Gregory of Nazianzus' reluctant sermon
Forced into the pulpit at Constantinople
Gregory of Nazianzus does not want to go to Constantinople.
He has just emerged from a period of deep personal loss — his father's death, his brother's death, his sister Gorgonia's death, all within a short period. He is exhausted and grieving and wants to go home to Cappadocia and write and pray and be left alone.
Instead, the Nicene community in Constantinople — a city that has been dominated by Arianism for decades, where the Nicene minority meets in a private house and has no church building — begs him to come and lead them. He is the most brilliant theological voice available. They need him.
He goes. He preaches in a private house that he names the Anastasia — the Resurrection — and the sermons he delivers there are among the greatest theological sermons in Christian history. The Five Theological Orations on the Trinity, delivered in that small house against the hostility of a largely Arian city, establish the pneumatology of the Nicene faith with a precision that the earlier councils had not achieved.
He is pelted with stones at one point. A group of Arians invades a service and attacks the congregation. He is nearly killed.
He stays. He preaches. He changes the theological conversation of the empire.
In 381 AD, the emperor Theodosius appoints him archbishop of Constantinople and presides over the council that completes the Nicene Creed. Gregory opens the council and then, exhausted and ill and disgusted with the politics, resigns and goes home to write poetry.
He is happier there.
“When I speak of God, you must be illumined at once by one flash of light and by three. Three in individualities or hypostases if any prefer so to call them, but one in respect of the substance.”
— Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration, c. 380 AD
“I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, Here am I; send me.”
Gregory went to Constantinople when he didn't want to go, and delivered the sermons that clarified the doctrine of the Trinity for the entire Western church, and then resigned and went home.
His reluctance is part of the story. He was not ambitious for the position. He was not building a platform. He went because he was needed and because he had something to say, and when the political machinery of the council became more than he could bear, he left.
There is something clarifying about serving from a position of non-attachment to the position itself. Gregory could say what needed to be said in Constantinople because he did not need Constantinople.
What would it mean to serve where you are needed without needing to stay when the work is done?