 by the Rev. Ted Thornton
In Luke 10:9, Jesus instructs the seventy missionaries he’s sending out to spread the gospel with these words, “...say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ “ Imagine you’re a member of an updated 21st century group of “Seventy” called to go out into today’s world this coming week to proclaim this message. How will you choose to describe the kingdom of God to those who don’t know or don’t like God-talk? Is this assignment crazy? Think of what the original Seventy might have thought, especially after listening to Jesus admonish them about the resistance they were likely to encounter in a Roman province infamous for its hostility to Jews and Judaism. Jesus could not have put the danger more bluntly: “I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves (Luke 10:3).” Failure is at least in part assumed. Now remember: Jesus, like some of his Jewish contemporaries, was an apocalyptic prophet who didn’t think the world had much time to get itself ready to meet God. I don’t think many of us today really think that way or live that way. We more closely resemble Mark Twain, who said, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky. They're always twenty years behind everything.” (Apologies to Kentucky!) In any case, most of us live our lives as if tomorrow will come and all too fast with its litany of first-of-the-work-week challenges. So, you should think about the words you will use in your preaching about the kingdom of God. For starters, is “kingdom” even the right word for our times? The evangelists after all didn’t take the Greek word basileia - “king” - literally to mean a person with a crown - so much as a realm or domain within us and between us [our Godly household or oikumene as depicted on the Whiteman window over the altar], the physical, emotional, and spiritual space we inhabit through which God’s love moves or tries to move if only we will let it. After all, haven’t we in our times had enough of kings actual and wannabe? “No Kings, no kings!,” shouted five million people across this country as they marched a few weeks ago on Flag Day, June 14, 2025. The “kingdom of God” is a communal attitude, an orientation, a sphere of action, a commitment to live a Godly life. And so, a growing number of Christians think a better translation of “kingdom of God” is “realm of God”: “realm” because that word conveys better the conviction that God’s presence is found in the way we conduct our everyday lives, not in the symbols of crown, scepter, and absolute power as we see them in history. This brings us to the most important question of all for how we might best proclaim the realm of God in our times: which is more important, proclaiming Jesus’ as our personal savior, or performing acts of loving kindness for others (what Jews call chesed)? Both themes are present in the New Testament: emphasis on right actions in the synoptic gospels and emphasis on belief in Jesus as savior in John. Have the meanings of love and belief changed since New Testament times? Actually, members of the early Church drew no distinction between Godly love and belief. They regarded practicing loving kindness toward others as the primary way we express our belief or faith in God and God’s son Christ Jesus. They didn’t think you could separate belief in Jesus from doing what Jesus told us to do: to treat one another with loving kindness. A reading of the Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5-7] makes this pretty clear. We express our belief and our faith in Jesus by behaving lovingly, compassionately, mercifully, and in the spirit of forgiveness toward one another. Martin Thielen, a retired Southern Baptist minister put it this way, “At its core, authentic spirituality is not about beliefs. It’s about behavior.” Rev. Thielen cites a scene from The Americans, a TV drama that aired from 2013 to 2018 in which one of the characters asks, “What if you don’t believe in God, or religion, or prayer? Her friend responds, “None of those things matter. All that matters is how we treat each other.” And, this corresponds to the dominant theme that unites both the synoptic gospels and John. The Great Commandment in Matthew 22:36-40 - “Love God and love your neighbor” - fits tongue and groove with John 13:34, where Jesus tells his disciples, "A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." Rev. Thielen concludes, “This ‘new’ commandment is a call to us to love each other in the same way that Jesus loved his disciples and the world. It emphasizes the importance of practical acts of love, kindness, and service within the Christian community and in the world at large.” This isn’t an easy fit for us in a world where zero sum thinking is the day to day “kingdom” we live in. Nevertheless, we Christians, the new Seventy, are called to challenge this plague of zero sum thinking that infects our relations with one another. Damien Cave wrote in a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (March 1, 2025, “Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out?