On Councils, Economy, and the Trinity

[Sermon delivered on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, Sunday, June 15, 2025, at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.

This very day one thousand seven hundred years ago every bishop who could was present in a small town in Bithynia called Nicaea at the emperor’s expense. At this time of the year the weather would have been warm, sunny, with pleasant breezes coming off the lake. It would have been a pleasant summer getaway, but this was no sabbatical or retreat or all-inclusive group vacation. This was as yet the greatest Synod of Holy Mother Church, and the decisions coming out of this Council at the end of July that year still reverberate throughout the world today. While the Council established rules such as canonical residency requirements for clergy conducting services, encouraging the faithful not to kneel in church on Sundays or during the Fifty Days of Easter, or the establishment of a common date for Easter, the greatest decision to rise from Nicaea concerned the relation of Jesus Christ to God the Father Almighty.

Little of the proceedings of the Council survive to this day aside from the decisions themselves. We do know that emotions ran high; most of the bishops there had suffered one sort of trauma or another during the previous administration, and the subject at hand was central to the very faith that sustained them through the dark months and years of uncertainty, fear, injustice, imprisonment, torture, and the death of close friends. Their experience of God which sustained them in those dark years fueled the debates and the positions taken. The wonder should not be that the Bishop of Myra laid Arius flat on the council floor in a smackdown echoing throughout the ages but that it happened only once (these were not Anglicans, after all). In the end, however, the decision arising from the Council was the one that made most sense in the light of the witness of Scripture, the experience of those present, the witness of generations before, and the economy of Salvation, that Jesus Christ was of the same being as God the Father.

With this in mind I direct you back to the Gospel selection we just heard today:

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth;

for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears,

and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

All that the Father has is mine.

For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.[1]

How could Jesus of Nazareth claim that what the Father had was His, how could the Spirit know that what He said was from the Father, how could all three operate so seamlessly as one unless they indeed were one, ‘ομοοúσιος, one single being yet with distinction of persons with discrete agency, each person fully within the other in a perfect unity that only shared being could accomplish. Only then could the Son possess everything belonging to the Father, only then could the Spirit know that the Son spoke in perfect accord with the Father, only then could the Son send out the Spirit on behalf of the Father, and it is only full, complete, selfless love that can maintain such a perfect unity, the Son eternally begotten from the Father, the Spirit eternally proceeding from the Father, both dwelling in the Father and each other in the greatest love that was, and is, and is to come.

Yet this is not a transcendent unity as remote from us as the farthest edges of the cosmos. How does something so beyond us and our comprehension become immanent, of importance to us as intimately as our own heartbeat? Yet it does, for it is the very essence of our salvation. How could the sacrifice of Our Lord upon the Cross cleanse all humanity of its sins if Jesus were simply human like the rest of us, under the same condition of death and corruption? How could His rising from the Dead mean anything to anyone aside from Himself if it were simply God restoring life to yet another creature? It is the shared being of the Father, of the Son, of the Holy Spirit that serves as salvation’s bedrock and the Council recognized this. If Jesus was not God, if God did not become us, then the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and the Ascension have no meaning for anyone except for Jesus Christ Himself. There would be no economy of salvation for it would have been salvation for Our Lord only, a personal deliverance from a personal suffering with no universal consequence whatsoever for humanity as a whole.

The First Ecumenical Council, however, did not address the whole matter: its pressing business was the assertion of the Divinity of the Son. Councils arise to address specific questions, and it took six other councils to answer other key questions about the Persons of the Holy Trinity to affirm the bedrock of the economy of salvation. The Second Council pronounced the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, and the Spirit’s equality with the Father and the Son. The Third Council affirmed that Jesus was of both fully God and fully Human from conception, that God became truly incarnate and dwelt among us and did not simply possess Jesus’ body. The Fourth and Fifth Councils determined that each of those natures were full and complete, allowing the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension to be both a fully Divine and fully Human activity. The Sixth Council demonstrated that because He had both natures in full Our Lord also possessed both the Divine will and a Human will, the latter of which He perfectly submitted and aligned to the former. Finally, the Seventh Council in the defense of icons showed them to be permissible and even desirable because God became Incarnate in Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Invisible now visible, the Uncontainable now contained in His own body. Each Council affirmed a truth central to our salvation, a truth that brings us hope, that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly Human, uniting Human nature and will to Divine nature and will, redeeming us and restoring us to fellowship and peace with God, all bound together by the power of the Holy Spirit in the Sacraments and in our daily lives.

Apart from the deliberations of the Councils, however, it is perhaps the Gospel of John, from which we read today, that the work of the Holy Trinity is best manifested in all of Scripture. This Gospel tells us about the Word, that the Word was from the very beginning with God, and that the Word indeed was God, that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, that the Word suffered for us, died for us, and rose again for us, that the Word sends us living water, the flow of the Holy Spirit, this Word known to us by the name of Jesus of Nazareth. This Gospel is full of His teachings, showing us the mind and heart of God, something for which He is uniquely qualified because He is in the Father, the Father is in Him, and they share in the same Spirit. All this is possible because these Persons are ‘ομοοúσιος, one single being, dwelling within each other in a selfless love so perfect that it is beyond attribute, but is the core of that being. For weeks now we have heard from this Gospel that God is Love, that we are to abide in His Love, and that we are to obey His commandments by loving one another. We heard that while Jesus prepares our place with the Father, the Spirit prepares the Father’s place within us, unifying us mystically with Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ though our new life taken on in Baptism, and sustained by His Body and Blood, given power by Word and Holy Spirit to become children of God.[2]

Fellow children of God, while we profess the mystery of the Holy Trinity, it is a mystery best professed in living the mystery than understanding the mystery. St. Paul wrote that “…we now see in a mirror dimly,”[3] meaning that full understanding of the mystery will not come in this lifetime, but in the next, when “…we will see face to face.”[4] Now is the time to live in faith, to trust the work of the Holy Trinity, to do the will of the Holy Trinity, to experience the Holy Trinity as Our Saviour has been teaching us. In these dark, tumultuous, and frankly very evil times it is more important now than ever to bear witness to these things, to demonstrate that ours is a living faith, that the Kingdom of God is not about power or self-promotion but about selfless love and making a place for the Persons of the Trinity in us and us dwelling in the being of God. The lesson of the Trinity, the message affirmed by the bishops at Nicaea and all the other Councils, is the affirmation of and participation in Life, the Holy Mystery of the Trinity, by loving each other, friends and enemies, in perfect truth as each Person of God loves the other and loves us is the perfection of that same Truth. Anything else is of the Devil, and of Death.

Fellow children of God, in every generation we are offered the choice between Life and Death. Let us make every effort to choose Life, the Life won for us upon the Cross by Jesus, Perfect God and Perfect Man, the Life given by the Spirit, the Life that is the Father’s pleasure to give to us.

The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’

And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’

And let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.[5]

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, , Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Jn 16.13-15

[2] Jn. 1.12-13

[3] 1 Cor. 13.12

[4] Ibid.

[5] Rev. 22.17