The ancient ruins of the church might be impressive in their own right, but they nevertheless pale in comparison to more magnificent ruins we have seen elsewhere, for example in the biblical cities of Pergamum and Ephesus. We spend a short amount of time wandering in the church, seeing the bare traces of a few ancient frescoes here and there, and taking a group picture in the apse where ancient bishops once sat.

But I have not brought the group here to see the remains of just

another ancient church. Rather, something special happened here once, what happened here probably affected Christian history more profoundly than any of the other sites that we have visited, even biblical ones. And I have brought the group here to pay our respects, and to use our imagination to see and hear the echoes of what once took place here. Whether we know it or not, a significant part of the faith that we have received from our ancestors was forged in this city. For you see, this city once had another name. This city was once called Nicaea.

Spain, Egypt, Italy, and all over the Roman world journey for weeks or even months to come here, to Nicaea, a city near Constantinople, the new capital that the emperor is constructing. Over 400 hundred bishops have been invited to attend what will be one of the first and most important ecumenical councils. Invitations had been issued by none other than the emperor, and they would be received in his home in imperial style. As Richard Rubenstein writes in his wonderful book, When Jesus Became God, the more than 250 bishops who arrived could hardly believe what they were experiencing. It felt like a miracle.

To understand their sense of good fortune, one must understand what had taken place during the preceding centuries. Following Christ’s death, Christianity had spread throughout the Roman empire. At times, however, it encountered resistance. In the eyes of worshippers of the state Roman religion, Christians seemed fanatical and intolerant as they condemned the Romans as atheists and denigrated their deities. From time to time, Roman emperors would therefore meet this perceived fanaticism with force, and institute persecutions meant to limit the impact and spread of this new Christian faith. These persecutions were not instituted merely for theological reasons. After all, there was no separation between politics and religion in those days, and Christian refusal to worship state gods was seen as a treasonous act. What’s more, Christian denunciation of pagan gods split the Roman community at a time when unity in the Roman empire was becoming more precious. The Roman Empire was having an increasingly difficult time defending its several thousand mile long border against exterior foes. The last thing it needed was a divided populace at home.

These historical trends culminated at the beginning of the 4th century under the emperor Diocletian, who instituted one of the most brutal persecutions of Christian history. Christian worship was banned, and Christians who refused to sacrifice to pagan gods could be tortured and executed. But Christianity could not be so easily stopped. As a lover is fanatically devoted to his/her beloved, so were the Christians devoted to their god. This devotion empowered them to survive the persecutions, and often to emerge stronger as a result. The Christians outlasted Diocletian and within a few decades of his death, what once seemed impossible had now become a reality. A new emperor sat on the throne of a revitalized empire, and not just any new emperor, but the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great. Christianity had finally been accepted at the very heart of power.

belief were generally not nearly as important as mere survival. But now that Christianity had been accepted, there was a newfound breathing room in which to ask questions about doctrine and belief. For the first time, leaders of the church from all over the Roman world could debate freely. And the most important questions they debated concerned Jesus Christ. Who was Jesus and what was the relationship between Jesus and God? Was one greater than the other? What was the relationship between Jesus’ humanity and his divinity – was he fully human or fully divine?

These are the questions that the bishops journeyed to Nicaea to debate. The questions would continue to be debated for centuries to come, and to a large extent, the fate of the Roman Empire and the future of Christianity were determined by the answers to these questions.

and I am at the hospital in Florida where I work as a chaplain. As I head up to visit the patients on the psychiatric ward, the chaplain on-call passes me the on-call pager. I hate being on-call. I am relatively new to the experience, and I always feel like a heavy lump of dread comes hand in hand with the pager. I suppose what causes the dread is the feeling that I am not in control, that I can be summoned at any moment to an encounter where I won’t know what to do or say.

off. I go to the nurses’ desk to use their phone and call the number on the pager. It is the Labor and Delivery unit. A young mother has just had a miscarriage, and would like me to come and bless the five month old fetus.

But there is no one else. I am the one who is on-call, I am the only one. And I suppose that greater even than my fear of going, is the need for me to be there. So I leave the psychiatric ward and journey across the hospital, stopping very briefly to get down on my knees in the chapel on the way there.

The journey doesn’t seem to take nearly long enough, and before I know it, I am at the nurses’ station of the Labor and Delivery Unit. The nurse fills me in on the details and ushers me into the room with the mother and father. They are about as old as I am, and tears line their cheeks. In the mother’s arms there is a white cloth. And after a few words of conversation, she asks me to bless the fetus, and hands me the white cloth. I hold it then in my arms and look down deep into the cloth to see, so small, so small, the little fetus buried there. What do I say? What can I say? What experience do I have of this grief? None. I have never lost a child. So why am I here?

relationship with God did not have much to go on. After all, by this time the books in the New Testament had not yet been decided upon – there was no established canon. But even if the New Testament had already been established, the New Testament does not set out a clear doctrine of the relationship between Jesus and God. By and large, the books of the New Testament were not written to establish doctrine on this or any issue, rather they were written to tell a story or to respond to particular circumstances.

