Father Chas Canoy
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Advent Homily Series: Understanding the Nicene Creed
In this powerful homily, Father Chas guides us through the rich and deeply theological second section of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ.” Drawing from Scripture, Church history, and the early councils, he explains the divinity of Jesus, the meaning behind “begotten, not made,” and the importance of the Incarnation for our salvation.
This message invites the faithful to encounter Christ not as a distant figure, but as God Himself—eternal, personal, and present—who took on our humanity out of love for us.
Resources mentioned include parish healing ministries, spiritual direction, and Bishop Barron’s book What We Believe.
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Father Chas:
Well, many of you, as I mentioned at the beginning, during these four Sundays of Advent, Father Randy and I are doing that homily series on the Creed, the Nicene Creed, that we profess virtually every Sunday of the year. Sometimes we use the Apostles’ Creed during the Easter season. So last week, Father Randy gave a wonderful homily on “I Believe in God the Father.” If you didn’t catch that, please listen to it online.
He mentioned how we can take our own relationship with our earthly father and project that onto our perception of God the Father. Now, that can be good in some ways if we’ve had a wonderful father who reflected the great love and wisdom of God in how he lived his life.
But no father is perfect, and so we may have father wounds that can be obstacles for us to receive that unconditional love of our heavenly Father—where we mistakenly feel like we have to earn God’s love or get our act together first, whatever it might be.
If you felt a Holy Spirit nudge last week during Father Randy’s homily and would like to allow the Lord to enter into that woundedness or hard memories as a divine healer, we thought it would be good to remind you that in addition to our Hope and Healing Prayer team, we have another team trained to offer inner healing prayer. We also have Todd Gale on staff as a spiritual director. You can simply call the office to set up an appointment with either the inner healing prayer team or our spiritual director, Todd Gale.
For this Sunday, I’ll be preaching on the second “I Believe” section of the Creed: “I believe in the one Lord Jesus Christ.” Now, this Sunday’s homily will have a different tenor to it because this second section is the meatiest of the four. It is the most content-rich, the most theological. To help us focus, I want everyone to pull out their Source and Summit hymnal, turn to page 7 where you’ll find the Creed, because we’re going to go over this line by line. Don’t worry, I won’t go through the entire second section—just the first half because of time constraints.
Look at that first line: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ.” There are two titles there: Lord and Christ.
Christ means “the Anointed One”—the English for Messiah, the fulfillment of all the prophets foretold.
Lord—Kyrios—commonly means “master,” but in the Old Testament it is a divine title. Pairing Lord with Jesus becomes a provocative statement: there is only one Lord, and He’s not the emperor.
Next line: “The only begotten Son of God.”
The title “Son of God” has been used before—angels, the king of Israel, and even us by adoption. But Jesus is the only begotten Son of God in a qualitatively different way. He shares the full divinity of God the Father. This makes all the difference.
Next line: “Born of the Father before all ages.”
This means from all eternity. God the Son did not have a beginning. The Son is co-eternal with the Father.
And so we get:
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.
This emphasizes the co-equal status of the Son with the Father. Jesus wasn’t “sort of” God. He is fully divine.
The creed comes largely from the Council of Nicaea in 325—whose 1,700-year anniversary we celebrate in 2025. We gave you Bishop Barron’s What We Believe as a Christmas gift—pick it up!
That council addressed the heresy of Arius, a priest from Alexandria, who claimed Jesus was semi-divine—a created being. Arius famously said, “There was a time when he was not.” But this is false. Yes, there was a time when the Son became human—called the Incarnation—but there was never a time when God the Son did not exist.
Arius was persuasive and misled even many bishops. It took Emperor Constantine convening the council to formally condemn Arianism. We just celebrated St. Nicholas, who attended the Council—and legend says he even punched Arius!
Next line: “Begotten, not made.”
Being made implies a creator-creature relationship. Begotten implies shared substance and nature. What is begotten participates entirely in that from which it comes. Jesus, the only begotten Son, fully participates in the Father.
Next line: “Consubstantial with the Father.”
The old translation said “one in being with the Father.” Consubstantial means of the same divine substance—one God, not three gods, shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Next: “Through him all things were made.”
Because the Son is eternal and consubstantial, He is co-creator with the Father.
“For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.”
This is why the Incarnation happened—to save humanity from sin and death.
And now those special lines where we bow:
“And by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man.”
God the Son entered creation by the action of the Holy Spirit and Mary’s yes. From the moment of conception, God took on human flesh—and history changed. Humanity now had a pathway to heaven.
We bow here because of this profound mystery.
For the sake of time, we pause there, since the remaining lines explain how He defeated sin and death.
Brothers and sisters, this is the crux of our faith. Our God is not distant but deeply personal—desiring eternal union with us and taking on our humanity to save us. Belief in that changes everything.
Do you believe this?
Let’s rise and profess our faith.
[Creed recited]