This sermon was preached on the 15th of June 2025, Trinity Sunday, in the Anglican Parish of Kalamunda-Lesmurdie.
Texts:
Why do we speak the creed together, each and every Sunday? Why do we lend our voices to it, lend our bodies to it, give it our voice?
The language of the creed is dense. It’s technical, theological. It speaks in response to debates among Christians that raged many centuries ago. And so some people argue that it is no longer relevant.
But, speaking today, this Trinity Sunday, on this year when we mark the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the Nicene Creed, I say to you that the creed is absolutely vital to the church. It is essential.
The church has been called into being by Jesus Christ to be a living proclamation, an icon of God, Holy and Triune. And that is a calling precious and at times fragile. There have been many moments in history when orthodoxy – that is, right belief – has been very much on the nose. Some heresies can be very appealing indeed.
Take the traditors. During the last major Roman persecution of the Church, at the threat of death for themselves or their families they turned over the sacred scriptures, they turned over sacred vessels… they even turned over the names of their fellow Christians.
Their name means ‘those who handed over’: we know it in English as ‘traitor.’ For a time, the dominant view in the church was that sacraments presided over by traitor clergy were invalid. And that was heresy, a heresy given the name Donatism. It was heresy because it trampled upon the reality that we are all of us sinners. We all need God’s forgiveness, we all need to be reconciled to God by grace; and it is by that grace that orthodoxy was upheld.
We all know that we’re sinners. If we ‘re honest with ourselves, if we reflect, if we pray, then we know our sin, at least in part. At the heart of orthodoxy is the right understanding of God and our relationship with God. And so, we intuitively know that the Donatists were wrong.
And so let us return to the Holy Trinity. It’s impossible to fully comprehend the Trinity, to fully describe the nature and being of God. God is so much bigger, so much greater, than we are. And so how are we to judge orthodoxy, how are we to know what is right belief?
Well, firstly, we are not alone in this task. We have the Holy Scriptures. And further, today Jesus teaches us: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”
God is not distant: the third person of God, the Spirit, guides us, nurtures us, teaches us. As did the second person, Jesus Christ, who came among us to do the same.
Jesus instituted the Church to be a living proclamation of God, a living proclamation of the Trinity. It is our calling, sinners though we be, flawed as we are, to make the nature of God real and tangible: to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, making the Triune God known to the world.
At Nicaea, seventeen hundred years, ago, the church upheld the equality of the three persons of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And to do that they even had to invent new words. The word that is translated begotten, which we speak when we affirm that Jesus was ‘begotten, not made’, was coined by theologians.
Christians understand that, in eternity, beyond time, beyond creation, the Son and the Spirit find their source in the Father – but this does not mean that there was a time when the Son, or the Spirit, were not. And it does not mean that the Son, or the Spirit, are lesser than, or subordinate to, the Father.
Is everybody still awake? After all that dense theology, I thought I’d better check in. Let me show you how vital this is.
The church is an Icon of the Trinity. And so the relationships between the persons of the Trinity tell us the shape that all relationships between human beings should take. If there is hierarchy within God, then those with power can impose heirarchy, and claim that it is ordained by God.
And this has happened. Time after time, the heresy of subordination, of understanding there to be hierarchy within God, has played out in horror.
It played out in horror when peoples of Africa were enslaved, commodified, their personhood denied. It played out in horror when those people were taught, by some of the church, that they were inherently inferior to Europeans. It played out in horror when those slaves, those people infinitely precious in God’s sight, were abused, denigrated, and killed.
And yet, through God’s grace, by the power of the Spirit, orthodoxy prevailed.
And so came glory.
A glory that played out in the Evangelical Revival of eighteenth century England. An unlikely, grassroots movement of humble Christians, people of our church, who, upholding the personhood of all, understanding the egalitarian nature of God, lived out their discipleship, and acted.
They acted by abstaining from sugar, for the first time widely available, because they saw it as representing the blood upon the backs of the slaves in the West Indies, who laboured in the sugar cane fields, dying in their thousands.
They acted by gaining political power, putting the Royal Navy out to sea with a great task, a task of God, to end the scourge of the transatlantic slave trade.
Jesus teaches us that we shall know orthodoxy, we shall know truth, by its fruits, by its proclamation of God. Jesus warns against false prophets, against false belief, against false proclamation. I believe Jesus did this because heresies have a way of emerging time and time again.
The heresy of subordination within God was taught by the Dutch church in South Africa as a justification for apartheid. Once more this was bravely spoken against by Anglicans.
Understandings of subordination have even emerged within our Church, the Anglican Church of Australia. The Doctrine Commission of the Diocese of Sydney holds that the Son is eternally subordinate in function and authority to the Father. And on that basis, some in that that Diocese, and those influenced by it, teach that women are rightly subordinate to men.
“You shall know them by their fruits.”
The unintentional fruit of the teaching that husbands are set above wives, that men are inherently set above women, is the twin scourges of domestic violence and gender based discrimination.
In his recent book, Peter Carnley, the former Archbishop of Perth and former Primate of our church, confesses that for too long speaking out against this has been left to brave voices within the evangelical wing of the Australian church – notably, Kevin Giles, a priest and a theologian.
Archbishop Peter is right: this isn’t a matter just for deacons and bishops and priests to speak about in private. This matters for us all.
Orthodoxy must be upheld and proclaimed, even and especially when it requires difficult conversations between those involved. If the church is to follow its calling and be a living proclamation of God, it must continually hold itself to account – as it did at Nicaea.
And so let us return to the great and joyous task that Jesus entrusts to us.
By God’s Grace, proclaim God, Holy and Triune, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And so, remember. Remember that each person is equally precious in God’s sight. Set yourself above no other person, or class of persons. Hold yourself to account.
Dare to lift up those who others seek to cast down, who others wrongly see as lesser than. Let the outworking of your life be love of neighbour and love of God, and so by God’s Grace, the Kingdom shall be built.