Sermon for the Third Sunday after Trinity

admin | 25 June 2023

“The God of all grace … shall himself restore, stablish, strengthen you.”

The epistles, especially of the Trinity season, lay out the doctrine of our abiding in Christ. They focus on the qualities of our being in Christ. The First Sunday after Trinity sets before us the principle of abiding in God and God abiding in us; it belongs entirely to God as love and that love as shaping our loves and our lives. The Second Sunday showed us something of its radical meaning in terms of how that divine love overcomes the animosities, divisions, and condemnations of both others and ourselves. Both those epistles were taken from John’s First Epistle. Today, the epistle reading is from 1st Peter from which the epistle for the Fifth Sunday will also be taken. Next Sunday, the epistle reading is from Paul’s letter to the Romans. These so-called ‘catholic’ epistles of John and Peter, meaning that they are addressed to the whole or universal church, along with Romans 8 next week, emphasize the theme of our sanctification in and through “the sufferings of this present world” and thus provide an introduction to a series of readings from Paul’s epistles that will instruct us in our life in Christ over the rest of the Trinity season. “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts,” as Peter will tell us.

The emphasis on the doctrine of our abiding in God and God in us is sanctification. The pageant of justifying grace in what Christ has done for us from Advent through to Trinity Sunday now gives over to the qualities of its realization in us, the pageant of sanctifying grace which belongs to our life in Christ. The Gospels illustrate the meaning of the doctrine or teaching and in often vivid ways.

Today’s epistle reading exhorts us to humility as the necessary condition of our being “restored, stablished and strengthened” which the Gospel illustrates in “this parable” which “[Jesus] spake unto them.” Who are they? Well, the motley crew of our wounded and broken humanity! Publicans and sinners, on the one hand, and Pharisees and Scribes, on the other hand. In a way, it embraces the whole range of our humanity. Publicans here refer to tax-collectors who are linked to the more general aspect of our humanity as sinners. The Pharisees and Scribes, the religious leaders and authorities in the Jewish world with their different approaches to the law, murmur against Jesus. Why? Because the Publicans and sinners “drew near … for to hear him.” The context is again the ways in which the human community is divided against itself and in particular against others; the Pharisees and Scribes against the publicans and sinners. But even more, there is the reality of our opposition to God.

The positive lies in the drawing near of the publicans and sinners to hear Jesus. This suggests the desire of our souls for the teaching of God beyond the divisions and divides in our worldly lives. But the condition is repentance; something which the witness of John the Baptist also highlights “by preaching of repentance.”

The simple point from Pentecost and Trinity Sunday is that the human community has no unity in itself. Nor are we really one with ourselves; we are divided in our affections and thoughts. Our unity and the real truth of our humanity is found in God and God in us. This is the strong message of the epistles illustrated wonderfully in the Gospels. What is the illustration here? It is the parable which Jesus tells us because we are in that company of publicans and sinners, Pharisees and Scribes, all divided against one another and divided within our hearts, but yet desiring what God seeks for us, we hope.

What is this parable? It is really one parable in three parts of which we have the first two this morning: the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son or the lost sons. Sometimes we speak of these as three parables but properly speaking they are one; they belong together and illustrate the necessity of humility which is the counter to all forms of human presumption, on the one hand, and the grace of God which seeks out the lost and restores us to our truth in him, on the other hand. All three parts of the parable illustrate the theme of God’s love seeking out our lost humanity and welcoming us into the loving embrace of God’s love. God is like a shepherd and like a woman and like a father; lovely analogies that point us to the priority and primacy of God and God in us.

It is all God and yet it is all us. We are like the lost sheep and like the lost coin and, more pointedly, like the lost or prodigal son. But we are like the elder son in his resentment of the good of another, his own brother. Just as the younger son, the prodigal son, rejected his father, so the elder son rejects his own brother; “this son of yours,” he complains to his father. It is his own brother. Beyond these points, we are to envision ourselves as embraced in the restorative and redemptive love of God which means the joy of heaven, the communion of saints and angels, we might say, because of our being returned to who we are in the knowing love of God. This is the cause not of our murmuring resentment but of our rejoicing and not our rejoicing in ourselves but in God and in one another. Only so is there true rejoicing.

The condition of this restoration and rejoicing is the knowledge of ourselves as sinners. This is the point of the first part of the parable about the lost sheep which being found is the cause of rejoicing. The analogy is clear; “likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth” and then points to the problem of our self-righteousness. There is “more [joy] than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance,” not because of any virtue in themselves but because they are in the company of God who embraces us all. The more significant point, perhaps, is that the joy of the ninety and nine is incomplete without the restoration of the one, looking back to the idea of a hundred sheep in the wilderness and the one that is lost and found. The community rejoices in its being made whole as a community of repentance and joy; the most profound and true form of inclusivity.

The second part of the parable emphasizes the principle of that restoration to wholeness. It is grounded in the love of God here imaged as a woman who, having lost one out of ten pieces of silver, “light[s] a candle, and sweep[s] the house, and seek[s] diligently till she find[s] it.” The adverb is significant both in Greek and Latin. It is the idea of careful attention and love. Diligence or love is the active principle in the seeking or desiring. God’s self-motion as love embraces us and gathers us into that perfecting love in which we are made whole. I love the detail of her “light[ing} a candle;” an image of illuminating love that bears witness, like John the Baptist, to the true light of Christ.

There is, I think, something more to these teachings. It is simply this. We find our joy in God’s rejoicing in us. Such is the point of the shepherd who rejoices in finding the lost sheep; the joy of the woman in finding the lost coin; the joy of the father in the return of the son to his everlasting and constant love. The parable in its three interrelated parts signals the priority of the divine love as all encompassing. We are restored to the truth of our God-created humanity. The God, who as George Herbert notes, “hast form’d me out of mud,” recalling us to the dust and ground of creation, and “hast redeem’d me through thy blood,” recalling us to Christ’s Passion, has “sanctifi’d me to do good.” That requires the “purg[ing],” he says, of “all my sinnes done heretofore” through confession and by “striv[ing] to sinne no more,” but also by God indwelling us: “Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in me,/ with faith, with hope, with charity; /that I may runne, rise, rest with thee.” (Trinite Sunday). In a way that is the whole project of the Trinity season. It is about our abiding in the dynamic life of the Trinity.

The love of God runs out to us in the Passion of Christ and now that love is meant to run, rise, and rest in us by our abiding in the dynamic of that love. Such is our joy in love and repentance. To know ourselves as sinners becomes our joy, the joy of being restored to fellowship with God and with one another. For as Peter reminds us, God “has called you to his eternal glory in Christ,” but only “after that ye have suffered a while.” This is the holy realism of our Christian faith which gives us the courage to face the division and divides of our world and our hearts and yet bids us find our joy in Christ.