This is Trinity Sunday, and the joke is that more heresy is preached this day than any other. It is traditionally the time – no kidding – to give someone else the Sunday to preach. It is a tough concept and hard to preach well, so you stick someone else with it. Mother Susan was blessed with a graduate student from Notre Dame who was licensed to preach and who was writing a dissertation on a topic that involved the Trinity, and so he was the Trinity Sunday guy for a couple of years.
The Trinity is a mystery. The Father, Son and the Holy Spirit are the Three-in-One. We have One God in three persons. This is a difficult idea to grasp and it is a concept we have difficulty getting our heads around.
In the early church there was the Apostles’ Creed. It said that we believed in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but this creed does not go into the nature of Jesus for example. It says he is the Son off God, but it does not say that he IS God. As you can imagine, there were folks who believed all sorts of things then as there are now. One school of thought was very popular, and that was the idea that Jesus was a nice guy and all, but he was just a prophet like John the Baptist.
Bishop Arius was someone who preached the heresy that Jesus was not God, and the heresy became known as Arianism. When Constantine came to power in the early 4th century, he was a Christian convert, and he made the practice of Christianity legal. He wanted to use his Christian faith to help unify the empire, but the Christian factions made this impossible. He had a couple of issues to settle. They had to come to some agreement on the nature of Jesus, and they needed to decide which writings were Scripture.
In 325, Constantine called the Great Ecumenical Council to settle these questions. I don’t think anyone claims that Constantine had a dog in this hunt. He did not want a specific outcome. He wanted issues settled just as an administrative thing. He wanted unity in the Christian community, and so he called bishops from all over the empire to come and settle these questions.
The discussions were heated as you can probably imagine. I talked last Christmas about the historical St. Nick – Bishop Nicolas of Myra who punched out Bishop Arius over the question of whether Jesus was God or not. At the end of the council, the bishops settled on the Trinity as we know it. Jesus was fully God and fully man. They wrote the Nicene Creed which is trinitarian and which we use in our Holy Communion service today.
Arianism became a heresy. Bishop Arius became a heretic and would not recant. He was excommunicated and exiled.
There was also the question of what was Scripture and what was not. Prior to the Council of Nicea, different groups in different regions had a subset of the Scriptures plus a few other things that had been added over the years. So in Corinth, they might have the letters of Paul to the Corinthians, but they might not have a copy of the letter to the Romans. Some groups had the Didiche I mentioned last week. Others did not. Many groups had one or two of the Gospels, but some of them had things like the Gospel of Thomas too. Many groups had letters from people like Irenaeus or Clement.
Irenaeus and Clement are called ante-Nicene fathers. They were not alive in the time of Christ, but were removed by a couple of generations. They wrote some important things that have become doctrine in the Church. They also quoted the things they considered Scripture in their writings. Their opinion was considered very important even if their writing was not ultimately considered to rise to the level of Scripture. Irenaeus quotes from all but about five of the books we consider to be the New Testament. He said their were exactly four Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The Council settled on the books they would consider Scripture, and these are the books we call “canonical” today. There were a few that were a little controversial. The Revelation of John was not so widely considered Scripture, but among other reasons for it to make the cut was the fact that Irenaeus quotes from it 29 times.
There are also the books we call the Apocrypha. The Jews settled on what is called the “Hebrew Canon” in the third century. They decided which books would be considered part of the Hebrew Scriptures – which we call the Old Testament. There were collections of these Scriptures in Greek though that contained some extra books. Some of these books were quoted and treated as Scripture by all sorts of ante-Nicene fathers. Augustine of Hippo had a fairly inclusive list. Jerome – who translated the Bible into Latin went mostly with the shorter Hebrew list. At the Council of Trent in 1546, the books were officially considered part of Holy Scripture by the Roman Catholics. Protestants in the Protestant Reformation mostly rejected them. Anglicans took a middle road as we are prone to do. The Anglican Church decided that these books are part of the Bible, but no doctrine should be based on them. These are books like Tobit, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus and they are found in the lectionary.
So I started talking about the Trinity and gave you a brief lesson on the Council of Nicea. I want to say a few words about the Gospel reading and then stop for the day.
The reading today is a famous one because it is an important one to many people. We get the John 3:16 which is a wonderful passage. We get the discourse between Jesus and Nicodemus about being born again of water and the Holy Spirit. Nicodemus is a Sr. Rabbi, and he comes to Jesus in the dark of night to ask Him some questions. Jesus tells him some things he does not understand. Nicodemus asks for some clarity, and Jesus tells him something else he does not understand. Nicodemus asks “How can these things be?” and goes away. This does not seem like one of the great instructional moments in the Gospels.
The lesson seems to have touched the heart of Nicodemus because he tried to get Jesus a fair trial in John 7:50-51. He brought aloes and myrrh to help prepare the body of Jesus for burial. We don’t have a lot of information about Nicodemus, but it seems that he left this encounter with Jesus a changed man. He is probably the first member of the religious establishment to believe in Jesus.
At the end of the day, it is not understanding that is so critical. It is belief and baptism. God will sort out the rest. There is a mysterious quality to the faith. We sometimes have to believe things that leave us saying like Nicodemus “How can these things be?”
I heard a remarkably good sermon from Bishop Little on this text a few years ago, and it was the confirmation service in the Chapel when a student of mine named Ranti was confirmed. I am not sure of the year – it may have been 2007. Bishop Little was preaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the context of confirmation, and the verse he had chosen to focus on was verse 8: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Adding to the sermon was the fact that the wind was so strong that day, it rattled the windows of the Chapel. It was really whistling around the building, and it was so loud, it interrupted the sermon. This was somewhat dramatic as you can imagine. His takeaway was that we see signs of the Holy Spirit, but we have to have faith. We have to submit ourselves to God’s will even if we can’t understand it sometimes. This is a great point to be making at a confirmation, and it is a great point to be making on Trinity Sunday. This idea is one of the takeaways for this Gospel reading, and it is the idea I am going to leave you with today.
I have said these words in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Sermon preached by Fr. Tom at St. Thomas, Plymouth
May 31, 2015; Trinity Sunday
Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17