Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, First Sunday after Trinity
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the First Sunday after Trinity.
Day: June 7, 2026
Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity
“He who loveth God love his brother also”
The Epistle and Gospel complement one another and illustrate the ethical understanding of God as Trinity. Last Sunday celebrated what God reveals about himself and about our humanity in Christ. It is not some abstract speculation or a mathematical puzzle, a kind of mystical Rubik’s cube, as it were. God is love: the mutually indwelling love of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; consubstantial and co-eternal. That divine love is the mystery of God revealed as Trinity which, in turn, speaks to the mystery of our humanity. Mystery does not mean what is hidden but rather what is revealed. What is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures through Word and Spirit is the essential life of God in himself and for us and in us. That demands our thinking upon what is revealed and our acting upon it. In short, it speaks to the truth and dignity of our humanity as persons made in the image of God.
It is really all about Heaven and Hell seen in the contrast between Lazarus and Dives in today’s Gospel parable. It highlights the question about acting upon what has been revealed. Dives means the rich man. What is the point of the parable? Simply what is shown in the Epistle about the necessary connection and interplay between the love of God and the love of neighbour. They are inseparable. Yet the parable illustrates their fatal separation: a great gulf is fixed between Lazarus in “the bosom of Abraham,” an image of Heaven, and Dives, imaged as being tormented in Hell.
Trinity Sunday is the revelation of God as essential love and life, the love and life which is revealed and made known as essential for our humanity. Without love, we are nothing. “God is love and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” It is as simple as that and yet so profound. “We love God because he first loved us.” But that love is meant to live in us and belongs to the true end and purpose of our lives as human beings, namely, to love as God loves. Love is motion towards another but if we neglect or ignore one another then love is not alive and moving in us. That is the meaning of Hell, the complete and utter absence of love for one another and for God who is love. Hell is a denial of the ethical, an absence of the good.
The Athanasian Creed shows the intimate and necessary connection between the revelation of God as Trinity and of theIncarnation of Christ which makes known what belongs to the radical truth of our humanity. Who we are is found in God, in God’s eternal knowing and loving of our humanity. In other words, our being known in God’s knowing of us. But that extends to our knowing and loving of one another; in short, the principle of the ethical about what is good to think and be and what is right to do that necessarily concerns our being and care for one another. All of this turns on what it means to be a person.
Month at a Glance, June 2026
Tuesday, June 9th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Thursday, June 10th, Eve of St. Barnabas
7:00pm Holy Communion
Thursday, June 11th
1:00pm Burial & Committal of Barry King, Shelburne, Nova Scotia
Saturday, June 13th
11:00am Encaenia Service KES Chapel
Sunday, June 14th, Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, June 21st, Third Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Wednesday, June 24th, Nativity of John the Baptist
10:00am Holy Communion (celebrant: Fr. Todd Meaker)
Fr. David & Marilyn away at the Atlantic Theological Conference, Charlottetown, PEI, ‘The Sublime Sermons of Anglican Poet-Preachers’, Tues., June 23rd to Fri., June 26th (giving a paper on Wednesday, June 24th)
Sunday, June 28th, Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
(Followed by a time of fellowship & refreshment – Parish Hall)
Monday, June 29th, St. Peter & St. Paul
10:00am Holy Communion
The First Sunday After Trinity
The collect for today, the Second Sunday after Pentecost, commonly called The First Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. John 4:7-21
The Gospel: St. Luke 16:19-31
Artwork: Codex Aureus Epternacensis (Manuscript of the Golden Gospels), Lazarus and the Rich Man, c. 1035-40. Illumination, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.