Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity
“Hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us”
We have gone, it seems, from the heights of blessedness in the vision of the Triune glory of God on Trinity Sunday to the ground of human existence in all of its confusions and uncertainties both last Sunday and again today.
Trinity Sunday presents the cosmic vision of the whole of creation in its praise of the Triune God, the One-in-Three who is worthy “to receive glory and honour and power; /For thou hast created all things, /And for thy pleasure they are, and were created.” All created things find the truth of their being in the praise of the Trinity. One way to that vision is through the gathering up of the whole pageant of Revelation signaled in the four and twenty elders representative of the books of the Old Testament and the four living creatures signifying the Gospels of the New Testament. It is a remarkable image and one which requires ultimately a change in our thinking, a constant metanoia, we might say; in short, a deeper awareness of heart and mind.
“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked Jesus, only to be told that he needed to think in a new way, not by way of ratio but of intellectus, meaning not in a narrow cause and effect kind of reasoning but in a larger more comprehensive kind of thinking which draws the knower and the known together into one. “Ye must be born again,” is what Jesus had said to him. It means from above and so our thinking must be analogical, a thinking upward towards the goodness and into the oneness of God. But to think upwards on our part is only possible because of the downward movement of God himself. “No man hath ascended up into heaven but he that came down from heaven.” In the lifting up of the one who came down are found all the possibilities and the actualities of eternal life for us.
Thus the Trinity Sunday readings already embrace the downward movement towards our daily lives on the ground where we are placed. The way up is the same as the way down, as I and Evan and others were regularly reminded at the Colloquium and Conference which I attended last week. The phrase is from Heraclitus.
Last week we argued that we are Lazarus, both as lying on the ground “desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fall from the masters’ table” and raised up into the bosom of Abraham, for if we do not see ourselves in Lazarus then we will be like the Rich Man, ultimately lost and in torments. We noted as well the parallel to the other Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, dead and buried but raised up by his friend Jesus. “Lazarus, come out.” May we not say that is the same as “Ye must be born again”? Are these things, too, not the same as the invitation in today’s Gospel, “Come for all things are now ready?”
