Christ Church

“God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things”

The Epistle and Gospel reading this morning not only complement each other but provide a strong encouragement to enter into what is made known to us in Jesus Christ. To put it in another way, our excuses are absolutely nothing when it comes to the heavenly banquet, itself an image of the soul’s enjoyment and fellowship with God. Our relationship with God cannot be simply what and when and if we please. What kind of God would that be? A God of our own devising, which is to say, no God. But God is greater than us, greater than our hearts in disarray, indeed, as Anselm so memorably put it, “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought,” to which we might add, and loved. Nothing greater.

Our excuses do not excuse us. This is a tough but obvious truth. Worship has priority. It is as simple as that. Yet to say this misses the greater reason. Worship cannot be coerced; it cannot be forced. It is about more than mere duty. It is about what we love. It is about our loving worship of God whose love defines us. It is so easy to miss the essential point. You can’t sell the Gospel. It isn’t a market commodity. God is not for sale.

The proclamation of the Gospel is the repeated invitation to enter into life with God. Today’s Gospel story is about the invitation to the kingdom of God’s blessedness. What launches the parable is the Gospel proclamation that “blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” That is, to be sure, a blessing. As such it is not a right. But the refusal of the invitation is the refusal of the blessing.

What is Jesus saying by way of a parable about our threefold refusal of the invitation? He is convicting our hearts about our indifference to the things of God and about the distractions in our lives. He is reminding us of the priority of God’s grace and the importance of entering into what God provides for us. We can only be moved by our hearts and minds. The parable convicts our hearts and our minds about our neglect of the things of God because of our indifference and our preoccupation with land, property, and personal affairs. I have bought a piece of ground; I have brought five yoke of oxen; I have married a wife.

Interesting and provocative excuses. Does the third imply that wives are like ground to be inspected, or oxen to be proved? But then again, is there not an even deeper critique implied in the ownership of land and the use of domestic animals? Is the land really ours? Are the oxen simply there for our use and pleasure? And then by extension, are we here simply to be used by one another, and then to be cast off into the dustbin of history? In a way, these excuses open us out to a larger view of the spiritual nature of our everyday lives.

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“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love”

The Gospel story of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, is a profound illustration of the teaching of the Epistle reading from the 1st Letter of St. John. God is love is the meaning of the mystery of God as Trinity, the essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. It is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be adored. Neither is it a human construct but the making known of God to us by God with us. What we behold in that door opened in heaven last week is what is to be lived in our lives. Thus we enter into the Trinity season, as it has come to be known, which presents a constellation of patterns, patterns upon patterns that circle around and into the mystery of God as Trinity, not unlike the circles of the Heavens in Dante’s Paradiso. “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” is the divine love which joins the varied forms of our humanity to God himself. The Trinity season emphasizes the connection between what is made known through revelation and how that it is to be lived in our lives.

The Epistle reading underscores for us the radical doctrine of the Trinity. The passage contains the core teaching that “God is love; and he that abideth or dwelleth in love abideth or dwelleth in God, and God in him.” This is a strong statement of living faith, our living in the mystery of God revealed. This love is not a transitory moment, here today and gone tomorrow; it is not about God tenting with us, as it were, but more emphatically dwelling or abiding in us, and thus, our abiding in God’s essential life. The simple point is that what is revealed is to be lived out in our lives; “because as he is, so are we in this world.” That, of course, is the great challenge and the real meaning of our spiritual pilgrimage. It is not just to God but with God and in God through the very motions of God himself alive in us. But how? Only by our attention to what is revealed and made known to us.

This is where the Gospel comes into play. It is an effective and powerful illustration of the importance and necessity of our attention to the things of God which if neglected result in our indifference and neglect of one another.

How we think about the world, as we have seen, changes how we think and deal with one another. As we have seen, the Passion and Resurrection of Christ is about the redemption of the world as gathered to God as opposed to seeing the world as something alien, something indifferent, something nauseating, and even something hostile or evil. That, in turn, changes how we see one another. The recurring theme has been about a change from fear and resentment of the world and one another to our joy and care towards one another. But this is equally true about how we think (or don’t think) about God; it affects how we think and deal with one another.

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