“). Mr. Cave challenges the notion that the best outcome is winner takes all. How much saner and productive for all of us to work toward an outcome built upon collaboration and cooperation, where benefits and risks are shared across the board.The belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another has no place in the realm of God. Here’s a final problem for the new Seventy. Does the realm of God within us expect us and others to be perfect? This obsessive and cruel pursuit has spawned more bloodshed than any other philosophical and political doctrine in history. Think of Robespierre in France (as many as 17,000 heads fell to the guillotine), Lenin and Stalin in Communist Russia (thirty million dead), Pol Pot in Cambodia (seven million dead), and the worst of them all, Mao in China where an estimated sixty-million starved to death during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” sacrificed in the pursuit of a perfect society. Each of these leaders believed in the perfectibility of human behavior. Consider how at least one of these enterprises ended: the French Revolution finishes with Napoleon crowning himself emperor, a far more absolute ruler than the king whose head they cut off. It took France nearly a century, until the Third Republic came into being in 1870, to usher in a more stable form of democracy. We have badly misunderstood what Jesus meant when he says in Matthew 5:48, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." I’m among those who think that translation is again the problem here, especially when taken out of context. In Matthew 5:48, the Greek word translated as "perfect" is τέλειος (teleios). Instead of perfect, a better translation is the goal of completeness, maturity, or wholeness, not faultlessness or sinlessness, and certainly not literal perfection. Jesus certainly didn’t think perfection was a reachable end. He dramatically illustrates this point when he tells the mob that’s about to stone the adulterous woman to death in John 8:7, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” What Jesus means is that we are to strive to love one another as God loves us, and here’s the important part: to love one another without prejudice or partiality, not favoring one religion or race over another, or one sexual orientation over another, and to do so even if we can’t do it perfectly. And, when we fail, as we’re bound to, to confess our failure and ask God and those we’ve offended to forgive us.This is how the realm of God works, folks. The expectation that we will fail or make mistakes along the way is built right in. It’s one of the fundamental articles in the Constitution of the realm of God. The late poet and singer Leonard Cohen expressed this beautifully in his song, Anthem. “Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.” Your light, my light, our light; we shine through our cracks, our shortcomings, our errors, our vulnerabilities, not through our vain and selfish fantasies of perfection. Good luck and Blessings as you go forth this coming week to proclaim and live in the realm of God. Amen.
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 By The Rev. Ted Thornton
From John, chp. 19, verse 30 we read, “When he had received the drink, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” A few millennia ago on this day, this Good Friday, Jesus’ business in this world was finished. What about your business in this world? Is your business finished? Is what the world sees when it looks at you the final version of you? What is the unfinished business in your life? There are a great many untidy and unfinished businesses in my life. With that line from our general prayer of confession in mind, I ask myself, “what have I left undone that I ought to have done?” When I sit and pray with people who are dying, more than once they’ve said to me, “I’m not afraid of death. I’m at peace with God on that score. What frightens me, and what I’m so sorry about is the mess I’m leaving behind for my beloved family to deal with.” Unfinished business. Adults in the room: have you discussed with your family or left written wishes to help them plan for the time after you’ve passed on? What unfinished business remains to prepare for your departure from this life? Consider the unfinished business of human society, not only here but across the globe. One of our penitential keynotes this Lent has been the role we Christians have played throughout history spreading the plague of antisemitism. Just before Lent began, some of us explored the role infantile narcissism plays in the creation of the cruel patterns of hatred and behavior directed at Jews, hateful remarks and behavior that have also targeted members of other minority racial, ethnic, religious, and immigrant groups today as well of those with different sexual identifications and how we Christians have been complicit in all of this. Holocaust camp survivor Elie Wiesel was once asked if he thought Christians were responsible for the Holocaust. He replied, “Christians were certainly involved in creating and carrying out the Holocaust. Was it the Christianity in them that caused them to do so,” he asked? Answering his own question, he said, “I hope not.” Good Friday is a solemn and subdued day to be sure. But, we need to remember that Jesus’ suffering ended a long time ago. In a few days we will once again proclaim his triumph over death. At a minimum, we bear witness to that triumph in the faith of the millions who have gone on before us throughout the two thousand years since it all happened. We rest assured even on this solemn day that for the Jesus who walked through this world, there are no more friends or enemies betraying him and abandoning, forsaking, or denying him. No more ridicule, no more false accusations. No more taunts from the mob. No more crowns of thorns and lashes across the back, no more brutality and sadism at the hands of his Roman executioners. For all its grim fixation on the cross, Good Friday is not really a day about a wrongful death. It’s a day about taking stock, which after all is what we’ve been doing since the long season of Lent began on Ash Wednesday. That was the day we started thinking harder about what kind of dust we’re made of, about who we are, about our unfinished business as those who say we want to follow Christ Jesus. How can we lead better lives, how can we be more kind, more good, more loving; how can we be released from our prejudices and become truly reconciled one with another especially in light of the fact that we don’t have unlimited amounts of time to finish our business? This is the real meaning of mortality, the real meaning of “dust to dust,” the sense that our own eventual deaths define a temporal boundary for us which is the price we pay for living in the natural, physical world. Lent introduces a healthy sense of urgency into our lives and it all comes to a head on Good Friday. Good Friday is not really, then, a day of grief alone. It’s a day that calls us beyond grieving into renewal, taking steps toward finishing our unfinished business. In short, Good Friday marks the final stage in our preparation for Easter. May God Bless you as we all strive toward finishing our own personal and collective unfinished business. AMEN.  By The Rev. Ted Thornton
