Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity
“If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart
and knoweth all things”
It is, I think, a great comfort. St. John in his epistle-treatise on love seeks to settle us upon “the one thing needful”, our contemplation of the love of God that dwells in us and the necessity of acting out of that love in our love for one another. Yet, while it is comforting in the biblical and theological sense of strengthening, it is also convicting. It challenges and convicts our hearts.
For where are our hearts? Everywhere except with God because of our excuses. The Gospel story from St. Luke illustrates how our hearts condemn us. There is the invitation to love and there are our refusals of that love.
Excuses, excuses. We all make them. What are they about? Simply our capacity to turn away from God. How? By our turning towards the everyday and the practical, so-called, which is always about our own immediate interests; by our turning, quite literally, to the ground rather than to God. The problem here is not with the world, with the everyday realities of our lives, with the practical necessities of life. No. The problem is with our wills. The question is about our attachments. We are too attached to the wrong things or in the wrong way.
This is a function of the disarray of our hearts. The whole project of the Trinity season and, indeed, of the pilgrimage of our lives in faith is about “setting our loves in order”. We all stand convicted by the Epistle and the Gospel of the forms of our disordered souls. The theological insight here is our experiential reality. Just consider.
If I were to ask you, as I sometimes ask the students in Chapel, how many of you have said to a brother or a sister, a husband or a wife, a mother or a father, or any figure in authority, “I hate you” or, “I kill you” the chances are pretty good that most of you, if you were honest, would have to raise your hands. Even more, if were to ask how many of you have ever thought such things! I argue that we all stand convicted. And what is John telling us? “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.” Guess what, at least in thought and often in word, we are all murderers! If looks and words could kill we would all be dead; even worse, we would all be murderers.