Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning. Will you pray with me?
Dear God, help us to open our eyes, our ears, and our hearts to receive the peace that every person of you wants to grant us.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: This is a reading from the second letter to the Corinthians. It's on page 944 of your picture Bibles, chapter 13, verses 11 through 13.
Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell.
Put things in order.
Listen to my appeal. Agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss.
All the saints greet you.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
Amen. This is the word of the Lord.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: So Jill and I just got back from nearly two weeks with the extended family in France.
In addition to Jill and me, the group also included my older brother and his wife, my younger sister and her husband, and my parents. My dad is 89 and he still did some biking.
Lord have mercy.
Our first day was spent in the city of Bordeaux, and I was told that, according to that famous author of travel guides, Rick Steves, he was unimpressed with Bordeaux. He even wrote later, bordeaux must be French for boring.
We didn't find it that way. We found it quite interesting, fascinating even. But that may have been because of the guide. We had a woman named Stephanie the first day we were in Bordeaux, and she passed on a host of stories about statues and buildings in French history and also shared a bit of her own story, which was really interesting. Stephanie had grown up in the United States, but in her 20s had met and married a Frenchman living in the U.S.
the pair then talked about moving to France. He was more reluctant than she to make that move because he really enjoyed being that exotic foreigner with the charming French accents, and he knew if he went to France, he'd just be another Frenchman. But she convinced him and they moved to Bordeaux, which was affordable and enjoyed many years there. Raised a family there as well. And Stephanie shared with us the process that you have to go through in order to become a French citizen. I don't know if you're aware of this, but she and her husband had to live in France at least three years.
She also had to pass an exam that showed she was fluent in French.
She also had to pass a civics exam that showed she really understood French history and that she also had a certain connection to that history, was willing to connect with it. And then finally, she had to show she knew the core French republican values.
Values like liberty, equality, and fraternity and subscribed to those. Only after all that could she become a French citizen and then enjoy some of the benefits of that, like guaranteed health care, paid family leave and retirement. And that sense she was now truly a part of the French people made me think. It's interesting, isn't it, what factors are deemed crucial by a state or a community or an institution in order for people to truly be a part of of that group?
What are those places of essential agreement that they say everyone has to have as a kind of connecting link that they all need to subscribe to or share? I thought of this also traveling as often as we did during these two weeks with my extended family. On one hand, we're very different people. We disagree on a lot of things, but we do have at least one point of connection, a bond, and that is that every one of us either married into, was born into, or was adopted into a family. Family was that tie that bound us together.
Well, for people of faith like you and me, one of the questions that emerges time and again in history is what is it that is essential in binding us together, making us not just individuals but a people, people of God?
Is it a common language, Hebrew, Greek, or Latin? Is it a certain knowledge of history, in a sense that we share that history together? Is it core values, maybe not liberty, equality and fraternity, but perhaps justice, love of God, and love of neighbor? Is it a common law to which we all subscribe and say at least we all are bound by a rule of law? Certainly in the Old Testament we can read of the Torah, the law of God serving as that kind of unifying force? Are we bound by a common space like this space, or for the ancient people of God, the tabernacle and then the temple, or for families, a particular house or dwelling space? Are we bound by having a common matriarch and patriarch, like my family did on this trip and still does, and certainly the Jewish people have long had in, say, Abraham and Sarah. Or is it a document, a statement that links us, like a declaration of independence or a constitution, or a creed or creeds to which all subscribe?
Well, Today's passage from 2 Corinthians provides one brief but poignant response to that question of what binds Christ's followers together? We read in first Corinthians that a central concern of the apostle Paul as he begins this letter exchange with the Corinthian church is unity, agreement, he's been told. He writes, of dissension and quarrels, and these deeply concern the apostle Paul. He writes of reports he's received that some say they belong to Paul, others to Apollos, others to Cephas. And historically, one of the greatest gifts the Apostle Paul gave the church as it comes to addressing precisely this concern of disunity, disagreement, quarrels is what he closes the second letter to the Corinthians with.
At the end of that letter, Paul offers this closing blessing to that community that faced division, factionalism and disagreement. He writes, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
And for two millennia the Christian church has said there there may just be a source of essential agreement.
It was almost exactly 1700 years ago that the first universal or global conference of Christian leaders took place. And it happened in a city called Nicaea, located in modern day Turkey. It was the Roman emperor Constantine who called the gathering. And his concern was disagreement, disorder and division in the Church.
