Year: 2012

“He proclaimed Jesus, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’”

We are in the presence of wonderful mysteries, the mysteries of God and man. The great creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith are wonderfully set before us in the Athanasian Creed, one of the three catholic creeds of the universal church, but one which, I fear, is little known, and, I am afraid, little used. Tucked away in the back of the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, it must appear to some of you as a very odd thing, a curiosity, something to peruse while suffering through an insufferable sermon, perhaps!

Yet, there was a time in our Anglican history when the Athanasian Creed was appointed to be used thirteen times a year, once a month and on Trinity Sunday. And I can think of at least one literary work which refers to the Athanasian Creed, interestingly being used at Mattins on Christmas morning, an intriguing concept; Charles Williams’ novel, Greater Trumps. In that novel, the Athanasian Creed is sung to an antiphonal setting which emphasizes precisely the counterpoint of contrasting and yet complementary ideas about God as ‘this’ and ‘not this’, the back-and-forth of negative and positive theology, and about the union of God and man in Jesus Christ. In the novel, the Creed of St. Athanasius, so-called, signals the dynamic of love, human and divine. The phrase “not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, / but by taking of Manhood into God” was one of Charles Williams’ favourite passages.

The three Creeds of catholic Christianity are the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Three Creeds and yet really one, a point made very clearly by one of the outstanding divines of the 17^th Century, Archbishop John Bramhall, whose sensibility about the interplay of Scripture and Creed and about the unity of the Creeds contribute to his wonderful epithet, Athanasius Hibernicus, the Athanasius of Ireland. Athanasius is the father of orthodoxy whose steadfast witness to the essential divinity of Christ resulted in the Creed which we know as the Nicene Creed, though properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, in reference to two of the Great Ecumenical Councils from which it came to birth in the fourth century. As Bramhall observes, “The Nicene, Constantinopolitan, Ephesian, Chalcedonian and Athanasian Creeds, are but explications of the Creed of the Apostles, and are still called the Apostles’ Creed.”

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“We love him because he first loved us.”

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus illustrates powerfully the Christian concept of love, the love which we neglect at our peril. The love of God is the animating principle that drives the love of neighbour. If we are deaf and blind to what is seen and heard about the love of God as revealed in the witness of the Scriptures and which lies at the heart of the Christian Faith, then we shall find ourselves at a great remove from God and from one another; “a great gulf fixed” between where we are and where we would want to be.

Lazarus is lying at our feet. In ignoring him, the parable suggests, we are denying God. The love of God and the love of neighbour are intimately connected. How so? Because of the Incarnation and the Trinity without which there can be no human redemption.

The parable offers a remarkable reversal of situation. The poor man, Lazarus, dies and finds himself in the bosom of Abraham, a lovely image of the intimacy of Heaven itself, while the rich man dies and finds himself tormented in Hell. It is not simply that one was rich and the other poor as if the material circumstances of simply being poor or rich are the conditions of Heaven and Hell. No. At issue is our attitude and approach to one another. “The poor you have with you always,” Jesus says, “you can do for them what you will.” What do we will? Do we step over them and ignore them? Despise and decry them? Blame them for existing and/or pretend that they aren’t there? Have them removed from our sight like some inconvenient heap of rubbish? Nuke them till they glow? How do we treat one another?

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“If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe,
if I tell you of heavenly things?”

It is Jesus’s question to Nicodemus who had asked, “how can these things be?” “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” Jesus had said. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven” and “immediately,” John the Divine tells us, “I was in the Spirit.”

Great mysteries are before our very eyes. Trinity Sunday celebrates the great and distinctive teaching of the Christian Faith. It does not celebrate an event. Nor is it about some moral lesson for us to act upon in our lives. It celebrates simply and clearly the mystery of God revealed. That is the great wonder that underlies the whole of reality and the whole meaning of our lives, morally and spiritually, intellectually and practically.

Our Church and culture is dead when it is no longer alive to the mystery of the Trinity. God’s relation to everything else is founded in God himself. We cannot not think the Trinity; to think it is our greatest challenge. The to-and-fro of questions between Nicodemus and Jesus signal the nature of that thinking. It is in the truest sense analogical thinking, thinking upwards, thinking into what has been shown to us, which are not simply earthly things but heavenly things. Being born again is not the monopoly of the charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Christian faith; it is the truth of the Christian faith. We are defined by what God reveals to us: himself, from which everything else derives. Religion is as dead as a door-nail when we think of it in terms of what pleases us or what is useful to us. Our instrumental reason betrays us when we attempt to turn everything into ways and means and deny what has intrinsic worth and value.

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“His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.”

Pentecost marks the birthday of the Christian Church. It inaugurates a new and ever-renewing spiritual community that is born out of the witness of the Scriptures in their fullness. There is the gathering up of the Old Israel into the meaning and reality of the New Israel, the Christian Church.

But what is the meaning of this new creation, this spiritual community? Formed by the coming down of the Holy Spirit, it is guided and directed by the Spirit of God and reminds us of the spiritual nature of all reality, and of ourselves as spiritual creatures who live in a spiritual community and, importantly, of the qualities of our participation in that spiritual community. But what does that mean? It means our active participation in the life of God in the power of God’s spirit.

Our second lesson this evening was once very familiar to everyone because of its being read at times in the Burial Office. Our first lesson, however, may be a little less known and yet is quite profound about the meaning of our lives in the Spirit. Isaiah’s text is the source of the concept of the seven gifts of the Spirit, gifts which have a strong and close connection to the Incarnation, to “the shoot which comes forth from the stump of Jesse,” an image of Christ in the Christian understanding of things, since Jesse is the grand-father of King David, the human lineage from which Jesus’s humanity is understood to be derived. The Spirit of the Lord was anticipated as descending upon the Messiah, the promised one of God.

But what are those gifts of the spirit? Those who were listening carefully and are especially enumerate might have counted only six gifts, there being, it seems, a repetition of “the fear of the Lord.” The Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate traditions use “piety” along with “the fear of the Lord”. The seven gifts of the Spirit are wisdom and understanding, counsel and might (or fortitude), knowledge and piety, and the fear of the Lord.

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