Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity
“We love him because he first loved us”
St. John’s Epistle is a treatise on love which complements and underscores with emphasis the love which his Gospel proclaims. It is, it seems to me, primarily through the eyes of John that we enter into the mystery of God. This epistle intends the application of the Gospel proclamation “God is love” to our lives. It is the underlying theme of the Trinity season. Love is of God and so we ought also to love one another. But what is that love?
That love is the communion of God with God in God – the communion of the Trinity. This is the love by which we have communion with God and so with one another. Our loves find their place and meaning in God’s love.
“God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” This is the recurring mantra of the Trinity season: This is the love which the Church is empowered and compelled to proclaim. But more than that, the Church is to be the place of the indwelling love of God, the place where God’s love is called to mind, and the place where that love takes shape in us. The Church is to be the place where we seek the perfection of our loves in the grace of Jesus Christ because the Church proclaims and confesses that love.
The Church, of course, refers to more than merely a building, just as the building, of course, points to so much more beyond itself, so much more beyond wood and stone, glass and tapestry. Our holy places signify a greater purpose and one which extends into the stuff of our daily lives with the intent that they should be holy lives. We are called to love out of the love which has been shown to us.
Four things are to be noted here as arising out of what we see through the eyes of John. First, that the love which is of God has been revealed to us as the communion of the Trinity; secondly, that our lives find their place and meaning in the Trinitarian love of God; thirdly, that our loves are expressed in the concrete realities of our everyday lives; and fourthly, that in seeking the perfection of our loves in the grace of Christ, we acknowledge that our loves are imperfect and disordered. It is only in the communion of the Trinity that we begin to find the proper expression and the true meaning of our loves and our lives.