Now, Constantine was the first Roman emperor in history to be baptized into the Christian faith. This was an extraordinary historic development. Some three centuries earlier, you'll recall, Jesus was crucified for being deemed a threat to the Roman emperor and the empire itself and its head, Caesar.
Proclaiming Jesus as Lord back in the first century, many argue, could be tantamount to saying Caesar is not Lord Jesus is instead an anti imperial message.
Christians didn't worship the Roman gods. And for this, Roman authorities in the earliest centuries of the Christian church would often call them atheists, non believers. Roman emperors before Constantine like Nero even and Domitian, famously persecuted Christians. Now after Constantine's conversion in 312 of the common Era, a Roman emperor was a Christian. What does that mean?
In some ways we're still wrestling with issues that period of history presented, wrestling with questions of how the Christian faith and the broader interest of an empire might be fundamentally at odds.
And some questions raised during that period as well include what does it look like for an empire or nation to be open to or tolerant of people of different faiths, not one dominant faith, whatever that faith might be.
Well, for Constantine, a central concern of his when he called this ecumenical council was unity, an end to disorder.
He had achieved unity militarily by 324 rising victorious in a series of civil wars, defeating rival emperors like Maxentius and Licinius. Politically, by that year he was the broadly acknowledged head of an empire that encompassed the entire land region that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea. And yet he said his greatest fear at that time was not war, but disorder in the Church.
He feared that. And so 318 Christian leaders were gathered together in Nicaea in the first ecumenical council that Constantine had called. And with Constantine being a Christian, these leaders did not have to fear for their lives. They could gather there and work out this core mission.
Find the emperor challenged them with this find an area of essential agreement, a point of connection that this now global church can say, on this we agree.
Now you might ask, why should there even be such a debate? Isn't the answer so clear?
The answer is, I heard some of you say, what's the answer to every children's sermon out there?
Jesus, right?
Jesus Christ, the cornerstone, the foundation, the monarch, the Savior, the Lord. Indeed, scripture proclaims that he is all that. But who is Jesus Christ?
And specifically, who is Jesus Christ in respect to God? And how do we understand this other mysterious problem? Protagonist in scripture called the Holy Spirit? What is the Spirit's relationship to God and to Jesus Christ? To speak meaningfully of Christ as the center of our life, as the center of our community? Christian leaders back in the 4th century realized they'd have to come to terms with the relationships between Christ and God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, and how the Holy Spirit fits in well. A priest at that time named Arius was getting a whole lot of press in influencing some of these Christian leaders, like Eusebius. Arius proclaimed that Christ was indeed the Son of God, but was not of one nature with God. For that would make two gods, Arius reasoned, and God is one. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is subordinate to the Father, Arius argued Christ was created by God out of nothing, by God the Creator. Christ was a creature like you and me. This was Arius claim.
But another bishop at Nicaea named Athanasius found this understanding of Christ abhorrent.
Athanasius argued that if the Son were merely a creature and did not share an essential nature or being with God, Christians were not saved.
For a creature can't bridge the gap between creator and creation. A creature can't join humanity. And God.
And Christ did that.
Athanasius argued only God could bridge that divide. And God did it by the work of the Son, the Logos, the divine word, taking on human flesh, being truly God incarnate.
Well, a great debate raged. I know you can't imagine that that a debate would emerge in a Christian church, particularly when 318 leaders were gathered. But it did, and it was fierce. Constantine the emperor finally proposed a way forward. He put forth the term in speaking of Christ's relationship to God, Homo usios. That solves it all, doesn't it homoousios to describe the relationship between God the Creator, the Almighty, the divine Parent on one hand, and Jesus Christ the Son of God on the other. Homoousios is a Greek term that means of the same essence, the same being, the same substance. That was not what Arius wanted. It was a loss for Arius. But that homoousios of one being, of one substance, one the day.
There was also this matter of the Holy Spirit. The Council of Nicaea recognized that if we're going to talk about Jesus Christ the divine, we also need to contend with the one Jesus himself referred to often in the Gospels as the Spirit or the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit plays a prominent role in the rest of Acts, and you'll remember the role it played last Sunday as we celebrated Pentecost.
And passages like today's text from second Corinthians lift up not simply the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, but the love of God and communion of the Holy Spirit.