The force fueling what we know as rapture theology was persecution, real and imagined. Paul’s little church in Thessalonika in northern Macedonia in 51 AD was undergoing real persecution by its religious opponents. Paul wrote his first letter in an attempt to counsel perseverance and hope. The key text is 4:17 (NIV). There we read, “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” This text gained the nickname “rapture text” because St. Jerome in his Latin translation of the Bible used the Latin verb rapio - meaning to snatch away - to translate Paul’s original Greek. More about this in a minute. But, here’s the quiding question for today: Is rapture the right way to think about leaving this world? Well, I was once a member of a small group invited to be raptured up to heaven. Had I accepted, I might not be here with you today to tell the story. Nearly fifty years ago, I was a student in a seminar at Harvard Divinity School with theologian Harvey Cox titled “Contemporary Theological Movements.” Harvey is now ninety-five years young. He’s the most influential theologian of our times. He published his first best seller, The Secular City, in 1965, and he’s still at it: in 2022, at the age of 93, he published his latest title - A New Heaven. One day, as I and my dozen or so classmates entered Harvey’s seminar room, we noticed a pair of strangers already sitting at the conference table. They’d been invited by one of our classmates who introduced them as representatives of the “UFO religion.” UFO Religion” is an umbrella nickname that covers many groups. Their starting point is the belief that messengers from heaven like themselves will come down to rescue the faithful from this evil world and “rapture” them, or “snatch them up” to heaven, as Paul puts it. Our visitors claimed they were no longer living mortal, physical lives. They’d been raptured up to heaven, and then sent back down to earth to rapture new converts into the hereafter. After about half an hour, Harvey Cox, who’d remained silent up to that point, had heard enough. He slammed his Bible down on the conference table and said, “Okay, time to show me where in the Bible the word ‘rapture’ appears. I dare you to find it.” Well, they couldn’t do it because the word rapture cannot be found anywhere in the Bible. Harvey then rose to his feet and stamped out saying he was heading home to seek some “rapture” of his own (he lived just down the street from the “Div” School). And so, our professor deserted us. We continued the discussion with these two guys on our own, and - no - we did not accept their invitation to join the ranks of the raptured. Harvey Cox was right: the English noun “rapture” cannot be found anywhere in the Bible. The closest you can come to it is in St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible from Greek to Latin, known as the “Vulgate Bible” (Vulgate meaning “common tongue”), which he completed in the late fourth century A.D. Jerome translated First Thessalonians 4:17 using a form of the Latin verb rapio which means "to snatch up"). Our violent English word “rape” comes from this word. Jerome used a form of this word altogether twenty times in his Latin translation. Before we go any further let’s clarify some terms. Rapture theology is a way some Christians understand eschatology. Eschatology comes from a Greek word meaning “last things,” and refers to descriptions of what will happen when the world comes to its end, or its “eschaton.” The literary form by which descriptions of the eschaton are transmitted is called “apocalyptic,” coming from a Greek word that means “revealing.” That’s how the final book of the Bible, bearing the Greek title, Apocalypse of John, came to be called in general English usage The Book of Revelation. The actual event at which the end occurs is often called informally “the apocalypse,” but in formal theology (“God-talk”) it’s called the eschaton. Finally, another word associated with eschatological events is Armageddon, the place where some believe a final cosmic battle will begin between the forces of good and the forces of evil. This word appears only once in the Bible, yet it’s one of the most familiar words in Christian discussions of the eschaton. The single occurrence is in Revelation 16, verse 16 (“And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”). Now, Armageddon was not just the stuff of eschatological nightmares; it was a real geographical place in ancient Israel (so by the way was hell, but that’s a story for another day). Armageddon was a city in ancient northern Israel named Megiddo, in Hebrew, Har Megiddo: “Megiddo Hill.” You can visit its archaeological remains. At its height during the reign of Solomon in the 900s B.C.E., Megiddo lay astride one of the busiest trade routes between Egypt and regions to the northeast, and as such was the scene of many battles as people competed with one another. It’s this history that led to the myth that at the eschaton, the final great battle between the forces of good and evil will occur there. Relatively speaking, no one paid much attention to biblical passages predicting the rapture until the nineteenth century in some parts of Europe and our own United