Sermon for The Second Sunday after Trinity
“A certain man made a great supper, and bade many”
There is more to the Christian religion that mere good manners. And yet good manners have in them more, perhaps, than we realize. More than just an aspect of civilization in the form of considerate behaviour, “manners maketh the man” and reveal something of our intrinsic character and nature; in other words, there is something of the charity of Christ at work in our dealings with one another.
And that is, of course, a central theme in the Trinity season. To put it bluntly, we participate in what is proclaimed. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as we heard last week from this same Epistle of St. John. There is a necessary, inescapable and intimate relation between the making known of God in Jesus Christ and the form of our life in Christ. St. John, in the Epistle reading for today, drives home a very hard lesson that follows from that understanding. It is about our love towards even our brother towards whom we may feel anything but love and affection, kindliness and concern. There may be things about our brother or sister (let’s not be gender exclusive!) that is quite unlovely, even hateful.
What, then, are we called to love in those whom, quite frankly, we can’t stand? Simply this, we honour their being made in the image of God as we are, howsoever much that image has been obscured, denied and derided, or howsoever much we ourselves may be confused and deluded in our judgment. This provokes the equally salutary thought. Our awareness of our judgmentalism leads to self-judgment. That can be quite destructive; self-condemnation leading to despair. In relation to that, there is the strong teaching that “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” In every way, we are being encouraged, if not actually catapulted into the mystery of God which we have been privileged to hear and receive.
It belongs to the joy of the Trinity season to place us in the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity. Trinity season is about going through the open door or, at the very least, standing on the threshold of that open door of the kingdom of heaven. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, but we don’t always see it, do we? Yet, the realities of the kingdom are here and now, present in our quotidian lives. This Sunday, like last Sunday, we have a parable about the kingdom told by Jesus: “A certain man made a great supper and bade many.”