One holy catholic and apostolic Church
Eleventh Sunday after Trinity
Ephesians 4:4-7, 11-6. Matthew 16: 13-19
One, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
Preacher: Revd Maggie Guillebaud
I wonder how many of you remember the book on punctuation by Lynn Truss in 2003 entitled ‘Eats, (comma) shoots and leaves’? The comma indicated that a panda had eaten, shot someone, and then left. Conversely with no comma we just had information about what pandas eat – shoots and leaves.
Which is a strange place to begin our exploration of the Nicene Creed in our summer sermon series, my chosen line of the Creed being ‘We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church’.
The Church of England in its ‘We Believe’ booklet published this year exploring the Nicene Creed hedges its bets in the punctuation department, sometimes inserting a comma after ‘one’ so that we have one, (comma), holy, (comma), catholic and apostolic church, sometimes not.
The Roman Catholic version of the Creed however is precise: in what it calls the Four Marks of the Church we have clear distinctions between one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Which makes sense to me. It is these four distinct categories, these four marks of the church, which I should like to explore with you today, beginning with the idea of church.
What do we mean by church? What is this Greek word ekklesia, from which we get the French word eglise?
An ekklesia was an assembly in Ancient Athens where citizens were entitled to speak, vote, and take political decisions. So a gathering of similarly minded people entitled to have their voices heard is one of the bases for the idea of a church.
Jesus mentions the word church just twice, Both in St Matthew’s Gospel. None of the other gospels mention it at all. But his ringing endorsement of Peter as a future leader of his disciples, telling him that he is the rock on which he will build his church, shows us the direction of travel: this new movement must have a strong leader who will carry forward the work Christ has begun on earth.
However, looked at another way, we can say that the whole of Jesus’ ministry was a lesson in how to become a church, how to form this small community of believers into a larger community rooted in his teachings and in love after he was no longer physically present with them.
And Paul in his letter to the Ephesians outlines in the passage from our first lesson the variety of gifts people will bring bring to the church ‘for building up the body of Christ’ coming to ‘a maturity of faith, no longer blown about by every wind of doctrine’ so that ‘we grow up in everyway into him who is the head, Christ.’
And that ‘into him ‘ is significant. In a recently published book of the late Metropolitan Anthony Bloom’s lectures on the Creed he likens those coming to faith as twigs being grafted onto an olive tree. For a successful graft to take, the little twig, cut off from its mother olive tree, must be grafted and bound, wound to wound, into the nick made on the new olive tree. The life of one becomes the life of the other as new life is forced into the twig’s veins. I am the vine, you are the branches. There is that deep interconnectivity between all members of Christ’s body which derives from this deep and intimate grafting. The Church becomes what Bloom so succinctly describes as ‘the very reality of the unity of God with humanity in Christ by the power of the Spirit.’ We, through the power of the Holy Spirit, are his church, a work in progress in building up the body of Christ.
What then does it mean to be ‘one’ church?
No where in the New Testament is the idea of institutional unity proposed or set up as an ideal. We may concur with Paul in his letter to the Ephesians that we all subscribe to ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’. Those are fundamental to our faith. But one universal church? Not so much. Rather today we have a diversity of churches all over the world which, in my view, transcend all linguistic, racial, and social differences. The Spirit moves where it will. Ecumenism, of course, has its place: we all need to be in dialogue and friendship with other Christians. But we must never confuse unity with uniformity.
Are we a holy church? I hope so. But it rather begs the question, what is meant by holy?
The idea of holiness runs throughout the Hebrew bible: everything which is dedicated to God – objects, places, people – become holy because they are dedicated to God. From the Ark of the Covenant to Mount Horeb to Samuel, all that is dedicated to God is holy.
This holiness is manifest in Christ, the head of the church. God’s holiness dwells in him because he is part of that Trinity of God’s being – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So it follows that the church, that body of Christ to which we through baptism have dedicated ourselves, becomes holy as well. Everything dedicated to Christ is holy. That does not mean we are sin free. But the sacraments and the work of the church help to make us holy
And so we come to the word catholic, with a small c. Catholic, in Greek katholikos, means universal.
The word was first used by St Ignatius in the C1st in his letter to the Smyrnaeans when he wrote ‘where the bishop appears, let the people be, just as where Christ is, there is the catholic church’.
This is not to be confused with the Roman Catholic church, with a large C. The universal church, in all its manifestations, is, as Paul says in his 1st letter to the Corinthians, one into which : ‘…all of us, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, have been baptised into the one body by the same Spirit’. There can be no denominational particularity when it comes to the spreading of the Gospel of Christ.
And so we come to our final word: apostolic.
As Anglicans, as many of us are, we were taught that this refers to the teachings which came straight from the Apostles. They were indeed the first teachers and preachers, and from first oral transmission and then in the written Gospels, the outlines of our faith were passed down by those who had known Jesus personally. And of course, Paul in his letters greatly expanded on these earliest teachings. But it is not long in our ponderings on this word ‘apostolic’ before we come to the tricky question of the Apostolic Succession, that thorn in the side of discussions between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church about the validity of Anglican orders, or ordinations, amongst other things, since the Reformation. Sadly time does not permit me to expand on this, but if you choose to join the Zoom session tomorrow evening, details of which may be found on your notices sheet, we can pursue this further if you wish.
Many of you will know that I led a pilgrimage to Rome from the cathedral in May this year. One of its highlights was Pope Leo’s first General Audience, a weekly event in St Peter’s Square.
We arrived early in order to get a seat, which gave us plenty of time to look round.
Three hundred thousand people filled the Square, all in a state of great excitement. The American nuns in front of us were in tears as they first spotted their new American Pope. We were all stunned as we heard him speak in English.
And in one of those moments which seem to take one almost out of time, I reflected that this was the church: we were by no means all Roman Catholic, but those of us who were Christians all subscribed to one faith, one Lord, one baptism. Denominational differences evaporated in the face of a feeling of Christian solidarity and yes, love. We were all God’s people, from all over the globe. In that spring sunshine we were indeed one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
Amen