Sermon for Trinity Sunday, 2018

Pierre Mignard, The Holy Trinity

Fresco (detail), Interior of Cupola of Église du Val-de-Grâce (1663)

Paris, France

Today we celebrate the profound and inexhaustible mystery of one God in Three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. My hope this morning is to communicate something of the excitement, wonder, and awe that the self-revelation of the Triune God has elicited in successive generations of Christians down through the centuries.

A good place to begin is with God-in-himself. Try to imagine God as he was before he created the world. Even then God was one God in three Persons. The Son and the Spirit are not ways in which God appears to us and becomes present in his creation. Even before Jesus Christ is conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary without the aid of a human father, he has already existed as the Son of his Father in heaven from before the beginning of creation. Even before the Holy Spirit descends on the Day of Pentecost, he, too, has already existed with the Father and the Son from before time began. Even if God had never created the world, he would still be one God in three Persons.

The Eastern Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware writes: “There is in God genuine diversity as well as true unity. The Christian God is not just a unit but a union, not just unity but community. There is in God something analogous to 'society'. He is not a single person, loving himself alone, not a self-contained monad or 'The One'. He is triunity: three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love.” (The Orthodox Way, p. 33)

A bit further on, Ware unfolds the implications of this picture of the divine nature: “the doctrine of the Trinity means that we should think of God in terms that are dynamic rather than static. God is not just stillness, repose, unchanging perfection. For our images of the Trini­tarian God we should look rather to the wind, to the running water, to the unresting flames of fire. A favourite analogy for the Trinity has always been that of three torches burning with a single flame.” (The Orthodox Way, p. 35)

C. S. Lewis makes much the same point: “in Christianity God is not a static thing … but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.” (Mere Christianity, p. 95) Speaking for myself, I find these dynamic pictures of God’s inner life enormously appealing and exciting.

The Nicene Creed, which we recite at Mass almost every Sunday and major Holy Day, distills the wisdom of the first three centuries of the Church’s accumulated theological reflection on the Scriptures. The Creed uses two active verbs to describe the relations among the three divine Persons: begetting and proceeding. The Father begets the Son; the Holy Spirit proceeds—either from the Father alone, as in the original Greek version of the Creed; or, as in the later Western Latin version, from the Father and the Son.

The Creed further specifies that the Son is “begotten, not made.” We don’t use the words “beget” and “begotten” much in contemporary English. But they’re critical to describing the relationship between the first two Persons of the Trinity. Here again, C. S. Lewis comes to our aid, writing of the difference between begetting and making: “When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set ...” (Mere Christianity, p. 86)  It follows that what God begets is God.

When we say that the Son is the “only-begotten” of the Father, we’re to understand that he’s not a creature like us, with a beginning in time, but rather a second divine Person, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father. To quote C. S. Lewis again: “we must think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father — what the Father has to say.” (Mere Christianity, p. 94) Here Lewis is alluding to the New Testament image of the Son as the divine Logos or Word. Another way of saying that the Father begets the Son is that the Father speaks the Word.

The third Person, however, is not begotten but “proceeds.” Following Saint Augustine of Hippo, the Latin West has tended to understand the Holy Spirit as the personification of the love between the Father and the Son: a love so real that it becomes a third divine Person. So, the Western Church added the clause to the Nicene Creed saying that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son.” Eastern Orthodoxy has never accepted that formulation, however, and maintains that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. Resolving that dispute is above my pay grade. A point that I find helpful, however, is that in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the word “Spirit” means “breath,” “wind,” or “life.” One lovely Trinitarian analogy is that the Son is the Word the Father speaks, while the Spirit is the breath by which he speaks it. 

So, the Son is begotten; the Spirit proceeds; the Father is the source and origin of both. Still, they’re not three Gods, but one God. No one of the three ever does anything without the other two. All three share the same divine essence or nature; all three act with the same divine will. They’re distinguished only by their mutual relations; that is, their distinct personal identities arise only through their relationships with one another. 

The absolutely crucial point is that those relations are relations of Love. The Father pours himself out in begetting the Son and sending forth the Spirit; the Son and the Spirit offer everything they are back to the Father and to each other. This eternal round of going forth and returning is the “dance” to which C. S. Lewis refers in the passage I quoted earlier. The New Testament says that God is Love. That is, Love not only defines the relationships among the three Persons, but also constitutes the divine nature or essence they share as one God. Love is thus at the very heart of reality itself. 

Well, it’s time to wrap up, and you may have noticed that I never got around to the role of the three Persons in creation, let alone redemption! But we’ve got the rest of the year to talk about that. Suffice it to say that God the Holy Trinity created us, and, when we fell away, the Son and the Spirit came into the world to reclaim us and gather us up into the Trinitarian life. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity thus teaches us not only who God is, but who he invites us to become—by sharing in his life and in his love for all eternity.

Sources

C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. Geoffrey Bles. 1952.

Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Way. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 1986.

