The Holy Spirit, The Trinity and The Church | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

2:39 This creed was birthed 1,700 years ago this month. And on its 1,700th anniversary, I thought it was appropriate for us to spend a couple of weeks trying to understand what does it teach and why does it matter. This is the most important distillation of the Christian faith that we have. So the Apostles' Creed comes earlier, doesn't go into nearly as much detail. The Nicene Creed has shaped Christianity since the 4th century. and has an opportunity to continue to shape our lives today. It is something that all branches of Christianity have stacked hands on, or nearly all. Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and most evangelical Protestants would say this summarizes and distills down what we believe. 90 seconds it takes to read the Nicene Creed. In 90 seconds, you can summarize our theological understanding of who God is and how God became flesh in Jesus and who the Holy Spirit is and what the church is meant to be and what our ultimate hope is.

3:31 And so I'm excited to be sharing this series with you. It was birthed, and I see a creed was birthed out of controversy, as we learned last week. In the northern part of the continent of Africa, starting in the town of Alexandria, Egypt, there was conflict that was taking place within the church. And out of that conflict, the emperor said, we've got to get the bishops together. We've got to resolve the conflict. And really, every council that's happened since then was called together to deal with conflict or points of disagreement about theology. And what happened was, as people came together in the midst of conflict, the Holy Spirit worked through that to clarify. So conflict's not a bad thing, and conflict's gonna happen in life, in politics, in relationships, in the church, it's gonna happen. And the Holy Spirit can use conflict to clarify. And that's exactly what's happened throughout Christian history. So when you think about conflict, people think, really, there's conflict in the church? Actually, I'm pretty sure you know that, because the reason why we have thousands and thousands of denominations across the world Christian denominations is because of conflict. Conflict is an inherent part of being human.

4:32 I was reminded of the story again by Michael Carpenter in his book, a story I've shared with you years ago, but a man that was stranded on a deserted island. He's there for a couple of years. Finally, you know, a group of people come, they find him, and when they get there to rescue him, they see that he's got three buildings that he's built there on the island. They say, what are these three buildings for? And he says, well, the first one is my house, the second one is my church, and the third one is the church I used to go to. So, you know, we know that this is what happens in the church world and in life. In the church world, of course, again, thousands of denominations birthed out of the fact that Christians struggle to agree. Even here in the United Methodist Church, you know that last year, two years ago, about 20 to 25% of the churches left to form their own denomination. Many of them formed their own denomination, somewhat independent, because of disagreements that we had in how we read scripture and try to interpret it and understand God's will for our lives and the world. So 75% of us remained part of the United Methodist Church.

5:26 Others left and did something else. In any given church, you're going to find that there's conflict. And here's the thing. If you want to always agree with your preacher or the denomination or the church leadership, the only way you're going to do that is if you get one of those fake ordination certificates for $25 online and you prepare your own sermons every week and you stand in front of the bathroom mirror and you preach to yourself. I guarantee you if you do that, you're going to agree with every sermon, every word that you speak and every decision that you make. The problem is if you live with anybody else, they're not going to agree with you and they're going to need to find another church because this is life. We're going to have conflict. We're going to have disagreements. And so when I think about conflict, we tend to be conflict avoidant. We don't like conflict. Nobody wants conflict, but conflict sometimes, if it's done in a healthy way, can actually be clarifying. It can help us grow. So LaVon and I celebrated our 43rd wedding anniversary this week on Thursday of this week.

6:20 43 years ago, we were married two teenagers. You can see in these pictures, the two teenagers who got married in 1982, June 5th, 1982, and the two of us just a couple of months ago on vacation. And can I tell you between those two pictures, there are thousands of conflicts. There are, in most of them, tiny minor little things that didn't really matter. Some of them a little more significant and some of them, you know, were major conflicts. And what happened is through those conflicts, because we were committed to loving one another, we grew. I became a better husband because of conflict. She became a better wife because of conflict. We learned how to navigate. We became better human beings. We became iron sharpening iron for one another. And that's what happened when it came to the councils of the church and the creeds is the church dealing with conflicts. And those conflicts are going to come up again and again and finally sorting through those and clarifying. And so sometimes people think, well, you know, we have Jesus and he's the center of our faith as Christians.

7:11 And of course that's true. And then we have the New Testament. There are 27 documents in my New Testament, starting with the four gospels, the book of of Acts, the letters, the epistles, and then finally the book of Revelation. And so they say, you know, this is it. This is where Christianity is. This is, you know, what I believe is in this book. Yes, absolutely. The seeds of everything you believe are in this book. And of course, Jesus is at the center of that. But the church still had to process, you know, Christians had to, through conflict, try to figure out, okay, do we believe this or this about who Jesus is, or about who God is, or the nature of God, or the Trinity, or the Holy Spirit, or a whole host of other things. And I thought you might find it interesting to see this rack of books here. So these are from my library, and these are the anti-Nicene. These are the fathers, the writers in the church, their writings that we still have in existence from before the Nicene Creed right here. These are the Nicene fathers and the post-Nicene fathers here. This, all of this, you know, starting around AD 96, about the time the book of Revelation was written, all the way until the year 700, these capture, and the council decisions and everything else, This captures the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in helping the church clarify what it believes and why it believes it.

