Christ Church

Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 2

Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God

You’re invited! To what? To the banquet of love. “Love bade me welcome,” as the poet, George Herbert, wonderfully says. “Come unto me, all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,” Jesus says. “Come and see,” he says to the disciples of John. “Come, for all things are now ready,” Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel parable. The whole of the Christian life is about the invitation to love. The kingdom of God is not about power and prestige; not some sort of patriarchy, even on ‘Father’s Day’. It is about the divine love which perfects and renews, refreshes and restores the broken loves of our broken lives. “Herein is love.”

And that love is powerfully made known to us. “Hereby we know love.” How? “Because he laid down his life for us.” And because he laid down his life for us, “we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Thus we see the ever-present aspect of reciprocity and mutuality that belongs to the Christian Faith. Thus we see the paradoxical nature of sacrifice without which love is nothing. We are to act out of what has been shown to us and known by us in the story of Christ crucified, the book of love opened for us to read. Even more, as John again in his First Epistle tells us, we are to love not just “in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.” Something is required of us if love is to be real for us and in us.

Yet “my soul drew back” from Love’s invitation, as the narrative voice in Herbert’s poem says. Why? Why do we not respond to God’s invitation? Is it a failure to pay attention? To God? To the meaning of God in our lives? Such are our modern concerns. God, it seems, is irrelevant to us. Or is it the church which has become irrelevant both to God and to us?

In the current situation of Covid-19, the churches have been caught in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, it belongs to the Christian Faith to invite people to come and see, to come and be fed, to come and be refreshed by God’s Word and Sacrament; to be companions with God and with one another – companion literally means with bread, com panis. We are companions in the breaking of the bread; that is our blessedness. On the other hand, that has been refused by the civil and medical community as being dangerous because of the pandemic. And understandably so. How do we respond to the demands of the invitation which belongs to the Church’s essential proclamation? The last several months have been revealing on that score.

The churches have been effectively shut down both by the state and by the acquiescence of ecclesiastical authorities. It is not the first time that countries, communities, and churches have faced plagues and threats to human life. It may be the first time that the Church in the form of the churches has effectively been denied any real voice and any way of responding to such things pastorally and theologically. Never has the sacramental and pastoral ministry been so completely proscribed except in times of outright persecution. The ministry, being what it is, has, at times and in some places, endeavoured to find ways to honour the dictates of the state while also ministering to souls. Gone are the times when the clergy were often on the front-lines of care and in jeopardy of their own lives. Mercifully, there have been few fatalities of Covid-19 among the front-line health-care workers.

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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.

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In thanksgiving for the reopening of Christ Church for worship: Laus Deo

“Behold a door was opened in heaven”

God is communion. God is dance. Because “a door was opened in heaven”, our doors too are opened and we enter into the dance of the Trinity. “This is none other but the house of God; this is the Gate of Heaven.” It is written on the very walls of our church.”Behold!” The whole point and being of the Church is about our being opened to God and to our lives in and with God. And God is communion, the communion of the Trinity, and God is dance, the dance of reason and love, the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology so wonderfully expressed in the Athanasian Creed; in short, the ways in which God is utterly other and beyond yet intimately connected to all reality. To think God is to know and love God in the mystery of God’s own being and life. The Creed we just proclaimed provides nothing more or less than a way of thinking about how God is at once more and beyond and yet present and with us. Here is the love that thinks and loves all things in its own loving and thinking. It is about the dance, the dance that connects Christianity to the insights and concerns of the world’s religions and philosophies about a divine principle whose self-relation is the ground of its relation to all else.

We have all gotten used to the strange and awkward dance of social distancing in these unusual times. But the greater dance is the dance of the Lord. “I am the Lord of the Dance” is the most favourite hymn of students at the Chapel at King’s-Edgehill, but even more radically, God is the dance. The technical theological term is perichoresis, the mutual indwelling or dance of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The doors are opened that we might celebrate the great wonder of God in himself without which God’s relation to us is mere idolatry and foolishness. How wonderful that our doors should finally be opened during the continuing concerns of the Covid-19 outbreak to celebrate God in himself. “Let us thus think of the Trinity!”

Think God. Nothing could be more counter-culture than this. We have missed out on the actual corporate celebrations of most of Lent, of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, of Easter and Eastertide, of Rogation and Ascension, of Ascensiontide and Pentecost, to be sure. But in the providence of God, we have been able to break our eucharistic fast, and never more wonderfully than on Trinity Sunday, the great feast of God in the majesty of himself, the feast which is the great gathering of all things into their source and ending, God as Trinity: God in the mutual indwelling life of Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Perichoresis signifies God in Himself, God in his own super-essential and utterly self-complete and self-sustaining life which is life essential for us and in every way.

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