holy cross sermon for trinity sunday 2010

In the Name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday is always the Octave day of Pentecost. This means that Trinity Sunday somehow completes Pentecost, and brings it to a proper conclusion.

Today the Church asks us to consider God the Holy Trinity, and for good reason. Listen to the opening words of the Athanasian Creed – one of the three great Creeds of the first millennium that are the patrimony of all Christians. The Athanasian Creed is the most detailed of the three great statements of the Christian faith. It says this about the Holy Trinity:

“Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and trinity in Unity; neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.”

The Holy Trinity is one of the two great mysteries at the center of Christian faith (the other centering on the incarnation, how it is that Jesus Christ can be both perfect God and perfect man at one and the same time). In considering the doctrine of the Trinity, it is good to remind ourselves that, as St. Paul says, God dwells in “unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6.16), and that in consequence, discursive theology can only proceed so far before it falls silent and becomes contemplation – that speculation must give way to worship. It is also important to say, however, that we cannot skip straight way to contemplation, but that we must first pass through the discourse of theology, we must learn what God is worthy of worship. We must also say that that the mysteries of Christian theology are data of faith – they are “givens” (=data) revealed by God himself, .

The Athanasian Creed (BCP p. 864) goes a ways towards laying out what we may say with respect to the Trinity, and explications of Trinitarian theology, per se, have been fruitful in the course of Christian history. But the utter, transcendent mystery of the thing notwithstanding, as the Athanasian Creed says: we worship one God in three persons. And so I would like to give you a small devotional reading of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity: not what it means for God to be a Trinity of persons in Unity of being, but what it means for us to worship such a God.

The great 14^th century English mystic Julian of Norwich experienced a vision in which God revealed himself to her. Julian says the following about her vision:

“And from the time that [the vision] was shown, I desired often to know what our Lord's meaning was. And fifteen years and more afterward I was answered in my spiritual understanding, thus: 'Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Keep yourself therein and you shall know and understand more in the same. But you shall never know nor understand any other thing, forever.

“Thus I was taught that love was our Lord's meaning. And I saw quite clearly in this and in all, that before God made us, he loved us…”

God is all about love. This we know from the first Epistle of St. John, who says it very simply: God is love. Thus we know that whatever else the Holy Trinity may be, the Holy Trinity is love. The Father eternally begets the Son in love, and therefore the Father is eternally Father, and the Son eternally Son, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from both by being the love that is the act of eternal begetting and eternally being-begotten (cf. Augustine in De Trinitate).

And this is the preeminent way in which God is revealed to us as love: God reveals to us the love that obtains eternally between the three persons of the Godhead: the Father eternally begets the Son in love, and the Son eternally returns the love of his Father. And indeed a consistent theme among the fathers of the Church is that the love that exists between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church says this:

“…Love proceeds from the lover into the beloved… the Father loves the Son and” the Son loves the Father…… and “the Holy Spirit is the love of the Father into the Son and” of the Son into the Father. [Commentary on the Sentences, Distinction 10]

As Julian of Norwich said: before God made us, he loved us. Before God made you, he loved you. As Psalm 139 says: “Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; all of them were written in your book…” Another great 14^th century mystic of the Church, Meister Eckhart, describes the inner life of God as a frothing or boiling of love, and he says that we are made by God from the boiling-over of the love that is his inner life. It is God’s nature to create, because his nature is love. As surely – or more surely – as the natural end of the love between a man and a woman is the bringing forth of new life in the procreation of children, so creation itself is the supernatural end of the love that is the inner life of the Holy Trinity. Why did God create us? It is his nature to create. Because he is love.

We see this love of God revealed perfectly in Jesus. Again, First John says “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.” And the life that he gives us to live is the life of love. For this reason the Father sent the Son, to restore us to the union of divine love. And as the Son returns to the Father, the Holy Spirit is sent to us at Pentecost to confirm and conform us in that union of eternal love. This is that for which we were made – and the realization of our purpose, the attainment of the love of God, is the wellspring of our truest happiness, whether we are capable of realizing it or not: the completion of our joy can only be found in God, in our being caught up into the communion-in-love that is the very being of the Holy Trinity.

