Trinity Sunday (Year C)
15 June 2025
Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee that thou wouldest keep us steadfast in this faith and worship, and bring us at last to see thee in thy one and eternal glory, O Father; who with the Son and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Isaiah 6:1-8
Revelation 4:1-11
John 16:5-15
Warren reminded me just the other day that this year is the one thousand seven hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicea of 325. In fact, we are not very far from the actual anniversary date, as some reckon the council to have begun on the twentieth of May. (1) I’m sorry to say that what with our own sesquicentennial, and thinking about William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons and what other composers whose death-years we could commemorate and create special musical programming around, I admit that this, quite extraordinary commemoration didn’t even occur to me. And I have to say, I’m a little embarrassed.
So, seventeen hundred years ago, over three hundred bishops gathered at Nicea in the Roman province of Blythinia in Asia Minor, not far east of the Bosporus on the shores of Lake Iznik, from which its modern Turkish name derives. Almost all the representatives who met came from the Eastern, Greek-speaking churches. From the Western, Latin Church, only the bishops of Carthage, Milan, Dijon, and two others, along with an emissary from the Bishop of Rome attended. Still, its authority was almost universally recognised, especially as it seemed to settle a very significant theological question that had riven the Church. Indeed, Constantine assembled the meeting in large part to promote Christian unity, and some have suggested that he did not care about the outcome as long as a consensus was reached.
The issue in question? Nothing less than the divinity of Christ. Sometime around 319 an Alexandrian priest named Arius began teaching and preaching that Jesus was subordinate to the Father. That is to say, he questioned and, indeed, denied the full divinity of Christ, and these teachings were in sympathy with that of many contemporaries in Alexandria and beyond. In a way, you can’t blame them. Perhaps believing that Jesus can be called the Son of God solely on account of his righteousness and that all his teachings still retain their meaning and force is much easier for people to believe than that Jesus is the very Son of God, equal to the Father, sharing his full divinity. Indeed, if you think about it, many people you meet and talk to about religion these days basically still express this same idea, agreeing that he was a great prophet and teacher, but feeling iffy about the whole Jesus is God thing. I mean, isn’t this basically Unitarianism?
In those early days, Arius’ teachings became wildly popular and quickly spread from Alexandria, touching a nerve with people, even ones who did not go as far as Arius, but who were in sympathy with him. This became a big problem, and Constantine himself saw it as damaging to the unity of his Empire, the unity of a Roman society that had declared Christianity its most favoured religion.
Despite Arianism’s popularity, however, there were still many who expressed and defended what we would now call the orthodox position, our position, in fact and they carried the day. The council asserted the divinity of Christ, stating very clearly that Jesus is fully divine, just as he is fully human (and yes, thinking that Jesus wasn’t fully human is a whole other heresy that was also rejected by the Church). In order to explain this, they did not turn to world of the language and ideas of scripture, but rather to that of Greek philosophy and science: Jesus was “of one substance” (famously homoousion) with the Father, although he was a distinct person (Gk. prosopon, Lat. persona).
Jesus is very God just as the Father is very God and while they are not the same, each being a distinct person, they are none-the-less one. The implications for this are, to say the least, significant. Fully divine and fully human, Jesus is one of us. This means that his suffering on the cross was real and, therefore, he can understand our suffering. At the same time, his unity with the Father overcame and defeated this suffering and death, and makes it possible for us to share in the new life it brings. Fully human and fully divine: it raises the stakes, shows us the scale of what God has done for us in inaugurating the Kingdom of God and making possible the reconciliation of God and humanity. Jesus wasn’t just another good guy, he was in one person both human and God.
Consequently, as we all know, the Council of Nicea produced a creed that put this all down in writing, and that was agreed upon by the bishops present, and we are about to say it. Well..., not exactly. The Council of Nicea did promulgate a creed and it did affirm the fill divinity of Christ as “of one substance” with the Father, but it was short, only mentioned the Holy Spirit tangentially, and included a number of anathemas at the end. This is not the Nicene Creed we know and love. That Creed, the one used as an essential element of the Eucharist in both the Eastern and Western churches for almost fifteen hundred years, is a development on the one promulgated at the first Council of Nicea. Our creed is pretty much the one endorsed by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 as the having been promulgated by the Council of Constantinople in 381 ... although it probably dates from several decades later. This is all probably way more than you want to know.
