Sermons on Nicene Creed
Trinity
Many of you know that I enjoy playing golf. Some golfers spend a lot of time thinking about their shot before they hit the ball. They think about how far the green is, which way the wind is blowing, which club they should use, how high their tee is, which leg is carrying the most weight and so on. Me, I skip most of that, put the ball down and hit it in the general direction of the hole. After…
Faith and Fellowship
Acts 4:32-35 1 John 1:1-2:2 John 20:19-31 When I was a teenager I had a very definite faith. I believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. I knew pretty much all there was to know about Christianity, and I practiced it. But as I grew up I suffered from severe depression and my faith gave me no answers. I became confused between the sacramental and symbolic Anglo-Catholic faith that I had grown up in, and the fundamentalist…
The Dance of Trinity
Today’s Scriptures all point to the Trinity, even though the word itself isn’t in the Bible. Genesis 1:1-2:4 Six centuries before Jesus was born, an unknown poet-priest imagined God at the beginning of time: hovering over the void, creating life out of chaos. Sun, moon, and stars are born; the earth is formed, with its mountains and seas; plants spring up, animals begin to roam the earth, and human beings are created. When we read this particular verse (Genesis 1:26),…
All Saints
Today we celebrate All Saints. The church I grew up in was All Saints so this was always a special day with lots of processions and incense. I think it’s still my favorite festival of the year, because unlike the major feasts which celebrate Christ, this one celebrates us. It’s our day. We often think of saints as people in icons and stained glass; people who did amazing things; in many cases people that today we would treat with therapy…
Baptism
I was baptized one Sunday afternoon, surrounded by my family and godparents, when I was just four weeks old. Not because I was sickly, but because the Vicar wanted a baby to baptize on Mothering Sunday. In contrast, Constantine the Great, the 4th Century emperor embraced Christianity when he was 40 but didn’t get baptized until twenty five years later, when he knew he was dying. As a teenager, I decided that my baptism was null and void since only…
One, holy and catholic
Today I am continuing with the series on the Nicene Creed, and we have reached, “We believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church.” There’s a certain irony in tackling this subject on Storm Sunday as the church has tended to be a stormy organization with a lot of dissension. Sometimes the church is described as a ship. In fact, the word “nave” for the body of a traditionally built church, came from the medieval Latin navis which means ship.…
The Holy Spirit
This morning we continue our series on the Nicene Creed by considering the work of the Holy Spirit. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. The church fathers who created the Nicene Creed were very concerned about the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. At the time, you will…
For our sake…
This is Caro’s sermon from this morning; Fr Barry also spoke and his is only available as an mp3 file here. There’s a young man in my neighborhood who has just graduated from Poly. If you ask him he may tell you his name is Bill.[1] But that’s not his real name. His real name is Mohammed, and although his Mom is American, his Dad is from Saudi Arabia. I tell you this because after the horrific massacre in Nice…
Jesus the Christ
Today we come to the second part of our sermon series on the Nicene Creed and we’ll be looking at the relationship between God the Creator and Jesus the Christ. As I explained in my last sermon, this was a very difficult and contentious issue in the first few centuries of the Christian church, and became such a problem that it caused a big split. One of the reasons it was so divisive was that people thought that wrong belief…
We Believe
Today we start the first of a series of sermons, one a month, which will be covering that difficult issue, the Nicene Creed. The Creed is difficult for us for a number of reasons; it was written at a specific time and place to solve specific problems, and although it remains the one creed that is accepted by the Orthodox, Catholic and most Protestant churches, it turns many of us off. I have had people tell me they don’t come…