States. Then, thanks to ministers like John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield there was a surge of interest in Christian eschatological thinking, including rapture theology: the conviction that Christ will suddenly snatch “his bride,” the Church, and carry her off to heaven before the eschaton begins. Darby and Scofield were what we in the trade call “premillennial dispensationalists”: that’s a mouthful for people who believe Christ will return to the world at a particular place and time to prepare it for its final thousand years before it ends. The problem with this idea is that there isn’t a shred of support for it in scripture. The passage most often cited to tell us how it will really happen is Matthew 24, verse 36, where Jesus says, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (NIV).” The Trinitarian Congregational Church in Northfield, where I served as a Supply minister for three months during Covid, called Cyrus Scofield as its pastor in 1895. Unfortunately, he is remembered as a disagreeable bully who, apparently not busy enough with pastoring, strove to control what was being taught in D. L. Moody’s Northfield school just up the street. Those who knew John Nelson Darby remember him likewise as an ill-tempered, controlling, and scornful curmudgeon. In Massachusetts during this period, William Miller persuaded tens of thousands of his followers that the world would end on October 22,1844. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was asked if he was prepared. He replied, “The end of the world does not affect me; I can get along without it.” A new surge of interest in the rapture and in eschatology began in the early 1980s, even reaching the White House. President Reagan once told a pro-Israeli lobbyist in 1983, 'You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we're the generation that's going to see that come about.” Reagan’s interest in Armageddon prompted one writer to investigate the activities of Pantex, one of the nation’s nuclear bomb assembly and storage sites, located in Amarillo, Texas. Amarillo plays host to a number of evangelical sects who believe fervently in Armageddon, and some of them believe that Armageddon and the rapture of the faithful at the eschaton will come to pass by way of a nuclear holocaust. Such are the beliefs of some who divide the world between absolute good and absolute evil, between the followers of the Lord and the followers of Satan. For them, nuclear war is the Armageddon that the Book of Revelation predicts and Rapture is the vehicle by which they will be saved while all others are destroyed and damned eternally. Rapture theology reached its height in popularity with Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which was published in 1970, and which the New York Times called the best selling non-fiction book of the decade. A few decades later came the “Left Behind” series, sixteen novels authored by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye that began appearing in 1995. So far, sixty million copies of the Left Behind books have been sold worldwide. The thesis of these books is that just before the Second Coming of Christ all genuine Christian believers in Jesus will be raptured: they will go straight to heaven into God’s presence without first passing through death, like the two gentlemen who came to my seminar. Those who don’t believe in Jesus will be “left behind” on earth to suffer and perish at Armageddon. They made a movie based on these books: a kind of Christian “Home Alone” film. In the end, what’s most disturbing about rapture theology and what’s missing is any vision of spiritual community, any vision of shared humanity in which all God's children put their hopes in a peaceful and just coexistence. And, this is the point that so many miss about biblical apocalyptic expressions of the eschaton: they are not predictions of the destruction of this world but allegorical cries of hope for release from tyranny in this world and the restoration of peace and justice in the here and now. The Book of Revelation was written by a man named John, almost certainly not the author of the Gospel, but another John who was sent into exile on the Aegean island of Patmos during the persecutions of the Roman Emperor Domitian at the end of the first century A.D. John’s book is an allegorical cry, not for the eschaton, but for release from the rule of Rome and restoration of the rule of God in what the Book of Revelation calls a “new Jerusalem (3:12 and 21:2).” Likewise, the apocalyptic Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible stands as a Jewish protest against the extreme Hellenism of the Greek ruler Antiochus IV, who in 167 BCE profaned the temple in Jerusalem by setting up an altar to Zeus there and sacrificing a pig on it. This event is referred to in Daniel 11:31 as “the abomination that makes desolate,” a phrase repeated by Jesus in his prediction of the destruction of the temple in Mark 13:14 and Matthew 24:15. Jesus thought the temple priesthood had been taken over by men whose principal loyalty was to Rome, not to God. And finally, Paul’s aim in his First Letter to the Thessalonians was to encourage his little church there to persevere in the face of persecution from far more numerous rival religious groups. But, let’s return to our guiding question: is rapture the right way to be thinking about leaving this world? As bad as things are in our world, you and I have not lived as members of a persecuted religious minority. The holy spirit speaks to us in different voices than it did in the first centuries of Christianity. I take that to mean that we should not read some parts of the Bible so literally. The rabbinical approach to the Jewish Torah has long been as follows: read a portion every day, pray about what you read, then behave according to