Thus there was room for interpretation and disagreement. And there was plenty of that. By the time the bishops arrived in Nicaea, answers to the questions about who Jesus was and his relationship with God had divided the Christian leadership into more or less two different groups, with a bit of a hazy border in between them.

One group was know as the Arians, named after Arius, a priest from Alexandria who declared, “There was when he was not,” by which he meant that there had been a time before time when Christ had not existed – in other words, Jesus was not fully God. They drew upon Scripture to support their point. “To patriarchal Romans, the very titles Father and Son implied a relationship of superiority and inferiority.” (Richard Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God, p. 10) Other scriptural statements seem to support that conclusion. Today’s Scripture lesson from Colossians states, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created. . . and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things. . . “ The Arians used these ideas to support their belief that although all things had been created in Christ, Christ was himself “firstborn,” and therefore less than the Father. Or to take another example, in John 5:30, Jesus says, “I can do nothing on my own.” And in John 14, he says, “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.” The Father is greater than I. How could one be clearer than that?

These scriptural and theological interpretations affected and were affected by their understanding of the role of humanity. In an environment in which the empire was increasingly strained, the Arians thought the people needed a figure that would inspire them to transform society. Jesus’ role was therefore seen primarily as that of a model. They believed that Jesus was a such a moral model to the rest of us that God adopted him as God’s son, sacrificed him to redeem humanity, resurrected him in a victory over death, and granted him divine status. The task of the rest of humanity was to imitate his example. They reacted against equating Jesus with God because it therefore seemed to let humans off the hook of their responsibility to emulate Jesus. It also seemed humiliating to them to believe that the creator of the universe would submit to the power of other humans by becoming human.

But that’s precisely the point, argued Athanasius, the champion of the other side of the conflict, also from Alexandria. While Arians emphasized people’s potential to follow Christ’s example, Athanasius and others emphasized their enslavement to sin, and their need for a savior. According to Athanasius, the Arians misused Scripture to support their point, and overlooked the fact that in order to free us from sin and death, God did the unthinkable and became human. If Christ had been any less than God, he could not save us. The Arians made the mistake of believing that it was a case of either/or – either Christ was fully human or Christ was fully divine, and they tended to emphasize the humanity. But if the Arians reduced Jesus to a sort of not fully divine figure, what was to stop them from reducing him to a mere human prophet? And who wants to worship a superangel, anyway? What the people needed was nothing less than God, fully God.

At Nicaea, this controversy culminated in a debate over one Greek letter, iota, the Greek equivalent of an “i.” The question was whether to include this “i” in the middle of the word “homoousius.” This is almost certainly the most important Greek word, and the most important Greek letter, in the history of Christianity. Arians wanted to include the “i” to make the word mean “of similar substance” – they wanted to affirm that Christ was “of similar substance” as the Father. But the others wanted to leave out the “i” to make the word mean “of the same substance,” or “of one substance with the Father” as we read in the Nicene Creed.

The Arians lost, the “i” was left out, and Christ’s divinity was

asserted. Athanasius’ side won that battle. But the theological war was not over, however, and continued for several hundred years to come. Reading the details of the ongoing controversy is like reading a thriller – it features usurpers and pretenders to the imperial throne, sex scandals, conflicts between church and state, divisions between the West and the East, mysterious deaths, the rise of the pope’s role, chases and midnight escapes, the list goes on. Who knows, maybe someone will make it into a movie someday.

Beyond its entertainment value, though, why do we care? Why do we care about what happened in Nicaea so long ago? I suppose most of the time we don’t. But whether we realize it or not, what was affirmed at Nicaea matters, indeed, sometimes it is the only thing that matters. Because when we read the Nicene Creed and say that Jesus is “Very God of Very God,” “of one substance with the Father,” above all what we are saying is that God knows. God knows. In Jesus Christ, all of God, fully God, knows what it is like to be human, not in any abstract sense the way that I might know that 2 plus 2 equals four, no, God knows from the inside, in the flesh. The Nicene Creed witnesses that God’s love is so strong, that it will do anything for us, anything, even become human, suffer, and die. And by crossing the boundary into human experience, that love makes all of human experience holy. All of it. Even the ordinary parts, even the broken parts, even the sad parts. Even a Wednesday afternoon in the hospital when I blessed a five month old fetus that I held in my arms. More than anything else, I suppose I was there to witness to what the council at Nicaea affirmed almost 1700 years ago, that there is no place that I can go where God is not already there, and that the grief of these two parents is shared by the God who became flesh and dwelt among us, the God who also lost a son. And in blessing the fetus, I suppose I was not only blessing the fetus, I was blessing their grief as well. It is holy. All of it. By the grace of our Lord Jesus, all of our human experience is.