Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity
“My little children, Let us not love in word, neither in tongue;
but in deed, and in truth”
The readings in these early days of the Trinity Season offer a kind of holy seminar about the necessary connection between seeing and doing, thinking and acting. There is a kind of interplay between the readings taken from the writings of John and Luke which shows us this. On Trinity Sunday we had not only the reading from John’s Gospel but also a reading from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. And last Sunday and today we have epistle readings from 1 John and gospel readings, two parables, from Luke’s Gospel.
These readings underscore a basic feature of the Christian faith: namely, the necessity to act out of what we have been given to see through the life of God opened to view through Jesus Christ. It means that there is an inescapable doctrinal character to the living out of the Christian Faith. There has to be that constant attention to the primacy of doctrine which informs our practical activities in lives of service and sacrifice. John is constantly making this point in one way or another even as Luke is constantly providing us with examples and illustrations of just what it looks like on the ground, as it were.
“Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” These are strong words. “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God,” we heard on The First Sunday after Trinity and then we were given to see how absolutely necessary it is to attend to the teachings of the Scripture and to act out of what we have been given to see in the story of Lazarus and Dives. Our indifference to one another arises out of our indifference to the things which really matter, the things of God. Today, John again emphasizes the conditions of our love in the face of the world’s animosities and hatreds and even our own failings, pointing out that love is not simply about us but, more fundamentally, it is about Christ’s transforming love in us. “This is his commandment,” John tells us, “That we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another,” emphasizing the main point that “he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him.” Luke indicates how we refuse that love through our excuses which are all about a refusal to think the things of God that have been revealed to us. We turn to the ground of our everyday affairs, a thinking downwards that denies what has been opened to view in our thinking upwards.