ASCENSION DAY, 2018

Hans Memling, Ascension
c. 1490; Louvre, Paris

Thursday 10 May 2018
Saint Martin’s Church, Providence

Acts 1:1-11

Luke  24:44-53

Our knowledge of Christ’s Ascension comes principally from Saint Luke’s Gospel, and from Luke’s sequel to that Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles. After his Resurrection, the Risen Christ appears to his disciples for a period of forty days. Then, at the village of Bethany on the Mount of Olives, in full view of the apostles, he lifts off from the earth and disappears into the clouds. Two angels appear, promising that Jesus will return in the same way he went into heaven. The apostles then return to Jerusalem, where they devote to themselves prayer and waiting for the promised Holy Spirit.

We don’t make nearly as much of the Ascension in the contemporary Church as we might. I suspect that many today find the imagery somewhat embarrassing, on the grounds that we no longer believe in a three-story universe, with hell downstairs, heaven upstairs, and us here in the middle. But it’s not clear that people in the biblical world believed in such a triple-decker universe either. They knew better than to think of God as located spatially somewhere “up there” in the sky. They understood perfectly well that God exists outside time and space as we know them. As King Solomon prayed at the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem: “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee …”  (1 Kings 8:27).

While I’m no physicist, my understanding is that post-Newtonian cosmology—with its relativity, black holes, worm holes, and parallel universes—affords plenty of room for movement between one kind of space-time and another. The visual image of Jesus disappearing into the clouds signifies his transition from our created realm of time and space into God’s uncreated realm of eternity. Just as he once entered this world to take human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, so now he returns to his Father taking with him the fullness of his humanity and divinity. And who’s to say that the Ascension didn’t happen pretty much as Luke describes it? To rule it out a priori would be narrow-minded indeed.

This evening, however, I want to focus on an oft-neglected aspect of Christ’s Ascension: namely, his enthronement. At the Ascension Jesus takes his place at the right hand of his Father in heaven. The New Testament states this in multiple places: for example, in the First Letter of Peter, who writes of “the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him” (3:21-22). The Feast of the Ascension thus pairs naturally with the Feast of Christ the King, celebrated annually in the Church’s Calendar on the Last Sunday after Pentecost.

The New Testament makes it clear that from his birth Jesus is a king—albeit not after the pattern of earthly monarchies. In Matthew, when the Wise Men come from the East bearing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, they ask: “Where is he who has been born King of the Jews?” (2:2) In the first chapter of John’s Gospel, when Philip brings Nathanael to meet Jesus, Nathanael ends up exclaiming: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel!” (1:49) When Jesus makes his Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the crowds who greet him cry out: “Blessed is the King who comes in the Name of the Lord” (Luke 19:38).

In all four Gospel accounts of his trial and crucifixion, Jesus is charged with having claimed to be a king, and the inscription on the cross proclaims, “The King of the Jews.” He never denies the charge, though in John he offers the clarification, “My kingship is not of this world” (18:36). Moreover, the very title “Christ,” meaning Messiah or “Anointed One,” identifies Jesus throughout the New Testament as bearing the threefold office of Prophet, Priest, and King.

So, if Jesus has been King all along, what’s the significance of his Ascension? It seems to me that the practice of monarchical succession, even in the modern world, affords a loose analogy. In a constitutional monarchy such as the United Kingdom, when the reigning monarch dies, the successor is proclaimed almost immediately: “The King is dead; long live the Queen!” Legally, the successor is the new monarch from the very second of the predecessor’s death. Even so, there’s always an interim period of waiting and preparation, sometimes as long as a year, before the coronation.

The American Presidency follows a somewhat different pattern. When a new President is elected, the victorious candidate becomes President-elect from the moment an undisputed election result is announced, usually a day or so after the election. But then there’s always that interim period before Inauguration Day, when the new President takes the oath and enters into the duties of office. This interim period is a time of preparation: of assembling a cabinet and forming an Administration-in-waiting.

The forty days between Christ’s Resurrection and his Ascension can be understood as such an interim period. His conquest of sin and death has confirmed that he’s indeed king, not just of Israel but of the entire cosmos. In his Resurrection appearances he teaches his disciples and prepares them for their mission to the world. Only then does he take his place at God’s right hand in heaven. Ascension Day is thus something like Coronation Day or Inauguration Day.

What, then, does all this mean for us, here and now? Well, the first implication is that in the Risen and Ascended Christ we have a King who is alive and reigning over all creation. No longer confined to the local presence of his human body on earth, he becomes available to each of us, in all times and places, wherever and whenever we most need him. At my parish of S. Stephen, on the masthead of our website and email communications, we quote the words of the Protomartyr himself at the critical moment of his trial before the Sanhedrin: “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56). The Ascension reminds us that the heart of Christianity is not the memory of a first-century rabbi and his inspirational teachings, but rather communion and fellowship with a living Lord and a reigning King.

The second implication follows closely from the first. If Jesus is our King, then we’re called to be his loyal subjects and servants: literally, his ministers in the world. As members of his Body, the Church, we’ve been commissioned as heralds and agents of his reign on earth: a reign of forgiveness and reconciliation; a reign of justice, love, and peace.

