The following sermon was preached at an ecumenical service at Christ the King Roman Catholic Parish in Regina on Sunday, January 26, 2025 at 2:30 pm.
Thank you for the invitation to preach this afternoon at this special service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. As was mentioned, I’m the minister at First Presbyterian Church here in Regina, and I’m currently also serving as the President of the Canadian Council of Churches.
I’ve been a Presbyterian representative on the CCC for almost 10 years. But long before I was connected with our national ecumenical body, I was involved in the work of the Prairie Centre for Ecumenism in Saskatoon. And the WPCU, celebrated in January every year, has always been on my agenda. It is a special time for Churches and Christians to come together in prayer and worship, to strengthen our relationships across denominations, and to encourage us towards greater unity, cooperation, and shared witness and mission throughout the year.
This year’s theme is quite unique. As always, we have a theme text and a title: “Do you believe this?” based on Jesus’ conversation with Martha of Bethany in the Gospel of John. But we also have a theme “Creed”, and a theme “Council of the early church” as we mark 1700 years since the first ecumenical council of the whole church that was held near Constantinople in the year 325 CE.
Called together by the Emperor Constantine, the Council of Nicaea was attended by perhaps 250 bishops, mostly from the East. The Church, having just emerged from hiding and persecution, was beginning to experience how difficult it was to share the same faith in the different cultural and political contexts of the time.
Disagreements had arisen among Christians in the previous decades, which sometimes degenerated into serious conflicts. These disputes were on matters as diverse as: the nature of Christ in relation to the Father; the question of a single date to celebrate Easter and its relationship with the Jewish Passover; opposition to theological opinions considered heretical; and how to re-integrate believers who had abandoned the faith during the persecutions in earlier years.
Our DeMargerie Lecturer earlier this week, the Rev. Dr. Sandra Beardsall, shared with us that the Emperor probably wasn’t really concerned about Christian theological orthodoxy when he brought together the leaders of the church to work out a common statement of faith. His main goal was the unity and peace of the Christian Church, which he needed to maintain the unity and peace of the Empire overall. But Constantine was committed to the goal of unity, and he pushed the bishops to keep talking, debating, and working on the task of writing a creed until they got it done.
If there is one thing that you may know about the first Council, it’s probably that that after much debate and deliberation (and probably a lot of committee work, which seems appropriate to a Presbyterian like me) eventually the bishops managed to agree on a statement of faith – on a creed that we know as the Nicene Creed.
I wonder how many of you regularly use the Nicene Creed in your worship services in your congregations or parishes. Does anyone use it regularly, like every Sunday? Does anyone use it occasionally, perhaps for special services or seasons? I wonder if there are others here whose churches would never include the Nicene Creed in your liturgies. Anyone?
That might be because your church tends to use the shorter Apostle’s Creed as the default choice, because you have adopted more contemporary statements of faith that seem easier to understand or more relevant, or because reciting creeds is just not something that your denomination typically does in worship.
I have to admit that Presbyterians don’t use the Nicene Creed very often. We used it for an ordination recently. But the time I hear it most often is actually at ecumenical services, at which it makes sense to use the earliest shared statement of faith of the whole church, one that is shared by churches of the West and the East. It is a reminder that as much as we differ in many practices and preferences in our various traditions, we can still say that ancient creed together – remembering that we believe in one God, the Holy Trinity, that we belong to one Church with one Baptism, and that together we look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and to life in the age to come.
In the 1700 years since the first ecumenical council drafted the Nicene Creed, the church has experienced many more disagreements and divisions. As we have worked out our faith in different times, places, cultures, and contexts, it sometimes seems like we have grown further and further apart from one another.
We have developed different structures of authority and leadership. We have moved in different directions with our liturgical practices and mission priorities. We have made different determinations on moral questions. And we’ve all added more confessions, statements of faith, encyclicals, and other authoritative documents that guide the faith of our communities in different, and sometimes contrary directions.
But the Nicene Creed, prepared in a time when the church was struggling with divisions, but striving to stay together, is a powerful reminder of our underlying unity in Christ, in our Trinitarian faith, and in our hope of the resurrection.
Back when I was in seminary more than 20 years ago, some of my fellow students were discussing the ordination vows that we would all eventually make when we were called to our first ministries. They were talking about some of the older Confessions that are considered subordinate standards of our denomination (subordinate to Scripture, but important documents of our Reformed tradition). And in particular, they were talking about the Westminster Confession of Faith from the 16th century.
Some of them really didn’t like the idea that they had to agree with the Westminster Confession of Faith. After all, that document includes a part where the Pope is called the anti-Christ. It’s got some nasty stuff by contemporary standards, along with some pretty out-dated ways of speaking about other aspects of our faith, besides ecumenical relations.