St. John Chrysostom, a great teacher of the faith from the fourth century, says this:

“The Unity of the Godhead, the Three Persons in One God, is not a barren truth in any sense; the devout consideration of it promotes unity in us. Our Lord's prayer for Christians to the Father is, ‘that they may be one as We are One.’ All love, all harmony, all union, worthy of the Name, is in the knowledge of the Three Persons and One God.”

There is a popular feeling these days that dogma is unpleasant. That is merely a cause for rancor and division among people. That if we could just get rid of believing-in-stuff, we would all be able to get along. Nothing could be further from the Christian truth. True solidarity, true communion, true fellowship, togetherness, fraternity – this is a gift given to us in the gift of God’s own life. And conversely, all feelings of solidarity and community apart from God ultimately prove chimerical.

The three-personed God wants to draw us in, to seduce us, to share with us the inner life of eternal love and mutual self-giving that he is. That is the meaning of this day: That God loves us; that his love is such that he was unwilling that we should be separated from him, unwilling that we should die in our sin. So he sends his only Son, whom he loves, to reveal his love by giving his life for us and to us. And then he sends us his Spirit, the very Love that constitutes the eternal and mutual self-giving relationship of Father and Son, the very Love that is itself God – he sends us the Spirit to teach us, to bring is self-disclosure to our remembrance, and to confirm us in what is the proper possession of the Father and the Son, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel: the Spirit of Truth “will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” We have been given the Holy Spirit to teach and confirm us in divine love, in the life of God himself. And by the way, God’s is not a weak love that is content to let us have what we think we want. As I have often said, God’s motto is NOT “live and let live.” No. God loves us too much to leave us alone. Scripture says that this God-who-is-Love is a CONSUMING FIRE. As Fr. Tom Hopko has said, this God-who-is-Love is a God who disciplines his children, wounds and flees from his lover, prunes his vineyard, burns his gold, and smashes his vessels. God’s message to us is, “die to yourself, that you may have life in me.” His love for us will pierce and burn us through, it will purge us of those things that keep us from blessedness, from life and peace and joy in union with him. If only we will let it. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God – but God never forces himself on anyone.

Again, St. Chrysostom writes:

“What, therefore, is the point we are taught, the one chief lesson which the Church would inculcate on us this day? We live under the dispensation of the Spirit, and it is, I think, this—that if we would live in the Spirit, would wait and pray for and seek His guidance, it will bring us more and more to the love of Christ, as revealed to us so fully in the Gospels. There we read of Him; we hear Him, as it were, and see Him; He is manifested to us as the Son of Man, our example, our advocate, the Sacrifice for us; in His parables and precepts, in His miracles of mercy, and His daily life, we have Him, as it were, before us; it is to the love of Him, and obedience to Him, to His likeness, the Holy Spirit must conform our unruly wills and affections.”

In your prayer life, invite the Holy Spirit to come to you. Ask God that you may live in the Spirit and by this power. Seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to confirm you in what is God’s own possession, namely his love. Turn meekly to God, without pretension, looking on Christ in love and gratitude, contrition and humility – the humility borne of facing yourself honestly, of taking stock of your life and offering it to God, and trusting Him to work in you in whatever ways are necessary to effect your blessedness – that you may be brought at the last to the blessedness of communion in the inner life of God, the eternal love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

worthy is the lamb

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away." And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new.... It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment. He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son."

sermon for pentecost / year c / may 23, 2010

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is the feast of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, when the Lord rose victorious from the dead. In the book of Acts, St. Luke describes the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Twelve, the event we remember today:

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit…” (Acts 2.1-4)

