Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity
“If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded
though one rose from the dead.”
“God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him.” Familiar words perhaps, though we know them better through the scriptural sentences in the Offices for the Trinity season with the word, “abideth” rather than the King James version, “dwelleth.” Either way the phrase captures the essential point of the Christian Faith – our being with the God who dwells with us. We live in the love of God without which we do not live at all. Something of the radical meaning of our communion with God is wonderfully and, perhaps, terrifyingly set before us on The First Sunday after Trinity.
We either live out of what we have been given to behold – “a door opened in heaven,” as we heard last week – or we are, quite literally, it seems, in Hell. To live out of the love of God as Trinity governs how we look at one another and treat one another. As today’s epistle reading from 1 John and the Gospel parable from Luke make clear, heaven and hell are right here in how we hear and see; in short, in how we think God and how we regard one another. “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” To love God means loving our brother also.
The parable makes it clear that this ethical principle has its basis in the Jewish Scriptures spoken of here as “Moses and the prophets.” What does that mean? Simply that the love of God and the love of neighbour belong to the essential ethical insight of Judaism which is carried over into Christianity. In telling this strong and powerful parable, Jesus convicts both Jew and Christian alike of the way in which we betray God in ignoring one another. Lazarus lies at our feet. Do we simply walk over him or do we care for him? “Our life and death,” one of the desert fathers says, “are with our brother.”
