“He who loveth God love his brother also.”

“The rich man also died, and was buried: and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments,” Luke tells us. Wow. Where is the love in that? It seems that we have gone from Heaven to Hell in the blink of an eye, from the wonderful vision of Heaven in the celebration of God as Trinity to a vision of hell. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven.” A door, not a window, a door through which we enter into what we see and hear.

And what did we see and hear? A vision of heaven, a vision of worship through the images of Scripture. The four and twenty elders, symbolic of the witness of the Old Testament to God, and the four living creatures, symbolic of the witness of the four Gospels of the New Testament, united in the worship of the Trinity. But how do we come to such a vision of God as Trinity, as absolute self-giving love? Through Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son, “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us” who is in the bosom of the Father and makes God known to us as Trinity. A fullness of Revelation.

In John’s Epistle this morning we hear about God as love, indeed that “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.” We know this as the refrain of the Trinity season as the abiding love of God. Abiding and dwelling are synonyms. John’s Epistle is a treatise on love. It opens out to us something which is heavenly in contrast to hell. Why then the Gospel reading from Luke in the parable of Dives and Lazarus? How do we reconcile that story with the idea of becoming what we behold?

“There was a certain rich man,” Dives. That is not his name. Dives simply means the rich man. He is defined by his worldly wealth; not named, but only identified in terms of his economic status, one who is “clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.” Who is Lazarus? “A certain beggar,” but he has a name, an identity beyond his circumstance and situation. He lies at the gate of the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table.” Yet he is completely ignored by the rich man; only “the dogs came and licked his sores.” It is a graphic picture. There is a compelling contrast between the unnamed rich man and the named beggar, between the compassion of the dogs and the utter indifference of Dives, the rich man. Another dog story, it seems, much like the Canaanite woman who reminds Jesus that “even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master’s table;” what Lazarus desires but more than what he gets. It is all in the contrasts.

(more…)

Print this entry

“The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known”

The historian and philosopher John Lukacs in ‘At the End of An Age’ (2002), quotes Feuerbach’s statement that “the old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit,” noting that it is “as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any” (p. 130). It is a view (early 19th cent.) that predates both Darwin and Marx and remains the dominant assumption for “the overwhelming majority of scientists as well as computer designers” who see the world and its future in this materialistic way. But, as Lukacs says, “they are wrong” (p. 131). Materialist philosophies, ancient and modern, are but one chapter in the history of Science. The assumption that “the universe is written in the language of mathematics is entirely outdated” (p. 112). At the very least it makes the epistemological error of conflating what belongs to the mental and intellectual world of mathematics with the physical and empirical world of nature.

The over-mathematization of the natural sciences, especially Physics ends up “explaining matter away” leaving us with “a complex but essentially empty scaffolding of abstract mathematical entities” yet recognizing more and more “the intrusion of mind into matter” (p. 131). The counter to this false sense of Objectivity – the idea of reality as completely mind-independent, the world which most of us have assumed and grown up in, has been shattered from within the world of Physics and not just by those who in the post-modern philosophies of reaction default to its opposite, namely, reality as completely mind-dependent, an over-exaggeration of Subjectivism which simply asserts the opposite – all mind and no matter.

The point is that these approaches conflict and contradict each other in failing to recognize the “confluences of mind and matter, indeed, of mind preceding matter” (p. 131). It is the reciprocity between human thinking and the world that is there for thought that is the essential concern. Now all of this is but prelude to the matter, pun intended, of the Trinity, the essential mystery of the Christian faith, a mystery which we can only enter into but not control or possess; it is the mystery of God himself who by definition is incomprehensible in terms of finite human thinking and yet makes himself known to us through the images of nature and word, especially the words of Scripture and in our liturgy that are set before us today. This is captured in my text from John’s Gospel, “the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known.” It complements both the Gospel reading about being born again, or anew or upward with the lesson from Revelation about a door being opened in heaven.”

It is only through the images of Scripture and our thinking upon them that we can enter into an understanding of the mystery of God, our world and ourselves.

All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost.” To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.

Essential Christianity is Trinitarian. What do I mean? That the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christian identity, corporately and individually. You are baptized in the Name of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At Holy Communion, we participate in nothing less than the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit. Our liturgy is full of the Trinity.

(more…)

Print this entry