Celebrating the Nicene Creed

This script is an indication only of the content of the service and may contain mistakes, both factual and grammatical, as well as producer’s notes.

We Believe: Celebrating the Nicene Creed

Intro: Malcolm:

In this morning’s Sunday Worship, we will be celebrating, relishing, and exploring the Nicene Creed, for this year marks the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325, which first formulated the beautiful, illuminating words of this creed. I’m Malcolm Guite and leading worship with me this morning is my colleague Susanna Gunner, and other friends from the market town where I now live in Norfolk.

MUSIC: Credo from Bach’s B Minor Mass

Academy and chorus of St Martin in the Fields conducted by Neville Marriner 1977 J.S. Bach: Mass in B Minor, BWV 232 / Credo: Credo in unum Deum Bach, J.S.: Mass in B minor Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chorus/Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Sir Neville Marriner Johann Sebastian Bach Decca Music Group Ltd NLA507511113

Susanna:

'Trinity Sunday’ by Malcolm Guite from Sounding the Seasons, Canterbury Press, 2012, p 48

Malcolm:

The Nicene creed invites us into the mystery of God as Trinity, a communion of love, something I hoped to evoke in the portion of my poem on the Trinity which we have just heard.

First, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider how astonishing this anniversary is. The Nicene Creed has summarised, expressed, and opened out the heart of our shared Christian faith for seventeen centuries! Almost nothing else in our culture and heritage has lasted that long. This creed has persisted through wars and revolutions, through changes of dynasty, the birth and development of languages, the rise and fall of empires. It has even survived the tragic divisions of Christendom. For even as Churches and nations battled each other over different understandings of church order, of scripture and of sacrament, they still held this creed in common.

Opening Music Opening section of the Nicene Creed from the English Chant Mass

Corpus Christi Watershed

Richard Rice http://www.ricescores.com/

This morning, at the start of the week of prayer for Christian Unity, it is the Nicene Creed that ancient and ever new treasure of the worldwide church that will form our common ground and invite us to worship together. In a world riven ever more deeply by controversy and disagreement we can still have hope as we recite a creed that itself emerged from great, and seemingly irreconcilable differences, and, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, found a consensus that still binds us together to this day.

Most of us encounter the creed within the beautiful poem which is the Christian liturgy, and it is within at that poem, and with the poetic imagination that we will approach the ancient, ringing, resonant words of the Nicene creed in this act of worship. The creed’s affirmation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit flowers into music in this Peruvian song:

Music: The Peruvian Gloria

Peruvian Gloria (Glory To God) Fresh Claim Plankton Records GBDBS9700256

So let’s approach the creed with these questions:-

What if the Creed opens up possibilities rather than closing them down? What if it is more like a map of mysteries than a table of rigid definitions? What if it turns out to be a story we can belong to rather than then a set of formulae beyond our grasp?

Dorothy Sayers called the creed not only a story but a drama. She put it like this in the Sunday Times on Easter Day 1938:

Reader: Extract from Dorothy Sayers article

Reader:

Certainly the great artists, musicians, and poets of the past have seen the creed as drama, poem and story, and so can we. Let’s began that exploration by hearing, and perhaps praying into Bach’s beautiful setting of the creed from his B minor Mass, which feels more like a joyous, polyphonic dance, than a list of definitions.

MUSIC: Credo in unum Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem from Bach’s B Minor Mass

Academy and chorus of St Martin in the Fields conducted by Neville Marriner 1977

J.S. Bach: Mass in B Minor, BWV 232 / Credo: Credo in unum Deum

Bach, J.S.: Mass in B minor Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chorus/Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Sir Neville Marriner

Johann Sebastian Bach Decca Music Group Ltd NLA507511113

Intro to Bible Reading:

Of course, the Nicene Creed doesn’t really begin with Nicaea, it begins with Jesus. What happened at the Council of Nicaea was the culmination of three hundred years of Christian thinking and praying, responding to the astonishing Christ Event, the dramatic revelation of who God really is, that was given to the very first Christians in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was Jesus, opening his arms wide for us on the cross that showed us what God is like, Jesus who called him Father – the key word in the first part of the Nicene creed, Jesus who said ‘if you have seen me you have seen the father,’ Jesus on whom The Holy Spirit descended and Jesus who breathed that Spirit into us. The place in the Gospels where we get our first glimpse of God as the Holy Trinity celebrated in the Nicene creed, is the story of Jesus’s Baptism. Let’s listen as Matthew tells it

Bible Reading: Matthew 3:13-17

Malcolm:

Some years ago, I wrote a sonnet about this moment in the gospel, drawing out the way it reveals the encircling love between the persons of the Trinity and invites us to join the dance. And then to my great delight the Canadian Singer-Songwriter Steve Bell turned the sonnet into a song, so now, in response to the scripture we’ll hear both the sonnet and the song: (Or alternatively we could just have the song)

Susanna: The Baptism of Christ by Malcolm Guite

’The Baptism of Christ from Sounding the Seasons, Canterbury Press, 2012, p 20

MUSIC: Epiphany on the Jordan by Steve Bell

Used with permission

Reader:

This Sunday Worship is the first of a series on the Nicene creed to be broadcast across this year, so let’s turn now to the first part of the creed, hear it, and, if we are able, recite it together:

Ensemble of readers:

We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

Malcolm:

‘We Believe’! When the creed was translated into Latin, as set by Bach, it was ‘Credo’ I believe, but in the original Greek and now in our modern English translation the plural We is restored. We join together and say ‘We believe’ and that plural pronoun is important. Our faith is something we hold together, something that draws us together.