the principle Jews call in Hebrew, chesed: doing “acts of loving kindness.” That’s very different from reading scripture with your hands tied behind your back. All of us want a future. Will it be an inclusive or an exclusive future? Will it be a future where some are damned and “left behind?” Does that vision make any sense to people who say they believe that God is love? Will it be a “meeting in the air,” as the old gospel tune has it, or a meeting here on the ground of God's creation, the good earth, where we can together - all of us - work to establish a healthy, sustainable present and future for all? It’s a choice between fatalism and hope. Which will we choose? Never give up on this beautiful world God created for you and me. Repent of the harm we do to it daily and to one another. Take a lesson from Harvey Cox. Look to the here and now for your rapture. Look for it in a gorgeous sunset. Look for it in beautiful music. Look for it in the faces of your friends and loved ones. Don’t let people like Tim LaHaye and those who are building nuclear weapons in Texas have the final say on rapture. Amen.  By The Rev. Ted Thornton
The story of the Nicene Creed begins with what happened nearly three hundred years after Jesus’ crucifixion when secular and religious divisions brought the Roman Empire nearly to a breaking point. It’s a vast and contentious topic. So, I’m going to limit us to two guiding questions: What secular and theological forces were behind the formation of the Nicene Creed, and, what place should the Creed have for us in our spiritual and worship life today? Let’s begin by looking at something familiar: the Whiteman Windows behind the altar. Look behind the altar at the window just to the left of the cross at the top of the wooden arch. Can you see the ship and cross in the glass? And, can you see the Greek word in white glass just above the ship and cross? If you can’t see it, get a copy of the wonderful pamphlet describing those windows from our church website or the office. That Greek word oikoumene (Greek: οἰκουμένη) in the window is the single most important word in the New Testament for us Christians apart from the sayings of Jesus, and it’s the concept of oikoumene that guided the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Yes, by the way, oikoumene gives us our word ecumenical (also by the way our word economy: economics as an ecumenical activity? Hmm! Think about that. The root word is oikos, which translates literally as “household,” but in a wider, more global sense, the household that makes up the inhabited world. Forms of the word oikos appear 106 times in the Greek New Testament. Our New Testament writers were acutely aware how important the word is to the religious lives of Christians. The pamphlet about the Whiteman Windows will tell you that oikoumene translates as “one of many.” It’s more complicated than that. The term oikoumene is a combination of that Greek word oikos meaning “household” and another Greek word “mene” meaning “management.” Household management: this is the sense Aristotle used the word, his vision of our world as a coherent, well-managed household. Now, there is no escaping the fact that whenever the need to manage something arises, some degree of coercion usually isn’t far behind. Unity at the expense of diversity has always been trouble, and diversity at the expense of unity spells division, and division is never good. This means there will always be tension between the forces of unity and diversity. Attempts to resolve the tension have never worked in history: for starters think of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot The pursuit of perfection in human nature has always led to gargantuan amounts of bloodshed. For our purposes, the tension between unity and diversity was perhaps never so manifest as in the life of Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Alexander the Great. Alexander and his Greek and Roman successors including the Emperor Constantine used the term oikoumene to describe a vision of a global economic, communal, cultural, and political household, a universal household where unity embraced diversity and never descended into division. That was the vision. The reality was something different, as we shall see. We call Alexander’s brand of oikoumene “Hellenism,” because its cultural roots are in Greek culture, and “Hellas” is the ancient Greek word for Greece. Alexander dreamed of a unified world in which all people would share in the mutual pursuit of survival and happiness by cooperating fully with one another just as members of a single familial household ideally would. A glance at a map of the world after Alexander and his army rolled through shows the extent to which he made this dream come true. You’ll notice how many cities and regions were renamed with Greek names. Alexander wanted the world to be quite literally one big household, a vast melting pot of peoples and races all under the umbrella of Greek Hellenistic culture. To this end, he promoted racial mixing by encouraging his soldiers to intermarry with local women in conquered regions after which he gave them land upon which to build their homes. The Greek philosopher and biographer Plutarch (46-120 CE), in his treatise, "On the Fortunes of Alexander,” summed up Alexander's dream of a unified family of peoples with these words: “Brought together into one body . . . mixing all together in one loving cup.” The quest for a common “managed household” was further advanced through the institution of a universal coinage, universal use of the Greek language, compatible trade practices, and religion by importing the Greek gods into foreign cities everywhere, including Jerusalem, to the great dismay of some Jews, but not as many Jews as you might think. Much of Jerusalem was rebuilt in the Hellenistic style, and one of