Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am service
“He proclaimed Jesus, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’”
We are in the presence of wonderful mysteries, the mysteries of God and man. The great creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith are wonderfully set before us in the Athanasian Creed, one of the three catholic creeds of the universal church, but one which, I fear, is little known, and, I am afraid, little used. Tucked away in the back of the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, it must appear to some of you as a very odd thing, a curiosity, something to peruse while suffering through an insufferable sermon, perhaps!
Yet, there was a time in our Anglican history when the Athanasian Creed was appointed to be used thirteen times a year, once a month and on Trinity Sunday. And I can think of at least one literary work which refers to the Athanasian Creed, interestingly being used at Mattins on Christmas morning, an intriguing concept; Charles Williams’ novel, Greater Trumps. In that novel, the Athanasian Creed is sung to an antiphonal setting which emphasizes precisely the counterpoint of contrasting and yet complementary ideas about God as ‘this’ and ‘not this’, the back-and-forth of negative and positive theology, and about the union of God and man in Jesus Christ. In the novel, the Creed of St. Athanasius, so-called, signals the dynamic of love, human and divine. The phrase “not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, / but by taking of Manhood into God” was one of Charles Williams’ favourite passages.
The three Creeds of catholic Christianity are the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Three Creeds and yet really one, a point made very clearly by one of the outstanding divines of the 17th Century, Archbishop John Bramhall, whose sensibility about the interplay of Scripture and Creed and about the unity of the Creeds contribute to his wonderful epithet, Athanasius Hibernicus, the Athanasius of Ireland. Athanasius is the father of orthodoxy whose steadfast witness to the essential divinity of Christ resulted in the Creed which we know as the Nicene Creed, though properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, in reference to two of the Great Ecumenical Councils from which it came to birth in the fourth century. As Bramhall observes, “The Nicene, Constantinopolitan, Ephesian, Chalcedonian and Athanasian Creeds, are but explications of the Creed of the Apostles, and are still called the Apostles’ Creed.”
