Homily for 22d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
22d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Sept. 1, 2024
Creed
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

“I believe in one God” (Nicene Creed).

Every Sunday and holy day we proclaim our Christian faith in the statement we call the Creed.  The form we use most of the time is called the Nicene Creed because it was formulated at the 1st Ecumenical Council, which met in the city of Nicea in 325.  Next year the Church will be celebrating its 1,700th anniversary.

Icon depicting the Emperor Constantine and the bishops of the First Council of Nicaea (325)
 holding the Niceno–Constantinopolitan Creed of (as refined in 381)

The bishops who met at Nicea thought it was important to lay out our faith in plain language, but in a little more detail than in the much older Apostles’ Creed.

The Creed begins with a very personal statement, which it repeats 3 more times:  “I believe.”  Most of you will remember that for 40 years (1970-2010) our Roman Missal used the plural form, “We believe.”  That was an attempt to highlight what the whole Church believes.  This common, shared faith is emphasized at the sacrament of Baptism after the one to be baptized, or an infant’s parents, have professed the Creed.  The priest or deacon concludes that part of the rite by stating, “This is our faith.  This is the faith of the Church.  We are proud to profess it, in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

But the original form of the Creed in both Greek and Latin is in the singular, not the plural.  Each Christian must take personal ownership of the faith.  What everyone else believes isn’t sufficient for me as an individual called to a personal relationship with God.  It’s important, it’s necessary, that I claim this common faith and make it mine.

What do I believe?  In contrast to the beliefs of many ancient peoples, and some still today, I believe in one God, not a whole array of gods, such as the gods the Hebrews contended with in the Old Testament or the gods of mythology like Zeus, Athena, or Odin.  It also means that we worship God alone—and not any part of his creation, like the sun, the stars, the trees, or the earth; nor fame, fortune, power, or pleasure; nor a human being like the Roman Emperor or some modern-day tyrant.  God alone is Lord, to be adored and served.  That’s why we come to church on Sundays:  to worship the one God thru his Son Jesus Christ.  That's why early Christian martyrs were put to death--and it still happens.

The Creed is laid out in trinitarian form:  our belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  A 4th “I believe” claims the works of the Holy Spirit:  the Church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life.  The Holy Trinity is what distinguishes our belief “in one God” from the faith of Jews and Muslims.  They also believe in one God, but a “unitary” God, not a Trinity.  How God is one, but 3 Persons at the same time, is the greatest mystery of our faith.  And it was the immediate cause of the Council of Nicea in 325, because many Christians were denying that Jesus Christ is God.

We acknowledge immediately that this one God is “the Father almighty.”  He is the Father of Jesus Christ, as Jesus claimed many times in the Gospels.  But because of our relationship with Jesus, he’s also our Father.  It must be said that “Father” is a metaphor; it’s symbolic language.  God doesn’t have a gender.  In view of his “fatherhood,” we call him he or him because that’s what our limited language allows us to do, and because Jesus spoke that way.  St. Paul also noted that all fatherhood or paternity derives from God the Father (Eph 3:15).  Most of our translations read that “every family in heaven and on earth” takes its name from the Father; but Paul’s Greek (and its Latin equivalent) speak of Pater (Father) and patria or paternitas (fatherhood).

And that’s true not because of any masculine action on God’s part but because of his generative action, the action of creation.  God is the “maker of heaven and earth.”  We can say, metaphorically, that he fathered everything that’s created.  No matter how vast or how old the universe is, it had a beginning.  God begot it.  Atheists may claim that the universe is eternal; it created itself.  That makes as much sense as to say that your sons and daughters created themselves; you had nothing to do with it.  It’s worth observing that 2 of the greatest scientists of the universe—Nicholas Copernicus, who proposed in the 16th century that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, and Georges Lemaitre, who died in 1966 and proposed the Big Bang theory of  the origin of the universe, were both Catholic priests.  People of faith can discover the great truths of how the universe may have begun and how it functions.

Next, the Creed states that this one God is the “maker … of all things visible and invisible.”  The version we used for 40 years spoke of things “seen and unseen.”  One commentator on the change of wording to “visible and invisible” quipped that from where we live we can’t see the Great Wall of China; it’s unseen.  But that’s not what our faith’s talking about.  Obviously, we understand what the visible universe is, even if the seeming infinity of the Milky Way and worlds beyond it are way beyond what most of us can grasp.

But what’s the “invisible” creation?  It doesn’t mean unicorns or the Loch Ness monster!  It means angels—saintly ones like my patron St. Michael, and fallen ones, Satan and his wicked gang.  God created all of them.  The fallen angels are his creatures too.  They’re not the work of some evil God or half-god, as some people have believed at various times.  At the same time, God didn’t create evil.  That’s the work of Satan and his cronies, the work of men and women who surrender themselves to sin, and of an earth that has followed our human initiative in rebelling against the good order that God created.  God doesn’t create earthquakes or plagues; those are in some mysterious way we can’t grasp the fruit of the disorder that sinful human beings have introduced into what God created.

“This is our faith.  This is the faith of the Church.  We are proud to profess it, in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  This is my faith and your faith.  We profess and make it our own.