Jesus called this gift, this “baptism” of the Holy Spirit, “the promise of the Father” – and he had told the Twelve to expect it, and prayerfully to wait for it in Jerusalem. Moreover, Acts tells us what the Twelve DID once they had received the Holy Spirit:

“[They] began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Par'thians and Medes and E'lamites and residents of Mesopota'mia, Judea and Cappado'cia, Pontus and Asia, Phryg'ia and Pamphyl'ia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyre'ne, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.’” (Acts 4.4-11)

What – or who – is the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Holy Trinity. This we know. Yet what does it mean to say that? Scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit as “the paraclete”, from the Greek word “parakletos”, which is often translated the advocate, the counselor, the comforter, or the helper. But all of these words describe essentially the operations of the Holy Spirit – what the Holy Spirit DOES for us. Namely, he advocates for us, he counsels us, comforts, and helps us.

We say in the creed that we believe that the Holy Spirit is himself God – God of the same divinity – the same “godness” as the Father and the Son; that he is “the Lord, the giver of life” and that he is sent to us by the Father and the Son, and that we rightly worship and glorify the Holy Spirit with the same worship and glory that we give to the Father and the Son.

I think St. Augustine of Hippo has the most helpful clarification of who the Holy Spirit is. In his great work “On the Trinity”, St. Augustine says that “the Holy Spirit is [that] unutterable communion of the Father and the Son” and that the Holy Spirit is “the love by which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father.”

To receive the Holy Spirit is therefore to receive the “unutterable communion of the Father and the Son”. It is to receive “the love by which the Father loves the Son and the Son love the Father.” To receive the Holy Spirit means to receive within ourselves the abiding and divine communion that is the same thing as the very life of God. And in this regard, let us remember that the word for spirit in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, also means “life” and “breath”. So there are three terms, really, for that which we receive from the Lord, three terms naming a single reality: (1) the Holy Spirit, which is (2) the eternally abiding communion-in-love of Father and Son that is (3) the very life of God.

For us to receive the Holy Spirit therefore means for us to receive divine life, the eternal communion, the mutual delight, of the three persons of the Godhead. It is quite a gift. To understand this mystery of Pentecost enables us to draw further implications about Christ’s gift of life in the Spirit. In 2008 Pope Benedict addressed 400,000 young people gathered for World Youth Day in Australia. He said:

“Love is the sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit! Ideas or voices which lack love – even if they seem sophisticated or knowledgeable – cannot be ‘of the Spirit’. Furthermore, love has a particular trait: far from being indulgent or fickle, it has a task or purpose to fulfill: to abide. By its nature love is enduring. Again… we catch a further glimpse of how much the Holy Spirit offers our world: love which dispels uncertainty; love which overcomes the fear of betrayal; love which carries eternity within [itself]; the true love which draws us into a unity that abides!”

The gift of the Holy Spirit is a gift of intimacy with God and with one another, a gift which dispels fear, and opens the mysteries of God to our understanding. But how do we receive this gift from God? Well, all who have been baptized have received the Holy Spirit sacramentally – objectively – in their baptism. Likewise, the sacrament of Confirmation objectively “confirms”, actualizes, seals, and brings to fulfillment the gift of the Holy Spirit in Baptism.

But gifts must not only be given, they must be received as well. And here we must cooperate with the work that God has done in our lives. He works outside of us and apart from us, but we must cooperate with his work to see it bear fruit in our lives. The one thing that God cannot do is violate our freedom. And so we must pray – asking God to renew in us the gift of his Spirit; we must cultivate within ourselves dispositions that are susceptive to the gift of the Holy Spirit; and we must exercise our wills and act in ways that are congruous with the Spirit’s initiatives. This means loving God, loving our neighbors and even our enemies; it means we must have a joyful heart and countenance in all circumstances, remembering all that we have been given in Christ; we must be peacemakers and witnesses of peace, never intentionally harming anyone for any reason; we must be patient when we are ourselves afflicted or maligned or abused; we must be kind to everyone; we must dwell on what is good and practice it in all we do; we must be faithful to Christ, obeying the mandates of the Gospel and keeping the Church’s moral law; we must be gentle with all men, particularly those who are weak or suffering or disadvantaged; and we must exercise self-control, never allowing fear or jealousy or anger or vanity or our sensual appetites to dictate our actions to us (cf. Galatians 5.22f).