8:20 And so we call this, we describe this and the ongoing work of the Spirit within the church as the tradition of the church. So we have scripture, and then we have tradition, and then we bring to bear reason, our own intellect and our ability to reason together. And then we bring together the experience of the Holy Spirit in our lives in discerning what is it that we believe and how do we practice our faith? all centered around Jesus, rooted and grounded in scripture, but drawing from the tradition of the church that is ongoing through the ages and our reason and our experience. All right, so there continues to be conflict within the church. That's what birthed the Council of Nicaea conflict. You remember we learned last week that conflict was centered around two personalities. There was Arius, who was a priest in northern Africa in the city of Alexandria, and his bishop Alexander. And Arius began to criticize his bishop because he thought his bishop was becoming, well, he was blurring the lines between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And Alexander looked at Arius and said, you've got it wrong when it comes to how you're describing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And Arius was saying that only the Father was unbegotten, that the Father had eternally been in existence.

9:25 At some point, the Father brought forth or begat the Son out of his own divine essence. He begat the Son, and then sometime later, the Holy Spirit. And so the areas of view was there was a time when the Son was not and the Holy Spirit was not. And he said that the Son and the Holy Spirit were of a lesser glory than the Father. And Alexander and others said, whoa, wait a minute. We don't think that's right. That doesn't seem right. And so when the Council of Nicaea came together, you had people on both sides arguing and debating this until finally, and we believe through the work of the Holy Spirit, the council determined that a vast majority of the bishops said, no, we really think Alexander's closer to the truth here about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit having always been. And really the focus was on the Son and the Father and how the Son was eternally begotten. And you'll remember what we talked about last week, and I want you to join me in saying this, that the Son was God of God, light from light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.

10:26 All right, and so that's where we landed the plane last week, was talking about what the creed said about the Son. And you remember the Son, of course, becomes flesh in Jesus. And so prior to Jesus' birth, when he was named by his parents Jesus, we speak about the eternal Son. He becomes flesh in Jesus. We speak about Jesus, who was the Christ. So Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord. All right, so the creed, you think we might have in our mind that, okay, once we got to 325 and they wrote the creed, everything was settled and everybody went home, you know, happy and pals and no more disagreement. But that's not exactly how it worked because the folks left and those folks who had made their decision said, okay, we've made the decision. We feel like this is the right path. We, you know, we've discerned with the help of the Holy Spirit. But the folks who were Arius' followers weren't necessarily in agreement with that. And they continued to advocate for their positions, even though some of them were exiled, continued to advocate for their positions.

11:19 And over the years that followed that, There were times where, you know, the emperor and others began to lean more towards the Arian group. And so there continued to be conflict here and other conflicts, a host of conflicts. And many of these writings that we have here are about those various conflicts that were happening in that period after. So these writings over here after Nicaea. So 56 years later, there was a need to have another council. And you'll remember that the Nicaean Creed ended originally in 325 with just this one. It ended with all the sections about Jesus and one little line that said, and we believe in the Holy Spirit. That was it. And then following that, there were several anathemas. Like anybody who continues to teach what Arius taught is anathema, excommunicated or cursed. But the anathemas were eventually removed, and there was a recognition that a little more needed to be said about the Holy Spirit. And there were some other things that needed to be addressed. The reason why a second ecumenical council gathered, the first one in Nicaea, the second one 56 years later, in Constantinople, which was now the headquarters of the Roman Empire. The reason why they gathered there was because of more conflict related to the Holy Spirit. So there was a group of people, and you don't need to remember all these names, but it's kind of interesting to know. There was a group of people called the Nematomachae, the Nematomachae or Nematomachae. I think that's it, Nematomachae. The Nematomachae were people who had come to believe, and they were sometimes associated with another group called the Macedonians, if I remember correctly. But they had come to believe that, yes, the Father and the Son were of the same essence, homoousia, same substance, same being, but the Holy Spirit was different. And some of them believe that the Holy Spirit was created by Jesus. And so, the Father had begotten the Son eternally, and they were of the same essence, but then the Son begot or brought into existence the Holy Spirit. And so, the Holy Spirit was, if you will, a grandchild to the father or a sidekick to Jesus and not one with the father and the son.

13:17 And so this group begins teaching this and other people begin thinking, well, that kind of makes sense. And so the emperor calls together a second ecumenical council, 56 years after the first one in Constantinople, to address this question of who is the Holy Spirit. And part of what they recognized is the first time around, they didn't talk much about the Holy Spirit. Now, because of conflict, they had to think carefully about who is the Holy Spirit. precisely the same kind of questions they were asking about Jesus and God the Son in the first ecumenical council. And this was the outcome, was these words were added to the creed. And I want