As the former Dean of Westminster Eric Abbott wrote:

Reader:

“Each clause of the Creed is a highly concentrated and highly charged “nucleus” of Christian thought and belief and experience.

At one moment it means little or nothing, and after another moment it can mean everything. Each of us needs the rest of the church to back up our individual saying of the creed. When we are weak others may be strong and vice versa.”

Susanna: Intro to Prayers and Rautavaara:

In its opening sentence, the Nicene Creed speaks of God as Creator. Creator of what? “Of heaven and earth,” it says and then, “of all that is, seen and unseen”. That tiny word ‘all’ is huge. As far as humanity goes, it means each one of us, those we love as well as those we find difficult to love, and the millions we’ll never meet, some living quite near us perhaps but forced to the unseen edges of things by circumstance of many sorts. We’re all of God’s making, all gathered together in this utterly inclusive creed.

The natural world is also included in “all that is, seen and unseen”; so are precious qualities like beauty and love and peace; and the arts in all their many forms. Music, the only one that’s invisible to the eye, will now take us to a part of God’s globe beyond the reach of many. This is a brief extract from ‘Cantus Arcticus’ by the Finnish composer Rautavaara who wove recordings of Arctic birds into orchestral music to conjure the timeless beauty of the far north. Amazing to reflect that when the Council of Nicaea was meeting to craft our creed 17 centuries ago, these birds were imprinting their haunting, mysterious, unseen sounds on the world’s frozen wastes just as they do today.

MUSIC Rautavaara, Cantus Arcticus Op 61, from the beginning of the 2nd movement.

Concerto for Birds & Orchestra, Op. 61 "Cantus Arcticus": II. Melancholy

Rautavaara, E.: Garden of Spaces / Clarinet Concerto / Cantus Arcticus

Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Leif Segerstam/Einojuhani Rautavaara

TRACK 2 FINDE0400160 ODE1041-2 2f13cf9c-d1a7-4164-8032-9f3a3e8dcf8f

Let us pray with gratitude and wonder for the planet which is our home, acknowledging its dazzling variety and vibrancy, and the delicate interconnectedness of its ecosystems. We pray first with the help of words by Gerard Manley Hopkins:-

Malcolm: reads Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Susanna:

God our Creator

as we ponder all that you have made,

(ALL) We praise you

God our Redeemer,

when we forget the world’s fragility,

(ALL) Forgive us

God our Sustainer,

when we are slow to seek its restoration,

(ALL) Bring us to our senses

and stir us to action.

Reader:

We can recite this creed together and alone, it can be a joyous communal celebration, or as it was for Cardinal Newman in his Dream of Gerontius, it can be the deepest comfort of a soul leaving this world. Here is Elgar’s beautiful setting of the hymn which Newman drew from the creed: Firmly I believe and truly

MUSIC: from Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius

This is part of Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus, the sixth section of Part 1. EMI Classics

‎ 0724356654020 ‎ 1998 EMI Classics B00000GCAV

Prayers 2 Susanna:

With the confidence of the dying Gerontius still ringing in our ears, let us pray for all who face death today:-

Living God, we pray for all caught up in conflicts across the world – in the Middle East, Ukraine, Myanmar, Sudan - those who live daily with danger and fear, and those who are traumatised by the brutality they have witnessed.

Into war bring your peace

ALL and your abiding presence

Living God, we pray for all who will die today, those who are being tenderly cared for at home, in hospital or hospice as well as those who will die violent deaths.

Into death bring your peace

ALL and your abiding presence

Living God, we pray for those who are grieving, especially those who are overwhelmed by feelings of loss and lostness.

Into grief bring your peace

ALL and your abiding presence

Living God, we thank you for those who’ve gone before us into the fullness of your light. Today we gratefully acknowledge our forebears in faith, and especially those creed-crafters who have helped to shape our own lives of faith.

From the cradle to the grave and beyond it,

you are with us, God our Creator.

ALL So may we journey on in hope,

alert to signs of your presence

all around us.

Amen

MUSIC: God be in my head (Walford Davies)

Choir of New College Oxford, Edward Higginbottom

Music Of Contemplation Choir of New College Oxford/Edward Higginbottom

Decca Music Group Ltd GBBBB3200009

Malcolm:

We have celebrated the Nicene Creed as poetry, as music, as drama, as an invitation into God’s mystery, but of course a creed is only a collection of words, and words, even the thoughts behind the words can only take us so far. The Mystery of God is always beyond them, as CS Lewis said in his poem ‘An apologist’s evening Prayer’:

Reader: An apologist’s evening Prayer

From The Collected Poems of CS Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper, Fount Paperbacks 1994, p143.

Reader:

Perhaps the creed, like a church building or a cathedral is really a kind of lens to bring in to focus for a moment the God who is always there.

So we will finish first with a sonnet Malcolm wrote about hearing the creed in a cathedral, a poem which is titled ‘A Lens’, and then with the hymn of praise to God the Trinity which we borrow from the Angels: Holy Holy Holy

Malcolm:

A Lens - After Prayer, Canterbury Press, 2019, p 71

Final MUSIC: Holy, Holy, Holy

20 Favourite Hymns - from the Cathedrals of Britain - Norwich Cathedral Choir – Anon Classic Fox Records Public Domain GBCEU0672405