its most enthusiastic builders was the Jewish King, Herod the Great. Hellenistic cities were built with underground water delivery and sewage removal ducts that rendered these cities cleaner, healthier, more sanitary places to live than many others for the next two thousand years. Thanks to archaeology, today you can visit sections of these water and sewage systems that ran beneath the streets of Hellenistic Jerusalem. The famous Roman roads and postal service really did make material life better (the dark 1979 comedy movie, “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” gets it right about this), and the inescapable fact is that most folks were willing to accept the coercion it took to maintain these standards. Followers of Jesus and other rebellious Jewish rabbis were the exception. After Jesus, there were many other exceptions to the rule, hence many more gospels than the four that made the final team, and many more writings laying claim to be Christian. Thanks to the influence of Alexander, what we call the “Old Testament” or “Hebrew Bible” was translated into Greek (guess where), not in Jerusalem, but in the newly constructed city of Alexandria, built on the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Rhacotis and renamed in honor of its conqueror. It was completed in the second century BCE and bears the title “Septuagint,” Greek for “Seventy,” so named because it was thought around seventy scholars were involved in the project. For a long time, most people living under Greco-Roman rule thanked the global dream of Alexander the Great for that. And, after Alexander died and the oikoumene began to break apart it was the Romans who put it back together again stronger than ever (yes, the Romans were Hellenists, too, through and through1). In addition to the word oikoumene, the Romans used a Latin phrase very familiar to those of us who still carry dollar bills around: e pluribus unum, “out of many one.” The great Roman statesman Cicero put it this way, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.” So, why spend so much time discussing this strange Greek word oikoumene in our window behind me? Because outside the New Testament, it’s that very secular Greek word that is perhaps most responsible for creating the spirit governing the creation of the Nicene Creed and for defining ourselves as Christians: people of God who strive to live in loving communion with one another under one roof in a unified “household” governed by faith. The chink in the armor of the oikoumene was the possibility that force would be used to maintain it. Usually, it took relatively soft power to keep order. When that didn’t work, the iron fist came down. The philosophical vision of “household management” that Aristotle passed down to his student Alexander ensured that the quest for common creeds quickly became exclusionary in Christian history. The fact is, there have always been multiple creeds in Christianity. Interestingly, the Greek word that gives us our word “heresy,” originally meant “choice,” not something to be condemned. Early Christians had many choices until “management” stepped in under Constantine. Okay, so Why did Constantine call the bishops to Nicea in the first place? Alexander’s dream of a singular world oikoumene didn’t last long. No sooner had he died of fever in Iraq while marching his army back home to Macedon than his generals fell to squabbling with each other and the dominion began to fall apart. The Romans, who inherited the remains of Alexander’s empire, tried hard to keep it together, but for a while fared even worse. There was indeed a period of a hundred years of genuine peace and order under Caesar Augustus, but otherwise it was chronic instability nearly everywhere. For the next 132 years after Marcus Aurelius (ruled 121-180) until the accession of Constantine, forty emperors were either assassinated or met some other violent death, a few of them through torture. One sad joke making the rounds in those times ran that a gladiator stood a better chance of surviving his contest in the Colosseum than did an emperor of escaping assassination. In addition, the imperial bureaucracy was riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Then there were the so-called “barbarian invasions”: mainly Germans from the north and Persians from the East. These movements of people into the empire, which was roughly the size of the continental United States, put pressure on increasingly scarce resources. Described in histories as “invasions,” for the most part they resembled the recent flood of illegal immigrants across our southern border states, people seeking a better life. As if all this weren’t bad enough, the empire had recently come through a pandemic. We aren’t sure what virus or bacterium caused it but that pandemic wiped out ten percent of the population of the empire, and at its height in Rome itself it was killing 5,000 people a day. Under such conditions of extreme social stress, it became so difficult to maintain civil order that it was decided to divide the empire into four quadrants. This tetrarchy (or rule of four emperors) was established by the Emperor Diocletian in 293. Constantine became emperor in the year 306 (d. 337) and thereby inherited this mess. He immediately set out to revitalize the oikoumene and restore unity. He abolished the tetrarchy in favor of his own singular rule; and in the year 313, he propagated what was known as the Edict of Milan, proclaiming our religion as officially recognized and protected. The problem was that our religion by that time had become riven with sectarianism. This was the immediate reason Constantine in the year 325 convened an ecclesiastical council, what came to be called the First Ecumenical Council (there’s our word oikoumene again!) in the ancient city of Nicea where the Turkish city of Iznik