with this Spirit, living, breathing, and doing. For the faith of God’s people is not a passive thing.
It is not a knowing of facts and figures alone, but the faith of God’s people is always active. It’s always looking for things to do, standing up and sitting down, just as we saw in Deuteronomy. What we believe is about knowing the God who has revealed Himself to us in his holy word, and about living then in how God has revealed Himself. To understand that the world is not spinning out in chaos, but controlled by a Father who loves us, that we are not lost and condemned, but through Christ, redeemed. That we are no longer dead in sin, but alive by the Spirit of God that has been poured into us.
In these things we now believe.
But why do we do it? What we believe is what the Scripture says and what the Scripture reveals. For the faith comes from nowhere else but the Word that has been revealed through Christ, given to him by the Father, as we heard in our Gospel lesson. But it is good for us to ask, but why do we believe it? Why believe these words?
Our first answer might be because they’re true. That’s a fine answer.
Here’s another. Because there is an empty tomb in Israel. Because Christ Jesus, who took on flesh the Word of God, made whole like us in ways that we will discover and learn together in the next weeks and days and weeks ahead, not quite months. I have to end the series at some point. But we will discover this together, the greatness of Christ.
And we will find in him one who has taken on every aspect of us, who has redeemed every part of us, and who has gone to the cross that we might be forgiven. And so we are. And because of his death, we can stand before the Father in the glory of Christ. Because there is an empty tomb, we need not fear death or damnation, hell or Satan, or any demonic force or power we can imagine. For Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed. Alleluia. This is the Easter faith that we have. This is the faith that we believe and that we now live in. And because he lives, we shall live.
We believe because there is an empty tomb, that Christ who died is the Christ who has risen and now ascended to the Father, where He sits in controlling all things for the good of those who love him and who will come again to judge the living and the dead. We believe not because this word makes sense. Even though it does. We believe not just because this Word grants peace to the broken. Even though it does, we believe not just because this Word gives hope and purpose to those who are struggling.
Though it does, we believe because Christ is risen. And he has risen indeed. Hallelujah. We’ll go with it. And so I wasn’t worried about that one.
You guys are already good. But Christ, as He is risen, now has appeared to his apostles and by His Holy Spirit has caused his word to be remembered among us. We believe because Christ is risen and he has given his word to us in the church that it might be passed down from generation to generation from forming us in this faith that we may say we believe standing with our fathers and mothers, the forefathers in the faith with all of the hosts of heaven, not alone in what we believe but united through all those older voices and united to those voices yet to come in the faith that has been handed down to us and prophets and apostles by angels and yes by the Christ so that when we believe it may be because he is risen, he is risen indeed. Alleluia. Amen.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all of our understanding, now guard and keep us in this faith now and unto the end of the age. Amen.