And in the ending of Matthew's Gospel, some of Jesus last words to the disciples are, go therefore, to all nations, make disciples and baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And that trifold framing of God's work that also hearkens back to when Jesus was baptized in Matthew's Gospel. And you'll remember, at that time, when Jesus arose from the waters, not only was there a voice from heaven saying, this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, the voice of a divine parent, but this Holy Spirit descended like a dove.
We have these threefold framings in Scripture.
So how do you leave out the Holy Spirit when you want to talk about what lies at the essence of the Church?
So a creed was written in Nicaea. Three persons in one Godhead. This creed proclaimed God the Almighty, the Divine Parent, God the Son, who was Jesus the Christ, and God the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life, the Trinity. That First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea proclaimed that is the Church's point of essential agreement.
1700 years later, that is still where the broader ecumenical church finds essential agreement. There are so many things about which, say, Protestants might disagree, and even more, if you want to divide Protestantism from the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, those three great branches of the Christian faith. But on this, all three branches agree.
The Trinity, God in three persons, or as Paul famously put it in his final words to the Corinthian Church, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Now, careful scriptural commentators will Note that in that closing blessing or benediction, Paul is not laying out an elaborate theology of the Trinity like the Council of Nicaea would provide more than 200 years later. And that's absolutely fair. Still so still, in Paul's closing blessing, he offers a threefold framework for understanding God's presence and work in the world that the church has found, well, absolutely essential ever since.
Our faith has at its essence the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son, forgives us, saves us, renews us, draws us into union with God, our Creator and Ruler of all things, and that God's glorious principal purposes, our faith, has at its essence the love of God. That love of God is what we read in John's Gospel first led God to send us Jesus Christ to be our Savior and call us to the work of loving our neighbor, advocating for justice, healing the sick, welcoming in the outcast, proclaiming God's love to the world. And our faith has thirdly added essence communion, the communion of the Holy Spirit. God is not only up in heaven, but with us here and now by the Spirit's presence. And it is by that Spirit's work that our minds and hearts are illumined, that we're drawn to faith, that we are transformed into the very image of Christ God Almighty, the Divine parent, Jesus Christ, God's Son and the Holy Spirit. All three we believe as Christians, are essential.
Now we might wrestle with language about the Trinity. And we do. For example, how do you speak of the first Person of the Trinity, who is spoken of so often in Scripture as Father, but is also referred to in the Bible with mother imagery and with imagery that is decidedly not gender specific?
How do we acknowledge that the Creator of all things, the sovereign ruler of all things, is both beyond gender and acts like. Well, a parent to us is a personal God.
We might find ourselves using traditional language on occasion, as I do and other times exploring female or non gender specific language for the first person of the Trinity.
But in the end, in all three persons, in one Godhead, that is who we worship. On that at least, Catholics, Orthodox believers and Protestants of all shapes and stripes find essential agreements.
Well, later in June, there will be a biannual General assembly of the Presbyterian Church usa. That's the broader denomination of which Knox is a part.
It will take place not in Nicaea, but in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It will be the 227th such gathering in our church's history.
A new confession of faith or creed will be considered. And guess what? Issues of human sexuality and gender identity will be looked at as well.
Also to be discussed will be to what degree different views on sexual orientation, gender identity and human relationships can be allowed among pastors of the broader million member Presbyterian Church. You can find this congregation's welcome statement regarding those of different sexual orientations, gender identities and other categories on the Knox website, along with our mission and vision statements. But one question the broader Presbyterian denomination is considering, based on discussions I've seen regarding one particular overture to that assembly, is should an affirming stance by pastors towards LGBTQIA persons be a point of essential agreement for our church or not?
Should pastors be examined on whether or not they adhere to it?
Well, may God be with all Christian organizations and institutions wrestling with those and a host of other questions we face today as human beings and as followers of Christ on the journey together.
But on this Trinity Sunday, let me close recognizing and celebrating with you, even with the many ways we Christians disagree and the commitments we will be debating, including in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, let's celebrate this precious point of essential agreement, agreement that we have possessed for 1700 years.
And we share it not just with other members of this congregation and the Presbyterian denomination, but Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic believers alike. And that point of agreement is essentially God.
And by God, what do we mean, we Christians mean the God Paul referred to in his closing Benediction of Second Corinthians, the grace he writes, of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
May it be so. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.
