Reflection for A Journey Through the Nicene Creed
November 29, 2025
By Sr. Doreen, SSJD
This is the last of a series of reflections for the Festival of Faith for Christian Unity this year – a Journey Through the Nicene Creed that has taken place in different locations over year. It has been an opportunity for some people to come together throughout the year with others from diverse traditions to celebrate our shared faith in Jesus Christ as we commemorate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. This evening the Sisterhood of Saint John the Divine was asked to share a reflection on “Waiting for the Kingdom and the life to come.”
What I have to say is indeed a reflection, my own pondering about what the words say and about how they might provide a scaffolding upon which we might rebuild, or strengthen, or deepen our understanding as we seek a deeper relationship with each other and with God. I am not a theologian, or a historian, and there are many books written by scholars about the Creed and our shared faith. So, I humbly offer my own reflection and pondering. They are just one of many thoughts that might also attempt to understand more deeply the meaning of waiting for the kingdom and the life to come.
This ending to the creed I believe is a celebration of the true meaning and purpose of our life here on earth – a time of preparing ourselves and our world for that life to come right now. The use of the word ‘waiting’ in some translations and traditions and the words ‘look for’, in other translations and traditions gave me some pause and form the heart of the reflections I share with you.
In both cases, either waiting for or looking for the implication is that what is, is not yet. And waiting is not something that most of us feel comfortable with! Look for can be added to that category as well. It presents an enormous challenge. We are impatient I-can-fix-it kinds of people. What do we really mean when we say we are waiting or looking? Are we talking about a kind of armchair waiting or looking, sitting before a comfortable fireplace with our feet up? Or a waiting or looking that is a kind of resignation … I can’t do anything about it so I will just wait? Perhaps it is a waiting or looking that is one of frustration, impatience, and anger that leads only to separation and division? So, what are we to make of this statement of faith ‘waiting or looking for the life of the world to come.” None of these images of waiting or looking fit the Biblical understanding how we are to wait for – look for the coming of God’s kingdom. And yet I know in my own life, and perhaps some of you also experience the same, there is a temptation to take up one or the other of these ways of dealing with waiting or looking as they flash for attention, especially in difficult times.
This ending to the creed presents a real challenge, a challenge to get over this minimal way of thinking and face reality! God’s kingdom is now, how are we to live into it and bring it daily to birth in the here and now, in the midst of the world that we are living in?
One of the thoughts that came to me when considering this reflection was something that Teilhard de Chardin in his meditations on metanoia said: “We can no longer simply ask ‘What has Jesus done for me’? The question now is “what can I do for God? How can I show loving service to my neighbour? What can I do, alone and with others, to help reveal and accomplish God’s love project, God’s kingdom on earth, while I live?”
If we are to seek, to look, to wait for the kingdom of God –‘ seek ye first the kingdom of God’, now, ‘and its righteousness’ … we are then promised / challenged that ‘all these things (justice, love, compassion, all the everyday needs) … will be added to you as well’ (Matthew 6:33). This is foundational to our faith, an elemental, ancient and ageless truth. We are talking about love being the life of the kingdom of God, now, and are challenged to ponder how we are to embody this truth in the world today.
As I was thinking about the theme for tonight from the Nicene creed, I found myself also thinking about the Lord’s prayer. How often do we say ‘your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven’ each day? Most days here at the Covent we say it 4 times a day – do we mean it? Do we want it? Is it really possible? And how will it come?
“Waiting for the Kingdom and the life to come” for us should evoke a sense of hopeful anticipation, and at the same time a desire to jump in and do our part for contributing something positive in bringing God’s kingdom and fullness of life into the now, where a new era of peace and prosperity is expected, where justice, peace, and righteousness will prevail. Is it too strong to say that what I want, what we want now is a spirituality of paradise on earth, rather than just a life hereafter – a better world in the here and now rather than just an escape to a life hereafter? I don’t think wanting this is too strong, I believe it is essential, and I believe that this is what lies at the heart of this last phrase of the Nicene Creed. Paradise on earth – alone my dream remains just a dream, along with others that dream can become a reality. I believe we can, we must, dream the impossible dream – paradise on earth. In the words the song it is our challenge, this last phrase of the Nicene creed to begin to sing and to act “The Impossible Dream” … to dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go, to right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar, to try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into Hell for a heavenly cause …” I would suggest that if we are not wanting both, a paradise on earth that is also a paradise in heaven, we will miss the boat and have neither! That song continues … “And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest that my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest and the world will be better for this, that one man, scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable star.”
In a very real sense, this waiting, looking for the kingdom to come, highlights for us an opportunity for reframing – something that Jesus was always doing and encouraging his fallowers to do. I have come to believe that God is not a noun but a verb that must be lived. If we wait for the kingdom of God, we wait as a verb, we wait in order to live …live fully, love wastefully, extravagantly, and be all that we are capable of being and help others to do the same. This is another way to understand waiting for the kingdom and the life to come. It is reframing waiting for the kingdom to come – as love, mercy, compassion, and justice for all, right now, values we participate in in order to partner with God to bring about the kingdom of God. It is like welcoming the guest of honour – a personal homecoming and a communal homecoming – that influences the world that we live in. We welcome this guest of honour with love and hopeful hearts longing for, working for love and mercy, justice and compassion, comfort and freedom.
This important ending to the Nicene creed reminds us that we are living in a not-yet time, a transition time, where there is uncertainty or even fear. This last phrase of the Nicene creed suggests that this transition time is a time to seek the light within the darkness and between the chaos and tragedy of our life and the life of the world.
