Sermon for The First Sunday After Trinity

admin | 14 June 2009

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love”

We are confronted with a challenge and a refusal. There is the challenge to act out of what we have been given to see of the majesty of God. Such is the vision of the Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” as we heard last Sunday. It is a door, not a window, a door through which we are invited to enter. We are invited into the vision so that the charity of God may shape our lives into holiness.

But then, there is our refusal to will that order and truth, preferring, instead, the vanity of ourselves that blinds us to the real needs and even the very presence of others. We ignore Lazarus at our feet. What has he to do with us? we may think. But in so neglecting Lazarus, we are really neglecting God. We deny the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ. In denying the poor man at our feet, we deny the God in whose image we are all made.

The love that is shown is the love that is to be lived. The Epistle teaches us that love is of God because God is love. That love is manifested in Jesus Christ so that we might live in love through him. The only question is whether we will live the vision.

And so the Epistle sounds the theme and the Gospel gives the crucial illustration about our relationship to the vision of God revealed as Trinity. The Epistle is St. John’s treatise about that love. The Gospel is St. Luke’s powerful story of the Rich Man (Dives) and Lazarus.

What does it come down to? Simply this. The love of God compels us to love one another. This is not a may-be, but a must-be for our salvation. We are commanded and compelled to love out of the vision of love which has been shown to us. When we ignore the stranger in our midst or neglect the beggar at our door, then we deny the God who “became poor for [our] sakes” and who “came into our midst”. When we are consumed by envy at the good fortune of others, when we filled with hatred and wrath for hurts and injuries inflicted upon us, whether real or perceived, then we place ourselves very far from God and do great harm to ourselves. To put it in terms of the parable, there is a great gulf fixed between us and God when we ignore the poor man at our gate, the neighbour close at hand, and, by extension, the stranger far away. Then we place ourselves in torment, the torment of our self-willed distance from God. We create the abyss that separates us from God and from one another.

The problem is not that we don’t know better. The problem is that we do not act upon what we do know. It is the age-old problem. “The good that I would, I do not; the evil that I would not do, that is what I do,” as Paul puts it. Such is the contradiction in us that belongs to the human condition and that compels us to the need for God’s grace to overcome the contradiction in us. The recognition of the need for grace means that we have to know it and want it. The vision of love is not alive in us unless we want to let it live in us. We are dead to the glory which God has revealed: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.” Yet Christ is risen from the dead and how shall we not be persuaded to love? And how much greater the torment if we will not? What God has given us to see and know, he has shown to us so that we might believe and live. The vision of love is our life with God, wherever the places and whatever the circumstances of our lives. The appeal is to our consciences.

The vision of God revealed gives shape to all that we see and do, to all that we hear and read. The love that is God is far more than sentimental feelings; it is the deep yearning of the soul, at once seeking understanding and striving for articulation and compelled to the care and service of others. Love and knowledge are inescapably connected and interwoven. It is the great struggle of our age to understand again that true knowledge is love and that true love is knowledge. You can’t love what you don’t know, in some sense. True knowledge is only possible through the passionate desire to know. “He that loveth not knoweth not God.”

The vision is transforming love and power. It breaks down the barriers of suspicion and creates the fellowship of charity. But when we do not “listen to Moses and the Prophets”, then we exile ourselves from God’s Word and presence. We are like Israel in exile from the promised land, but where we, too, may learn as in a far away place the deep lessons of God’s grace. There is the added sensibility here, too, that unless we listen to the Old Testament, to Moses and the Prophets, as it were, we cannot understand Jesus. The lesson, at any rate, is there for us to learn if we will pay attention to the parable. After all, that is the point. It is told for our benefit. In a way, the interplay of the epistle and the gospel recalls us to the dramatic teaching and illustration of divine love in the Upper Room on the eve of Jesus’ passion.

There the Lord and Teacher of Love kneels down before us and washes our feet in an act of loving service. “For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you,” he says. His love commands our love by the quality of his example. His love draws us into the vision of eternal love which he opens to view. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” In him, all love has its fulfillment and perfection.

He makes his act of loving service, of course, even in the face of the treacheries and the deceits of our hearts. It was, after all, “on the night that he was betrayed” that he gives himself for us in the institution of the Holy Communion and provides a practical example of what his love means for us in the washing of the disciples’ feet. But that only shows the deep love of God for us, a love that is greater than us and a love that seeks our good.

When we let that love rule our hearts, then we are with him in the fellowship of the Blessed Trinity. Then we are blessed.