Lastly, we must remember to do what the apostles did on the day of Pentecost: proclaim the mighty works of God in Christ (Acts 4.11). And we must proclaim this good news with the way we live – as unashamed and conspicuous disciples of Jesus – and also with our SPEECH. We must be willing to share our faith in Christ with others, with those in our lives who are hungry for meaning or direction, or who are sorrowful or who feel lost. But in order to be able to share the mighty works of God in Christ, we must first know what these works are. So we have a duty to inform ourselves, not only by reading and re-reading, and marinating in holy Scripture, but also by looking at our own lives and reminding ourselves (or maybe realizing for the first time) how God has made known his deliverance in our own personal histories, the particular ways we have known his mercy, and asking forgiveness for our failures to acknowledge it and to cooperate with it.

This is how we participate in God’s action within the world, in calling all people into the communion of his love. This was his purpose from the beginning; this was why he called Abraham, gave the law, sent the prophets, elected Mary, and sent his Son to live and die as one of us: in order to reconcile the whole world to himself. We are called to God in Christ, and we have been filled with his own life-giving Spirit, so that we may participate in his saving action within the world, and ourselves be caught up in the abiding unity of the one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

a prayer from the syrian clementine liturgy

O God, you are the unsearchable abyss of peace, the ineffable sea of love, the fountain of blessings, and the bestower of affection, you send peace to those who will receive it; open to us this day the sea of your love, and water us with plenteous streams from the riches of your grace, and from the most sweet springs of your benignity. Make us children of quietness, and heirs of peace. Enkindle in us the fire of your love; sow in us your fear; strengthen our weakness by your power; bind us closely to you and to each other in one firm and indissoluble bond of unity. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

from friedrich holderlin -- the poet du jour in father brown town

From Holderlin's great poem Patmos:

Jesus Christ. This latter now I wish

To sing, like Hercules or the island which

Was held and saved, refreshing

The neighbouring one with cool sea waves drawn

From ocean's desert, the vast, Peleus. But that's

Impossible. Differently it is a fate. More marvellous.

More rich to sing. Immeasurable

The fable ever since. And now

I wish to sing the journey of the nobles to

Jerusalem, and anguish wandering at Canossa,

And Heinrich himself. If only

My very courage does not expose me. This first we

Must understand. For like morning air are the names

Since Christ. Become dreams. Fall on the heart

Like error, and killing, if one does not

Consider what they are and understand.

But the attentive man saw

The face of God,

At that time, when over the mystery of the vine

They sat together, at the hour of the communal meal,

And in his great soul, carefully choosing, the Lord

Pronounced death, and the ultimate love, for never

He could find words enough

To say about kindness, then, and to affirm the affirmative. But his light

was

Death. For niggardly is the wrath of the world.

Yet this he recognized. All is good. Thereupon he died.

But nevertheless, bowed down, the friends at the very last

Before God saw the denier's presence, as when

A century bends, thoughtfully, in

The joy of truth,

Yet they were sad, now that the evening had come. For to

Be pure is a skill, a life that has a heart, in

The presence of such a face, and outlasts the middle,

But much is to be avoided. Too much

Of love, though, where there is idolatry,

Is dangerous, strikes home most. But those men were loath

To part from the face of the Lord

And from their homeland. Inborn

Like fire in iron was this, and beside them

Walked, like a plague, the loved one's shadow.

Therefore he sent them

The Spirit, and mightily trembled

The house and God's thunder-storms rolled

Distantly rumbling, creating men, as when dragon's teeth, of glorious fate....