is located today. All that was needed was a catalyst to get the ball rolling toward the Nicene Creed, and that catalyst was a theological dispute we know as the “Arian Controversy.” Arianism was a theological doctrine, attributed to a Christian Priest from Libya named Arius. He held that Christ, whom Christians proclaimed as the "Son of God," was not actually divine, but physically created and therefore changeable, not eternal. In short, Christ was mortal. And so, to dispel Arianism, the council drew up a "creed" that described the oneness of God the Father and the Son using the Greek word homoousion ("one substance" - GK, ὁμοούσιον). The scriptural reference taken to support this definition was John 10 verse 30, “I and the Father are one.” Arianism was duly rejected. The hope was that this change would lead to religious unity in the Church and and with it civil and social unity. Unhappily, that didn’t happen. Ambiguities in the homoousion ("one substance") formula sparked fresh arguments and created the need for follow up councils. A Second Ecumenical Council in 381 was held in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and that is when most of the final wording we use was put in place. But, the theological tinkering and wordsmithing continued in the Third Ecumenical Council which was held in the city of Ephesus in 431. This council featured wrangling over the status of Christ’s mother Mary. Then came in 451 the Fourth Ecumenical Council, this one at Chalcedon in the modern city of Kadıköy (Kadikoy), near Istanbul. At Chalcedon, Christ was affirmed to be one person with two full and complete natures one human the other divine. However, this formula made matters even worse because Christians to the east of Rome couldn’t tolerate the dual nature creed. Over the following centuries, other differences arose leading to the formal break in 1054 that created the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox churches in the East. Theological differences aside, the real problem was regionalism: what Christians living to the east really resented was a pope in Rome telling them what they should do and not do and what they should believe. Most Eastern Christians, then, with some exceptions, affirmed that Christ had one nature only and this nature was divine, not human. Hence, they came to be called Monophysites (Greek for "one nature"). Today, the chief examples of Monophysite Christianity are the Syrian, Armenian, and Coptic (Egyptian) Churches. So went the process we call “the Christological controversies,” which can be summed up as arguments about the nature of Jesus Christ: “How human was he, and how divine?” It may be hard for some of us to understand what caused people at the time to get so riled up over this question until we consider how the forces of regionalism in our country, for example, are pitting the urbanized coastal regions against the more rural “heartland,” as it’s called; and how political instability, immigration, and a vicious recent pandemic have eroded our own national sense of unity and mutual trust today. What’s less forgivable about all this is how the regional power struggles in Constantine’s realm corrupted perhaps the most orthodox expression of our Christian faith, a failure to accept the relationship of God, Christ, and Spirit (our holy Trinity) for what it is: a mystery, a holy mystery. It’s a failure stemming from the hubristic (prideful) sin of thinking it possible that we could ever reduce the greatest mystery of life, the nature of divine reality, to rational concepts like “substance” and “nature.” God and Christ remain a mystery, a holy mystery, in theological parlance, ineffable, that is to say, indescribable, inexpressible, undefinable. We experience this mystery symbolically and spiritually, not rationally. It can only happen when we perform what the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith.” Saying the Nicene Creed meaningfully takes a leap of faith. The Creed - any creed - functions as a holy reminder that as members of God’s creation we are part of something much bigger than ourselves, something that continues to call us into ever widening circles of loving connectedness in this “household” of ours: connectedness with God and with God’s creation. Creeds remind us that indeed there is more to life and more to reality than what meets the eye. Having seen how the Creed came to be and how it functions, let’s turn our attention now to that second guiding question: How should we align ourselves with the use of the Creed in our worship today? I don’t think there is a single right creed or any single right way to say it. I suspect I share this view with at least some of you. When it comes to the Nicene Creed or any other affirmation of faith, I don’t think a coercive common response is right. Personally, I do strive to listen carefully to every word of the Nicene Creed as I recite it because for me it’s a way I can connect with other people of faith past and present stretching back two millennia. That approach may not work for you. Sometimes as we recite the Creed my attention strays. When that happens, the sound of other voices - your voices surrounding me - calls me back and reminds me that we’re engaged in a communal act that draws us together and connects us with the voices of all the Christians who’ve come before us. In these moments, we’re no longer individuals but a community of believers, the body of Christ, one ecumenical “household.” We are at least for that moment a bona fide oikoumene. One of the obstacles preventing the Creed from occupying a more central place in our spiritual lives is our radical American individualism, which we inherited from the European Enlightenment by way of thinkers like John Locke and David Hume. