“Christ, King of All That Is” by the Rev. Dr. Don Wahlig, November 16, 2025, Year C / Proper 28 (33) – Psalm 46 ¨ Colossians 1:11-20.

THEME:   In Christ, all things hold together and are reconciled to God.

Why are you a Christian? I am not asking how you became a Christian. I am asking something more fundamental. What is it about Christianity that makes you sure that, of all the possible faith traditions, Christianity is the one to hang your hat on? This question came up recently in a conversation I had with someone who had been raised in the church, but now claimed to be spiritual, but not religious. 

My first instinct was to say that I was raised to be a Christian. My entire upbringing prepared me to be a mature, adult Christian. But fewer and fewer folks have this kind of upbringing today. Research bears this out. We are living in a post-Christian world. Respect and support for institutions of all kinds, including the church, is in decline. Meanwhile, the numbers of those of lapsed faith, and no faith continue to rise. That is why we Christians are increasingly being asked to defend our faith. Why do we continue to believe that Christianity is best not only for us, but for others?

First, let’s acknowledge that this is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it is a very old one. With respect to the role of Christianity, our world is becoming more like the world in which Christianity grew up. In the first century, Christians were a tiny minority. Roman citizens were expected to worship the pantheon of Roman gods. They also worshiped the emperor, mystery cults, and even their ancestors.  But all the while, other religions were growing.  One of them was Christianity, but it was initially very small. What distinguished Christianity from those other faiths was hope. As I Peter says, believers should be ready at all times to offer a witness to the hope that is within them.  For Christians, our hope is embodied in Jesus Christ.

Hope comes from faith and is expressed in love. As we know, hope and love are powerful things. They are the reason why Christianity spread so rapidly throughout the Roman Empire. By the early 4^th century, even Constantine, the Roman Emperor, was persuaded by Christianity. For him, it was personal. His own mother had become a Christian. So, he decided to legalize Christianity. When he did, however, he unwittingly walked into the middle of a church fight. He was appalled that church leaders were squabbling furiously over theology. A Bishop in Alexandria, Egypt and one of his local priests named Arius were in the midst of a knock-down, drag-out feud. Arius believed that Jesus was human, not divine. His Bishop disagreed, strenuously. 

This would have remained a relatively minor dispute, except that Arius ran a school for priests and lay people. He taught them all that Jesus was a created being who was subordinate to God the Father. Eventually this Arian controversy spread all the way to Rome. For Constantine, division in the church was more than just an ecclesiastical issue, it was a political problem. In a letter scolding both Arius and his bishop, he called this division "far more evil and dangerous than any kind of war or conflict." 1,700 hundred years ago this past summer, Constantine convened a meeting of 300 bishops to settle the question.  

What exactly do we Christians believe about Jesus Christ, in relationship to God and the Holy Spirit? Even under ideal circumstances, the church moves slowly. In this case, it took the church 60 years to figure it out. The result is what you and I know as the Nicene Creed.  In just a moment, we are all going to stand and recite this Creed together. As we do, we will see how it affirms that Jesus Christ is both fully human, and fully divine, coequal with God and the Holy Spirit, and eternally coexisting with them in the Trinity. The very essence of the Creed is the hope that you and I have in Jesus Christ. If Jesus was not fully divine, he could never bridge the gap between sinful humanity and God.  Only a truly human Jesus could understand our tendency to sin, and only a truly divine Christ could redeem us from the effects of it. 

So, we follow the wisdom of the Council of Nicaea. We trust that Jesus of Nazareth was God in the flesh. He showed us God’s very nature, even as he shared our human nature. He gave us glimpses of the Kingdom and showed us how to live for it. Most important of all, through his dying and rising, he promises us new life, life lived in God’s eternal presence. That new life is possible because, in him, we are reconciled to God and each other. Today, this creed remains the only universal Christian creed. With some minor variations in language, Christians of all kinds have adopted it.  And so have we. It is the core of our faith.

It affirms what we know to be true – both in our heads and in our hearts – that, in Jesus of Nazareth, God became incarnate. God chose to do that because he loves us that much. Folks, no other religion in this world understands God to be so loving and so intimately involved in our lives. All major religions understand God to be infinite and transcendent. Some of them envision that he is present to us through creation. A few even understand that God can take human form.

None of them, however, are grounded on the central belief that God loved us so much that he chose to become one of us, so that we might become one with him. This is what Paul is getting at in his letter to the Colossians. Christ is more than the first-born of creation.  He is more than the one through whom and for whom all things were made. He is the one in whom all things hold together. As Paul put it, “In him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things.” The hope that reconciliation makes possible is what changes lives and turns former foes into fast friends.

Constantine saw the power of Christian hope. So did his mother.  So did the majority of the bishops in Nicaea. Every generation since has seen the power of Christian hope, too. One of those was a 19-year-old German soldier named Juergen. Juergen sat in a POW camp in Scotland at the end of World War II. He was reluctantly conscripted into Hitler’s army at age 16.  He was taken prisoner just a few months before Germany’s surrender in 1945. Confronted by pictures of the victims of the holocaust, he sank into deep shame. He was overwhelmed by disgrace and despair. Is that what he was fighting for, he wondered?

One day, a visiting chaplain gave him a Bible.  With nothing better to do, he read it. In the story of Christ being crucified, he encountered a God who knew firsthand what he was feeling: pain, abandonment, and shame. Feeling utterly forsaken himself, Juergen resonated with Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” Two years later, Juergen and some other German POWs were given permission to attend a conference of the Student Christian Movement in England. Still wearing their German army uniforms, Juergen and his fellow POWs listened as a group of young Dutch students describe their horrific suffering at the hands of the Nazis.  Juergen fully expected them to be angry and vindictive. Instead, they offered forgiveness. He was stunned. These Dutch Christians embodied the very love he had read about in his Bible.

For the first time in years, he felt hope and it changed his life. He went on to study theology. In 1964, he published his first book. It was titled “A Theology of Hope.” Juergen’s last name was Moltmann. When he died last year at age 98, Juergen Moltmann was universally regarded as one of the world’s greatest Christian theologians. He published 40 books. In one of the most important ones, he wrote:

“Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts:  there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son … is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them.  God is our last hope because we are God’s first love.”

The Nicene Creed speaks to us of that love. It is God’s love embodied in Jesus Christ, in all his humanity and all his divinity. It is the source of our hope. Friends, that is why I am a Christian. 

Now, on this Christ the King Sunday, I invite you to stand and affirm with me what the bishops of Nicaea say to us about that love. 

Will you please rise?



NICENE CREED

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

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. 

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.