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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?

Jesus tells a parable. Dives is the rich man. That is not his name – Dives simply means the rich one. He is defined by his worldly status. Interestingly, he is not named; only identified in terms of his status, one who is “clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.” Who is Lazarus? “A certain beggar”, to be sure, but he has a name, an identity beyond his circumstance and situation. He lies at the gate of the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” It seems, however, that he is completely neglected by the rich man; only “the dogs came and licked his sores.” It is a graphic picture. There is a compelling contrast between the unnamed rich man and the named beggar, between the compassion of the dogs and the utter indifference of Dives.

The contrast is made even greater by what follows, which is, you might say, a way of seeing each of them from God’s perspective. It is about heaven and hell. Not simply as something by-and-by, later on, as it were, but right now, here and now. The point of the parable is that heaven and hell are present realities in our souls. Dives is in Hell “in torments”; Lazarus is in “Abraham’s bosom”, a wonderful image that takes up the Old Testament figure of Abraham, recalling the Abrahamic covenant through which all nations were to be blessed; in short, it is an image of Heaven. They are seen as complete opposites – there is an unbridgeable gap between them. The point of the parable is ever so direct.

Why is Dives in Hell? Because in neglecting Lazarus, who lies at his gate, he has neglected God. There is the inescapable connection between the love of God and the love of neighbour. In neglecting the one, we deny the other. The point of the parable is to convict us to act out of the vision of the love of God which we have been given to see. Where have we seen it? In the witness of the Scriptures. Jesus is making a strong point here about the unity of the Old Testament and the New. Dives has ignored Moses and the Prophets – a symbolic way of referring to the Jewish Scriptures – and the further point in the parable is that without the witness of Moses and the Prophets we will not repent of our indifference and we will not be persuaded to the love of neighbor even “though one rose from the dead”. We cannot really understand the New Testament apart from the Old. As Paul will remind us, “love is the fulfilling of the Law”.

The parable is told to convict our consciences. We are convicted of the forms of our unloveliness in our neglect and indifference to one another. That neglect and indifference and, by extension, hostility and hatred towards one another is a picture of Hell in us because our neglect, indifference, hostility and hatred of one another means that we are dead to God.

There is more to this parable than some sort of social or economic commentary. It is really a matter about where our hearts are: with God or with our worldly interests and concerns? How we act has real spiritual consequences. Our words and actions reveal our intentions. The parable is told to compel us to act out of the love which has been shown to us in the witness of the Scriptures to Jesus, the divine love which “was made flesh and dwelt among us”. There is the close and inescapable nexus between the love of God and the love of one another. We ignore it at our peril.

So who will we be? Like Lazarus – a certain beggar who knows his lack and his need and who is named in the mercy of God? Or Dives, the unnamed rich man who is indifferent to God and to his fellow man? What will it be, heaven or hell, because we have not paid attention to Moses and the Prophets, let alone to the one who rose from the dead?

Christians are simply those who know the love of God for our humanity. To know that is to live it in our lives. It is, of course, a life-long struggle, the struggle to let God’s grace perfect our souls. It has to do with our reading the Scriptures, with our thinking and acting upon what has been proclaimed and heard in the liturgy. We are meant to be changed by what we have been given to see in the witness of the Scriptures to the truth of Jesus Christ. It means repentance and forgiveness; it means service and sacrifice. It means abiding or dwelling every day in the love of God and letting that love shape and govern our souls and lives. It is our challenge and it is, quite literally, about heaven and hell.

“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.”

Fr. David Curry
Trinity 1, 2011