Christ Church

“Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind.”

Dreams and visions. It is hard to know what to make of such things. They might seem so subjective and impressionistic, so removed from what is actual and real, as we might assume. In one way, that is true, at least when we look at the form in which ideas are conveyed rather than the ideas themselves. But if we look instead at the ideas themselves then perhaps, just perhaps, even in our dogmatic and empirical attachments to material reality, we might discover wisdom and truth.

And wisdom and truth are what are at issue on The First Sunday after Trinity. Wisdom and truth guides and directs our judgments and our actions. The Eucharistic readings, the epistle from The First letter of John that “love is of God” and Luke’s Gospel about the parable of the rich man, Dives, and Lazarus, are all about living the vision that has been opened out to us. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” as we heard on Trinity Sunday.

The point of an open door is that you go through it. The vision is to be entered into and lived. Our failure to do so creates the “great gulf fixed” between the rich man in the torments of Hell and Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham. Hell, as always, is about our own choosing; signaled in the parable by stepping over and ignoring Lazarus “lying at his gate full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”; only the dogs attend to Lazarus, it seems. It is quite a powerful image and one which conveys great wisdom as parables so often do.

Like dreams and visions, the parable opens us out to a larger understanding of reality. In ignoring Lazarus, the parable suggest, we are blind to the things of God which have been opened out to us. The door “opened in heaven” is about what is revealed and made known to us. We neglect such things at our peril. The further paradox is that in neglecting the things of God and heaven we wreak havoc on our lives with one another. We cut ourselves off from the only reality that there is. The dreams and visions are what are truly real.

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“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

We have just recited “The Creed of St. Athanasius, commonly so called”! Now that was quite a spiritual and intellectual work-out, wasn’t! Imagine doing that once every month as well as on this day, Trinity Sunday! I don’t imagine many places are using it even on this day. It challenges the anti-intellectualism of our church and culture. And yet, it provides us with a wonderful way to think the mystery of God, the mystery that we can only think and only be constantly thinking; the mystery that we can never ever exhaust. We need this marvelous parade of paradoxes to glimpse and behold the inexhaustible mystery of God.

The Creeds themselves, of which the Athanasian Creed is one, are wonderful distillations of the scriptural witness to the living reality of God revealed and therefore given to be thought. The Athanasian Creed, admittedly awkward for use liturgically and not exactly twitterable, nonetheless provides a wonderful way of thinking and reasoning upon the mystery of God. “Let us thus think of the Trinity,” it says (now that could be tweeted!), means think of the Trinity in this way, the way of affirmation and renunciation of images, positive and negative theology, that catapult us into the spiritual reality of God and in which we discover the deeper truth of our humanity. The mystery of the living reality of God is being opened unto us. Think God, love God and be with God in his being with us!

It was behind closed doors, literally and figuratively, that Jesus made known to us his resurrection. But it is not only behind closed doors that the things of God are made known to us. Through the incarnation and manifestation of Jesus Christ, through his passion and death, through his resurrection and ascension, through the sending of the Holy Spirit, “a door was opened in heaven” and we behold the glory of God in the fullness of his revelation. God makes himself known to us.

Trinity Sunday sets before us the vision of God which is the end of man. “The end of man is endless Godhead endlessly possessed” (Austin Farrer). Trinity Sunday, we might say, is the great Te Deum Laudamus of the Church. We proclaim God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We proclaim what we have been given to behold through the fullness of the scriptural witness to God’s revelation. It is what we have been given to proclaim and in which we are privileged to participate.

We meet together in the glory of the revealed God, the glory of the Trinity. All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is, we may say, the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor.12.3). To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement. It is the burden of the Church’s proclamation.

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“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It was behind closed doors, literally and figuratively, that Jesus made known to us his resurrection. But it is not only behind closed doors that the things of God are made known to us. Through the incarnation and manifestation of Jesus Christ, through his passion and death, through his resurrection and ascension, through the sending of the Holy Spirit, “a door was opened in heaven” and we behold the glory of God in the fullness of his revelation. God makes himself known to us.

Trinity Sunday sets before us the vision of God which is the end of man. “The end of man is endless Godhead endlessly possessed” (Austin Farrer). Trinity Sunday, we might say, is the great Te Deum Laudamus of the Church. We proclaim God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We proclaim what we have been given to behold through the fullness of the scriptural witness to God’s revelation. It is what we have been given to proclaim and in which we are privileged to participate.

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