They joked about crossing their fingers behind their backs when it was mentioned, but they all eventually made the vows, holding fast to the line that says that we will interpret these texts together as a church, under the continual illumination and correction of the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit.
Of course, those vows also include the ecumenical creeds that have been adopted by the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church of which my denomination is a part. And I expect, that if any one of our churches were to evaluate and seek to edit or update the Nicene Creed or the Apostles’ Creed today, there would be some things we would want to change.
I, for one, was pleased to see that the translation we are using today (the one normally used by the World Council of Churches) uses inclusive language for people. I always cringe just a little bit when I’m invited to join in the creed in a community where they still say “For us men, and for our salvation, he came down from heaven” as if Jesus only came for less than half the population of humans.
Some of us might also want to emphasize some more attributes of God than are emphasized there, or perhaps we’d like to add something about how our belief in God and our relationship with God calls us to live in the world as Jesus’ followers.
But I suppose that’s why all of our churches have continued to produce documents: new creeds, confessions, statements of faith, and expressions of belief for our times. These are important, and good, and helpful as we work to teach the faith to the coming generations, as we welcome new people into our churches from different backgrounds, and even as we engage in ecumenical dialogue and relationship with other churches.
One of the things that has changed quite dramatically since the year 325 in the Roman Empire is that there is no political leader who cares whether the Christian Churches are united and harmonious in our relationships or not. In fact, the more divided we are from each other, the less trouble we are likely to be for secular political leaders who won’t have to pay much heed to our voices, or letters, or advocacy when we call on our governments to act in line with our values.
Without someone like Constantine to make church leaders sit down together and keep talking, discussing, and debating until they worked out the creed, the Churches today need to be committed to the ongoing dialogue ourselves. The Canadian Council of Churches is one of the places where that dialogue takes place, a multi-lateral dialogue between 26 member churches, representing more than 85% of the Christians in Canada.
The CCC includes Anglican; Eastern and Roman Catholic; Evangelical; Free Church; Eastern and Oriental Orthodox; and Historic Protestant traditions. And between the Governing Board, the Commission on Faith and Witness, the Commission on Justice and Peace, the Forum on Intercultural Leadership and Learning, Project Ploughshares, and several other working groups and reference groups, over 200 church representatives are involved from across the country.
We sit at tables together, sometimes in the same room, and other times in online spaces. And we work on what we can say together, and what we can do together. We celebrate what binds us together, come to understand our differences and divisions more clearly, and work and pray for unity and common witness.
The mission of the CCC is to respond to Christ’s call for unity and peace, to seek Christ’s truth with affection for diversity, and to act in love through prayer, dialogue, and witness to the gospel. And although I happen to have a volunteer role on the Executive of the CCC, most everyone here today belongs to the CCC because your denominations belong to the CCC. It is your Council of Churches.
And the dialogue that happens on a national level can happen, and is happening here in Regina as well. I think it happens every time that Christians, congregations, and parishes remember that there really is only One Church – one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church of which we are all a part.
We receive the ecumenical creeds like the Nicene Creed as a historic gift of hard-won unity, and hold them up as a reason that yes, we can get together with our Christian friends to pray, to worship, to talk, to share faith, and maybe even to debate and discuss theology.
A group of us did just that on Friday morning this past week. We came together with the DeMargarie Series speaker, Sandra Beardsall, and we explored the Nicene Creed together. We pondered and shared with each other about what is most important to us in our faith – the ideas and values that matter most to us, the faith practices that we care about, important texts that shape our faith, and language for God that speaks to our hearts. And then we searched the ecumenical creed to see how many of those things were indeed expressed in those ancient words.
In our Scripture texts today, Jesus encounters Martha of Bethany and later his disciple Thomas and invites them to believe. He doesn’t present them with a detailed creed or confession and ask them to sign on. But he asks them to believe in him – to believe in his love, to believe in his power, to believe that he is their hope and their salvation. It’s not so much a matter of intellectual assent to an idea or agreement with particular language or emphasis, but it’s a matter of whether or not they trust him. And we are invited to trust Jesus as well.
I think that trust in Jesus, that belief that we all share in the love and grace of God is what can equip us to go deeper in dialogue and grow in unity and peace with each other.
Like the first generations of Christians earnestly sought to give a comprehensible answer to Jesus’ question, “Do you believe this?” and as the leaders at Nicaea strove to find words that would embrace the entire mystery of the incarnation and the passion, death, and resurrection of their Lord, we can engage in that exploration and dialogue together too.
And even now, with the real though imperfect unity that we share, we can witness together to our faith in the resurrection, which is our source of hope and joy, to be shared with all people.