Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity

admin | 14 June 2020

Link to audio file of Matins & AnteCommunion for Trinity 1

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love

The great mantra for the Trinity season captures the divine self-relation which Trinity Sunday celebrates. That mantra is taken from today’s Epistle reading. The mantra, given as the opening Scriptural sentence for the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, is familiar. “God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God in him.” Since 1662, the Epistles and Gospels were taken from the King James Version of the Bible where abideth is translated as dwelleth, echoing perhaps the great Christmas Gospel in which we hear that “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” literally, “tented among us” which suggests something more transitory. “Abideth” suggests something more lasting which is most appropriate for the Trinity season which has very much to do with our abiding eternally in the love of God himself and in the interior realizations about the nature of that love.

In a way, the whole long Trinity Season is about the lessons of love taking root and abiding in us, growing in us, bearing fruit in us. So many of the images of the season, as we will see, are organic and agricultural. We are returned to the land, to the ground, as it were, and yet where we are is the ground where divine love is meant to be moving and living in us. Not because of any special quality in our wills and thoughts, but simply because of God’s love moving in us. God’s love is prior to our loves and without God’s love moving in us our loves are more than incomplete; they are, in fact, unlovely. That is the reason, I think, for this powerful Epistle reading from John that accompanies the equally powerful Gospel reading from St. Luke of the parable of Dives and Lazarus.

The argument and exhortation about God’s love in the Epistle is actually complemented by the Gospel story which highlights the problem of not loving God through our ignorance and indifference towards one another. In a way, it is all about paying attention, or not. “There was a certain rich man … and there was a certain beggar, named Lazarus.” The rich and the poor. These are the classic images of inequality which continue to bedevil our world and day and contribute to the current protests about racism and injustice. What could be more obscene than the grotesque wealth of the global transnational corporate elites, the wealth of a very few, who are virtually unaccountable to the political community? All white males, too, we might add. The parable is, to be sure, a critique of the privileged and the rich in relation to the poor and needy. But more profoundly, it calls attention to how we see one another and how we act or do not act towards one another.

In other words, it is profoundly about love ignored and denied. Lazarus lies at the gate of the rich man. Notice that Lazarus is named; the rich man is not. He is viewed in terms of an accidental and external condition, in this case, his wealth. The underlying logic is clear, I think, and goes to the heart of the Christian understanding. We are more, though not less, than our circumstances, our possessions, our concrete everyday realities. Some have more; some have less. That is not the problem exactly. The question is always about what you do with what you have in relation to others. The point is that Lazarus lies “at his gate full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table,” but he is completely ignored, it seems, only “the dogs came and licked his sores.” The description is the telling indictment of the rich man’s indifference towards someone at his very gate.

We have all gotten used to the dance of social distancing; dancing around one another in awkward steps and suspicious glances. That requires a certain awareness of one another but in what way? How do we look upon one another? In fear and uncertainty or in love and respect? We cannot, it seems, be completely indifferent to one another, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into care and compassion towards one another. Are we, in fact, really paying attention to one another as being not just with one another but with one another in love? The rich man, it seems, utterly ignores Lazarus lying at his gate, stepping over and around him, as it were, as if he doesn’t really exist, doesn’t count, doesn’t matter. He is not paying attention to the other, to Lazarus.

The rest of the parable is the dramatic explication of what that lack of attention really means. It means not paying attention to God, not paying attention to Moses and the Prophets without whom, it seems, one cannot properly make sense of the Resurrection, itself the doctrine about our life to and with Christ. That failure to pay attention to Lazarus is a denial of God. How? Because we deny ourselves as made in the image of God. We ignore and negate the redemption of our humanity in Christ’s Death and Resurrection. If each of us is made in the image of God and redeemed by Christ, then how we deal with one another reveals how we think or don’t think God.

Perhaps, last Sunday, you were troubled by the condemnatory lines in the Athanasian Creed about the Catholic Faith, “which Faith except a man keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he will perish eternally”! “They that have done good will go into life eternal; they that have done evil into eternal fire”! Strong stuff and no doubt troubling. Yet, in a way, something of their meaning is illustrated in this Gospel parable. It is precisely about whether we are alive to the knowledge of God’s love revealed in Christ and let that love live in us. If not, then we are dead, dead in ourselves and dead to God because we are dead to one another. We create the abyss between ourselves and everything else. It is not an external judgement; Lazarus in the bosom of Father Abraham, a wonderful and intimate Hebrew image; the rich man in the torments of Hell, are simply pictures about the true nature of our regard or disregard for God and for one another. Lazarus is not in the bosom of Abraham simply because he was poor and now is rich; The rich man is not in the torments of Hell simply because he was rich and now is tormented. That would be to judge things simply along social and economic lines of who has what and how much and who doesn’t. Something merely external.

What then? It is all about our lack of attention to what we have been shown and know. That is where the connection to the Epistle reading comes to play in our understanding. Our actions or inactions towards one another reveal our fundamental relationship to God. Not paying attention to one another in love and respect means not paying attention to God. We isolate ourselves from the divine love; we become cosmic orphans adrift in an indifferent universe which is our creation of the abyss of ourselves as separate from God and his love. All because we ignore one another. “He therefore that would be saved,” we heard and proclaimed last week, “let him thus think the Trinity.”

That means paying attention to what is known about God. God is love and to abide in that love means paying attention to one another, not in judgment and sentimental emotion, but in love. It means seeing one another as made in the image of God and caring for one another as God cares for us. That care is signaled in the image of the dogs coming and licking the sores of Lazarus; in short, caring for him. It is one of those few but lovely dog stories in the Scriptures that serve to remind us about divine friendship which is the ground of our friendship with one another.

The story of Tobias’ dog in the Book of Tobit is about loyalty and the faithful attention of the dog to its master. The story of the Canaanite woman coming to Jesus seeking the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil” is about paying attention. She is paying total attention to Jesus and that story draws out precisely her attention to God in Christ. “Yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Here we are all Lazarus, all in need of the care of God through the care of one another. That point always comes home to me in the lovely prayer that I like to use at funerals. It is called the In Paradisum. It reminds us of our end in God and his kingdom, the kingdom of love. It is all about paying attention to one another in knowledge and love.

Into the Paradise of God may the Angels lead thee; and at thy coming may the Martyrs receive thee, and take thee into the holy City Jerusalem. May all the Choirs of Angels welcome thee; and with Lazarus once a beggar, may God grant thee rest eternal.

Lazarus, once a beggar. If we pay attention to one another, we are paying attention to God; therein lies our wealth and our salvation, our wholeness. We are only rich when we attend to God in his Word and Will for us. If not then we are lost in the abyss of our self-exile from God and from his truth and mercy.