The last phrase of the Nicene creed is a strong statement that we live in radical trust that God’s promise will be fulfilled, as people, me and you are committed to co-create with God God’s plan for all of creation. We wait and we look. We labor. We hope for, we dream the impossible dream, that which is not seen, and yet waits to come, as we embody with God the signs of God’s kingdom of love and righteous, mercy and truth.
As Leonard Cohen sang in one of his songs “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in”. This last phrase of the Nicene creed provides us with that truth, a crack, an opening that It is here in our life now, but it is not fully here yet. Waiting is an active time of getting things ready, of making a difference, of working to fulfil God’s dream on earth as it is in heaven.
We are called to reframe the prevailing cultural norm: we desperately need to reframe this idea that life is what we do now, but it has no importance to the Kingdom that will come. We’re just here waiting to get to heaven. Waiting, then, is just getting by until Christ comes, and the Kingdom is realized in its fullness. This is an illusion! My friends, this doesn’t seem like God’s kind of waiting, it is not God’s vision or plan. It’s not the image we see in Scripture, which tells us how God used men and women during periods of waiting before something happened. God used Jeremiah to announce the coming exile. God sent John the Baptist to proclaim the age of God’s reign, and the coming of the Messiah. Prior to his death and resurrection, Jesus sent the Disciples out in missions to proclaim that the Messiah had come. Waiting seems to be a time of action for those who follow God. This was an empowering faith in the Risen Jesus. This was a call – a commission from Jesus – ‘to follow me.’ The Nicene Creed ends with a clear message that the apocalypse, the day of reckoning, is now. We are to help God bring it to birth now, today, in this world of ours.
Is there something important here for us today? How do we reframe the essential scaffolding truth of the Nicene Creed – and align it with Jesus’s vision for the kingdom of God, a life of mercy, compassion, and justice for all? Now here, now right now. Waiting for, seeking this, working for this is our primary mission. Doing the hard work of reframing can help us see new ways in which we can imagine God at work. The Kingdom of God is here, in the midst of all that seems broken, and angry, and falling apart: but we know what we see is only a glimpse of the kingdom that could be, and we have the opportunity together with all people of faith to move what is here now closer to the kingdom of God on earth, so that we can know and love God more in the joy of the life that is to come. We are called to bring about the impossible dream – to go where the brave dare not go, and to be willing to march into a world that is filled with its fair share of death, sorrow, tears, and pain: division and anger. We have all experienced how cruel this world can be. The ending of the Creed begs us to march into this world that is falling apart with violence and injustice for a heavenly cause – to bring the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
The world of today does not look like this. The impossible dream: the vision of the New Jerusalem is what we place our hope in. This is the hope expressed in the ending of the Nicene creed – the life of the world to come. When the Kingdom comes, and as we work to bring this about now, all that robs life for everyone of being fulfilled will be taken away. I believe that it is the little bits of good that each one of us do to move closer to this vision that can and will change the world.
The Kingdom of God will not be in the clouds, but here on Earth. The world we will inherit is the very place we live today. If the place we will inherit, New Jerusalem, is to exist here in the places we currently reside, then it means that we must take seriously the things we do here on Earth. One aspect of what this means is that the things we do on Earth, the ways we live into the current reality, the here and now, of the Kingdom of God, will impact the life that we will inherit in the life that is to come.
This, I think is what it means to wait for the Kingdom of God to come. We live into this reality by being aware that the things we do have lasting implications. There are several ways that this is played out in our world. As followers of Christ, we conserve our natural resources, not because it is the popular or trendy thing to do, but because this is the earth we will inherit in the life to come. We are good stewards of what we are given, because our decisions will dictate the world the Kingdom will enter into. We wait for the Kingdom of God’s coming by preparing the world for its full coming by living into the present reality of the Kingdom of God, recognizing that God’s kingdom is present, here now, and it demands our cooperation in all aspects of our lives. Waiting for the Kingdom of God to come also calls us to want others to be with us when the Kingdom comes. Kingdom people are called to share the message and enter into relationship with those who are not here, to everyone, to those who are outside of the creedal faith to which we belong. The kingdom of God is God’s plan for all of creation, everyone and everything is held in the inclusive and unconditional and tenacious love of God.
Each of us have something to do in this and God has gifted us in certain ways to share God’s story by our words, our actions, and our love and compassion. The Kingdom of God is here, so let us share it. The Kingdom of God is coming in its fullness, and we are committed to working to make this happen, so let us tell the world so everyone may experience it.
Perhaps for each of us, as we enter Advent there might be three comments or questions to ponder from the resources offered for this section of the series of reflections on the Nicene Creed:
1. Love will be the reality of the Kingdom of God. Concrete actions of charity make this Kingdom present in our lives.
2. Living in expectation of the Kingdom of God, how do we embody signs of the coming Kingdom in the world today?
3. We are called to be ready for the second coming of the Lord. How do we prepare ourselves for it?
What this final truth of the Nicene creed is saying to us I sum up for myself in the following prayer (inspired by Joyce Rupp and freely adapted by me), and share this prayer with you:
Source of Light, Emmanuel, God-with-us, your unconditional love illuminates our waiting world with the surprise of your Bethlehem birth. Each year since then we celebrate this astonishing event, rejoicing in your coming anew, not as a newborn Babe, but as the hidden presence of God living within each of us. To our great astonishment we have become your dwelling place. We are now your Bethlehem, and we rejoice in being a dwelling place of God: called, challenged and invited to bring your kingdom on earth.
Amen.