Day: June 22, 2014

Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity, 2:00pm service of Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf

“Love is of God”

The Trinity celebrates the fullness of God’s Revelation. It gathers up the whole pageant of what God has revealed of himself to us into the proclamation of God’s own self-identity. God is Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the three-in-one and the one-in-three. “The Father is God, the Son God, the Holy Ghost God; And yet there are not three Gods, but one God” (Athanasian Creed, BCP, p. 696). Such is the mystery of God. It is the essential heart of the Christian faith. The mystery lies in what has been shown to us.

It is all the vision of God. It is all God teaching us and all our thinking upon what God has taught us; “let [us] thus think of the Trinity” (Athanasian Creed). “I saw the Lord,” says Isaiah, recounting his vision of God, “in the year that King Uzziah died” (Isaiah 6.1).  “I saw and behold, a door was opened in heaven,” says St. John in his Revelation, his recounting of what had been shown to him to proclaim to us (Rev. 4.1). “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen,” says Jesus to Nicodemus, for so are we taught of “heavenly things” (John 3.11,12).

He is the teacher and not simply a teacher “come from God” like Moses and the Prophets, as Nicodemus supposes. For “these signs that thou doest” are not done simply because “God is with him”.  And what about those Old Testament books of ancient war stories and political intrigue?  What are we to learn from them? We are to learn of God’s good providence made known through the events of nations and the actions of persons, however contrary to worldly expectations and however hidden to ordinary perceptions. Israel had to learn what it means to be God’s people.  Israel had to learn what it means to live under the word and in the will of the God who had made himself known to her. Israel had to learn what it means to be brought up in the steadfast fear and love of God.  And so do we.

Obedience to God’s Word has to be learned. It is the condition of our being in the kingdom of God. It means attending to God’s Word, hearing it with the intention of acting upon what we hear.

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Sermons

Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity

“Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind.”

Dreams and visions. It is hard to know what to make of such things. They might seem so subjective and impressionistic, so removed from what is actual and real, as we might assume. In one way, that is true, at least when we look at the form in which ideas are conveyed rather than the ideas themselves. But if we look instead at the ideas themselves then perhaps, just perhaps, even in our dogmatic and empirical attachments to material reality, we might discover wisdom and truth.

And wisdom and truth are what are at issue on The First Sunday after Trinity. Wisdom and truth guides and directs our judgments and our actions. The Eucharistic readings, the epistle from The First letter of John that “love is of God” and Luke’s Gospel about the parable of the rich man, Dives, and Lazarus, are all about living the vision that has been opened out to us. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” as we heard on Trinity Sunday.

The point of an open door is that you go through it. The vision is to be entered into and lived. Our failure to do so creates the “great gulf fixed” between the rich man in the torments of Hell and Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. Hell, as always, is about our own choosing; signaled in the parable by stepping over and ignoring Lazarus “lying at his gate full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”; only the dogs attend to Lazarus, it seems. It is quite a powerful image and one which conveys great wisdom as parables so often do.

Like dreams and visions, the parable opens us out to a larger understanding of reality. In ignoring Lazarus, the parable suggest, we are blind to the things of God which have been opened out to us. The door “opened in heaven” is about what is revealed and made known to us. We neglect such things at our peril. The further paradox is that in neglecting the things of God and heaven we wreak havoc on our lives with one another. We cut ourselves off from the only reality that there is. The dreams and visions are what are truly real.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 23 – 29 June

Monday, June 23rd
6-7:00pm Brownies/Sparks – Parish Hall

Tuesday, June 24th, Nativity of St. John the Baptist
6:00pm ‘Prayers & Praises’ – Haliburton Place
7:00pm Holy Communion

Wednesday, June 25th
2:00pm Funeral of Eileen Demone (Demont’s Funeral Home)

Thursday, June 26th
6:30-7:30pm Girl Guides – Parish Hall

Friday, June 27th
3:30pm Holy Communion – Gladys Manning Home

Saturday, June 28th
4:30pm Holy Matrimony: Melanie Dawn Riley & Harry Brett Dill

Sunday, June 29th, St. Peter & St. Paul / Trinity II
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
4:00pm Evening Prayer

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Prayers and liturgy

The First Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, commonly called The First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

Feti Workshop, Lazarus and the Rich ManO GOD, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:19-31

Artwork: Workshop of Domenico Feti, The Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, 1618-28. Oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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