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in his two volume Democracy in America written after his visit here in the 1830s was anxious even back then about our excessive individualism. And, in his recent (2022) book,2 Bill McKibben chides us for what he calls our “hyper individualism.” I think excessive individualism is chiefly responsible for the difficulty some of us have reciting the creed and the difficulty a larger number of Americans have belonging to organized religion in general, not to mention the political madness that is presently tearing us apart. We Americans frequently forget that we are a “household” here on what Native Americans used to call “Turtle Island.” For this reason, the best starting point isto remember that when we recite the Creed, we begin by saying, “We believe.” It's that sense of “we-ness,” the first person plural denoting connection and oneness with others, that permeates the whole recitation. Reciting the Creed reminds us of the promise we made or was made on our behalf at our baptisms: the promise that God is at the very heart of every breath we take and everything we do here in this “household” of ours. On the subject of whether the holy mysteries of our faith should be sung or recited, I’m with the late Yale Professor of Medieval History, Jaroslav Pelikan, who argued that the Creed should be sung, as we do here in this church on high holy days, not merely recited. This reminds me of the famous formula attributed to Saint Augustine, Qui cantat, bis orat: “Whoever sings prays twice.” In the final analysis, the Nicene Creed is one way, among many, we express our identity as a “household,” an oikoumene. We also call ourselves “the Body of Christ,” but I confess I like “household,” too, maybe even more. The “management” part of oikoumene and the implied threat of coercion I can do without. But, the Nicene Creed need not be the only way to affirm our faith in public worship. As I said at the outset, I don’t think we will ever resolve the tension between unity and diversity in human behavior and I despair about the presence of coercion in human relations. I do think we should celebrate the alternate creeds we recite here at Saints James and Andrew (such as the wonderful South Indian Profession of Faith we recited here in place of the Nicene Creed last week). We have many possible ways to affirm and articulate our faith. Affirming our faith in different words is good for our spiritual selves just as a varied diet of healthy food is good for our bodily selves. The Nicene Creed was an imperfect, over-rationalized attempt to express what means most to us and a response to civil power struggles and disorder. The tumultuous history out of which it emerged, including the many attempts to refine it, stands in stark contrast to its place in the hearts of many of us today and to the millions of Christian hearts that have adored it these past two thousand years. Is it time to set it aside? Constantine’s admittedly coercive attempt to impose unity has been labeled a “heresy” by his severest critics, and they don’t mean heresy in the old sense as a “choice.” Similar coercive attempts to impose unity where regionalism threatens to undo it have occurred in other religions. Unhappily, households of all kinds can slip into intolerance, authoritarianism, and repression. The dynamics of coercion and conquest remain an omnipresent threat, never far from the surface in every relationship, from family households to entire civilizations. If our guiding principle is that we love one another, as Jesus put it in his new commandment to us in John 13:34, then we must remember that Jesus took love as something we do, not something we believe: we must walk the walk, not just talk it. So, think of creeds as things that remind us what we should do in our lives, not just things that bounce around in our heads. When we say in a moment, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,” tell yourselves that those words translate into our commitment to act out that new commandment - to love one another - as Jesus delivered it to us in John 13:34. But. loving one another should never be restricted to any particular set of words. For this reason, I think it's spiritually healthy to prayerfully consider other ways of expressing what theologian Paul Tillich used to call the “ultimate concern” at the center of our lives. In the meantime, I hope we will continue to grant the Creed a place in our liturgical life and at the same time remain open to exploring alternatives as the Holy Spirit leads us. God has revealed Godself in many different ways beginning with how we perceive God throughout the Bible. It follows that we be drawn to a variety of ways to express how we experience divine reality. Amen. 1 Rome was perhaps the least original civilization in history. The Romans borrowed freely from the Greeks. Even the Greek gods had their temples in Rome: Zeus was renamed Jupiter, Aphrodite was renamed Venus, and so on. 2 The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, 2022, 118ff. |
Mission
We believe God is calling us to cultivate a community of love, joy, hope, and healing. Jesus is our model for a life of faith, compassion, hospitality, and service. We strive to be affirming and accessible, welcoming and inclusive; we seek to promote reconciliation, exercise responsible stewardship, and embrace ancient traditions for modern lives.
Summer Office HoursTuesday 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Thursday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Closed holidays Our gardens and grounds are open from dawn to dusk for the community to pray, rest, be. Please help us take care of this sacred space by following the outdoor ethic & principle of “leave no trace.” |
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Worship Times10 a.m. In-Person Worship & Livestreamed
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