Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity

admin | 25 June 2017

“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?”

Today’s Gospel tells a parable of the kingdom of God. It is told as a comment on the pious claim of “one who sat at meat with Jesus” who said, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” We are being challenged about what that blessedness really means. It has altogether to do with the ground. The point is really about the conditions of our being with God; ultimately, it is about God as the true ground of our being, the one in whom we truly live and move and have our being.

The parable tells about a great supper to which many were invited. The dynamic of the parable turns on our response. “Come for all things are now ready,” we are told. But here is the response. “And they all with one consent began to make excuse”. With one consent? Yes, they all consented in one thing, making an excuse even if the excuses were a bit different. For even as different excuses, they are all alike in being excuses. They are all about turning to the ground in some fashion or another, both literally and metaphorically, but the deeper point is that they are all a turning away from the true ground of their being which is found in God.

It is in him that our lives on the ground have meaning and purpose. That is where the ground of our hearts is proved. That will have to do with how we live out our lives, how we live out the vision of love that has been shown to us in Jesus Christ and in whom we find the joy and the delight of our lives. In the Gospel parable, one argues that “I have brought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it”. Another said, “I a have bought five yoke of oxen, and I must go to prove them.” And finally, another said, “I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.” Now that’s probably not an excuse to be trifled with but really, the point of the parable is clear. An invitation is given, and excuses are made in return. No big deal, right? Wrong.

The point is that it is a big deal because how we live on the ground of human existence does matter. It matters because God is the true ground of our souls, not some sort of add-on, some new upgrade. Reboot and carry on. No. God is the real ground of our being and we are only alive in the orientation of lives to him. That is the very definition of prayer. Prayer is all the service that we ever do unto God. And so the orientation of our lives must be upward in the downward motion of God’s love towards us. Our lives on the ground, quite literally, and our working the ground, quite literally, and our lives in family and community, quite literally, all belong to our life with God.

“I came forth from the Father and am come into the world, again I leave the world and go to the Father,” Jesus said in the Eastertide Gospel preparations for Pentecost. Powerful stuff. But the way up and the way down are the same. It is all about a kind of circling around the mystery of God, letting God enter into our hearts yet more and more. He is our beginning and our ending.

This church building itself envelops us in the Alpha and Omega of our lives in Christ. Look up and behold the beams. At once functional and symbolic, they make the point about the ground of our being in God. We are in the mystery! Our liturgy is redire ad principia, a return to a principle, the principle which has turned to us. The way up and the way down are one and the same, indeed! Yet, something is required of us. What? It is simply our openness to the things of God, letting God have his way in our lives. It is the opposite of oppression. This is our freedom, a freedom wonderfully captured in the parable by the feast being filled with “the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.” God will have his banquet ready and filled in spite of us in our follies and excuses. Such is the reality of God, the only true reality, something which the poor and humble always know whether they know they know or not.

“Love bade me welcome,” the poet George Herbert reminds us, “yet my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sin.” That is, of course, not an excuse but a form of self-awareness. “But Quick-ey’e Love … drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/ if I lack’d any thing.” The poem explores the forms of our relation to God in terms of confession, contrition, and satisfaction all of which turn on Love’s invitation and even more, on Love’s action.

Like Lazarus we seek the crumbs which fall from the master’s table but God seeks something more for us. As Herbert’s poem unfolds we see how much love reaches down to draw us up so that we “must sit and eat”. Blessedness indeed. A blessedness found in the way up and the way down, themselves all the same, a movement to and from the principle, a movement to and from God to us. God seeks himself in his superlative goodness in seeking us to be at the banquet of love. Our refusals are nothing so much as the refusals of love, a repudiation of the ground of our true being. Our blessedness is found in God, the true ground of our being in and by the Spirit of God in us.