Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity
“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.”
It is the manifesto of the Trinity Season, and, indeed, of the Christian religion itself. We know it more familiarly, perhaps, in Tyndale’s translation which also remains in the Prayer Book in the sentences for Morning and Evening Prayer. “God is love and he that abideth in love, abideth in God and God in him.” Abiding and dwelling. Same idea.
Well, it must seem that we have gone from Heaven to Hell in short order! Just think, last Sunday we had that marvelous vision of Heaven in the celebration of God as Trinity. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and we were allowed to enter into what we were given to see and hear. What was that? A vision of heaven, a vision of worship. The four and twenty elders, symbolic of the witness of the Old Testament to God, and the four living creatures, symbolic of the witness of the four gospels of the New Testament to God in Christ, worship the Trisagion, the thrice-holy God. There is a unity of the Old and the New in the worship of Trinity. How do we know God as Trinity? Through Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son, “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us”. There is that word again.
We are to be what we behold. It means being born anew, born into that vision of divine love, the community of the Trinity.
But what do we have in this morning’s gospel? Luke’s powerful parable of Dives and Lazarus juxtaposed with the lessons about love in The First Epistle of St. John. It is a kind of treatise on love. So what is this all about?