Yet, it is all important to help us understand that what we are celebrating here on Trinity Sunday – the trinitarian faith of the Nicene Creed – is not a simple thing. On Christmas, we have the stories of the Incarnation from Scripture. The same goes for Epiphany, Candlemas, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Day, and Ascension Day. At each of these celebrations, our task is to interpret and understand where these stories from Scripture meet our Story, what they have to do with us, what they tell us about who God in Christ is, and what we are called to do as a consequence. Even Corpus Christi, which we will celebrate on Thursday, finds its basis in all the scriptural foundations of the Eucharist. Each of these commemorations is found in the Bible, they are grounded in the life of Christ as it comes down to us in the Gospel. There is nothing in the Bible that tells us exactly how Jesus is the Son of God, or how the Holy Spirit actually fits in. We have heard a great deal this Eastertide in our readings from the Gospel of John that Jesus and the Father are one, and that as Jesus’ followers we must be one with Jesus so we can be in relationship with the Father. In Matthew, Jesus gives the disciples his final instruction to go out and baptise “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” but he does not tell us what that means. We hear about the coming of the Holy Spirit, but what is its actual relation to God and Christ?
We are left to try and figure it out, and this is what writing the Creeds and saying them together as the Church is meant to help us do. The Creeds are both a recital of God’s mighty acts – like the formulae we see even in Hebrew Scriptures: “I am the God who brought you out of Egypt” – and professes our understanding of who God is – “I believe in God the Father, creator of heaven and earth.”
The Scriptures tell us a great deal. God created the world and declared it good. God sojourned with Israel and was an active force in the history of the Jewish people. The Scriptures tell us that God sent Jesus into the world as his son, born of a human mother, to reconcile a fallen creation with God. The Gospels give us overlapping accounts of Jesus passion, death, and resurrection. John tells us that Jesus was one with the Father in the beginning and that he is God’s word, God’s reason, God’s self expression. And we have the Holy Spirit, a life-giving force that is the very breath of God, both for Israel and latterly sent to the disciples to compel them out into the world to bring the Gentiles into relationship with God through Christ. God is one. God is the Father. God is Christ. God is the Holy Spirit. But what is their relationship? How does it all work? We are not given a handbook and hence, there was no Doctrine of the Trinity ready made for us.
Rather, these questions had to considered, hammered out, formulated, and they were, over hundreds and hundreds of years by people of good will, all of whom were devoted to God in Christ and knew that somehow God had done something extraordinary in sending Jesus into the world, defeating death, leaving us the Holy Eucharist and the Holy Spirit. Was Jesus completely and only divine? Well in that case, does this mean his suffering isn’t real? Was Jesus completely and only human? In that case, how does the Resurrection fit into it all? And again, and again, what do we do with the Holy Spirit? The creedal formulae, some of the earliest of which which we see in scripture, especially in the Epistles, tested the waters, let people hear how it sounded. Does this represent what we know to be the Gospel – the Good news of Jesus Christ?
The Creed of the Council of Nicea was a step on this journey, one that asserted the fundamental principal that Jesus is one with the Father in substance, and that the Holy Spirit was an integral part of the Godhead, of that unity and oneness. The Trinity expresses to us conceptions of unity in diversity, that when something is one with something else that they can, and in the case of God, do retain unique properties. These kinds of interpretations, conclusions, thoughts, have real life consequences for, for example, our understanding of marriage and parenthood, of our own most intimate relationships, and of our relationship with God, one God in three persons.
I have to say that I think it is kind of cool that this is something left for us to wrestle with. God has come to us and acted decisively, destroyed death, opened the Kingdom of Heaven to us, but has not spoon fed us exactly what we are to believe and exactly what we must do. This is a kind of uncertainty that makes many people uncomfortable, and that draws people to religious communities that purport to have all the answers. But I don’t think that this is what God wants. God wants us to use our brains, God wants us to put our heads together, to come to understand these questions of existence and the meaning of everything. We are, after all, made in the image and likeness of God, and this means we share in God’s very Word, God’s self expression, God’s reason, and we are called to use it, in conversation with others who are called to this life’s work, so we can understand together what it means to be Christian together in the world today. In this way, when we hear the voice of God calling, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then we can all respond with the confidence of Isaiah, “Here am I! Send me.”
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
New York City
Ember Day and commemoration of Basil the Great, 14 June 2025
© 2025 Andrew Charles Blume
1. The historical information in this sermon comes primarily from general knowledge, but it has all been checked against the relevant articles in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. by F. L. Cross, 3rd ed. by E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: at the University Press, 1997). I apologise for any errors.