We cannot fulfill this calling by our own unaided efforts. But the Ascension makes Pentecost possible. Having taken his place at God’s right hand, Christ pours out the Holy Spirit upon his Church on earth, empowering us for the ministry of his kingdom. But that is to get ahead of ourselves. This evening, we rejoice that Christ our King has ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things; and we pray for the grace to continue his faithful servants until the day of his return.

Sermon for Easter 6, Year B

Acts 10:44-48
I John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17

A key theme of today’s readings is love. For those of us old enough to remember, the songs of the 1960s and 70s presented love as the solution to all the world’s problems. The Beatles gave us one of the anthems of that era when they sang, “All you need is love.” A bit naively idealistic, perhaps, but few of us would dispute the supreme importance of love for human life and happiness.

A curious feature of today’s readings, however, is that they present love as a matter of keeping commandments. Our Lord says in today’s Gospel: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, as I have kept the Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.” A bit further on, he continues: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Saint John, in the Epistle, writes: “we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.”

Here we have a clue that by the term love the New Testament means something different from what contemporary culture understands. We tend not to think of love as something that can be summoned up at will in response to a command.

When I prepare couples for marriage, I point out that nowhere does the Prayer Book service ask whether they’re “in love” with each other. I always enjoy watching their reaction. The precise wording of the question is “Will you love him / her?” In the exchange of vows that follows, the couple promises to do just that: to love each other until parted by death. The kind of love implied by that question is not so much an emotion as a decision—although it certainly can encompass and build upon romantic feelings and physical attraction as well. And these vows are humanly impossible to fulfill without divine assistance, which is precisely why the couple comes to church seeking God’s blessing.

In his classic work published in 1960, The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis analyzed four principal Greek words for love: storgē, philia, eros, and agapē; usually translated as affection, friendship, romantic love, and charity.

Storgē—or affection—is our love for family members and others with whom we share a deep natural affinity. I love my mother, my brother, my sons, and my extended family members in the first instance simply because of the family ties themselves. They don’t have to do anything to earn that love; but when they’re likeable people, so much the better.

Philia—or friendship—is the bond that grows with someone we like based on shared interests, common experiences, and mutual understanding. Notice that this second type of love may or may not be built on the first: we can become close friends with the members of our family or, conversely, with those who begin as total strangers.

By eros, Lewis means something slightly different from the popular conception of the term as unbridled lust, which is not love at all. Rather, he means that overwhelming attraction to another person which combines romantic feelings with physical desire. It’s what we typically mean when we say that we’re “in love” with someone.

Now, the important point to get clear before we go any further is that Lewis, with the Christian tradition behind him, regards all three loves just described as perfectly natural and good. There’s nothing intrinsically evil or shameful about any of them.

Like all natural goods, however, these three loves can become distorted and disordered. They each combine what Lewis calls “need-love” and “gift-love.” That is, they fulfill our own needs, and they afford us the opportunity to help fulfill the needs of others. With each of them, selfishness and self-centeredness can overwhelm generosity, or, conversely, extreme generosity can become controlling and smothering. Still, in and of themselves, storgē, philia, and eros are naturally good – the building blocks of human happiness in fulfillment of our nature as social creatures made for life in community.

Lewis believed that these three natural loves inevitably do become corrupted unless they’re purified and completed by a fourth type of love, which he calls by the New Testament Greek word agapē, in Latin caritas, in English “charity” (although the English word has taken on other connotations). This fourth type of love is not natural but supernatural: not human but divine. It is unconditional. It persists through changing circumstances because it doesn’t depend on the fulfillment of our own needs.

Our Lord is talking about this type of love when he says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.” Then, to make his meaning clear, he explains: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Such divine love is totally self-giving and completely self-sacrificial.

The classical Christian definition of love is willing and doing the good of the other, no matter what the cost to oneself. Such love is the very antithesis of selfishness and self-centeredness. It ultimately entails dying to self, taking up the cross, and following Jesus. In Lewis’s terms, agapē or caritas is pure “gift-love.”

Thus defined, agapē is not a virtue that we can achieve ourselves by unaided human effort. It can only be received as a gift from God. So, why does Our Lord present it as a command, as if it were something that we could summon up by our own willpower? The best answer comes from Saint Augustine of Hippo, who in the late fourth century wrestled with this question in his Confessions; and ended up praying, “Command what you will, O Lord, and give what you command.”

Today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles describes Peter’s baptism of the household of Cornelius the Centurion, the first recorded instance of the incorporation of Gentiles into the apostolic Church. Its depiction of the Holy Spirit descending upon the newly baptized in a replay of Pentecost reminds us that at our baptism we also received the Holy Spirit. As Saint Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”

Again, in today’s Epistle, Saint John alludes to both Baptism and the Eucharist in that wonderfully mysterious saying, “This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood.”

The tie-in is that our ability to love God and one another as God has loved us comes first in Holy Baptism and then in the Holy Eucharist. Indeed, liturgical scholars believe that the Mass of the earliest Christians was originally celebrated in the context of a common meal known as the agapē, or “love feast.”

Today, then, we pray God to stir up in our hearts the gifts of the Holy Spirit given to us in Baptism and renewed in us every time we receive Holy Communion. In this way we have the capability to become a people who love God and one another with the same unconditional agapē love with which God has loved us and loves us still.