Sermon for the 1st Sunday After Trinity

“In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

One of the most useful and illustrative parables that Jesus ever told is the parable of the prodigal son. It’s not a parable we hear in our readings today, but just to remind you – it’s the story of a ne’erdowell son is fed up that his father is taking too long to die and he wants his share of the inheritance.

Jesus tells this parable in the 15th chapter of Luke’s gospel alongside other parables about things lost and things found. He tells them in response to the pharisees and the scribes who are cheesed that Jesus is spending so much time with tax collectors, and other sinners – ‘those’ people.

Which one of you, Jesus asks them, when you lose a sheep does not leave the 99 and go looking for the one? Who, when they lose a coin, does not light up the room and search the house until it’s found? Even for God, Jesus says, heaven rejoices when one sinner repents.

This son, one the father’s two, demands the inheritance and for some reason, the miracle of a father’s love, I suppose – the Father gives him his inheritance. Like any parent I’m sure the Father gave it with high hopes for the son, dreams of how it might be spent, saved, used to seed the son’s future life as a memorial of sorts to his loving Father.

But no. He traipses off to foreign lands and spends every dime of it on dissolute living, dishonouring not only himself but also his father and his father’s generosity. Things get so bad that he hires himself out to farmers to feed pigs, himself so hungry that he considers eating the pig’s fodder. He thinks back to his father, his family, his home – to the servants who are eating bread and sleeping comfortably; if I go back, he thinks, and show that I am not worthy to be even called my father’s son perhaps I can live as even one of the servants.

So it is with us. Our living might not be quite as dissolute as the prodigal son’s, we may not always fall into quite the hard times that he did, but nonetheless we often squander what our Father gives us: He gives us people, relationships, and love which we squander by betrayal, self-sabotage, anger; he gives us the means to support ourselves and we squander it by wanting more; He gives us the gift of prayer, of communion and unity with Him and we squander it by spending time thinking about everything but.

We can be overcome with our shame. There’s a phrase that escapes me, a slang word that describes the shame spiral we get into when we are late in replying to people on text or email. Maybe we’re a day or two late, maybe they send a followup message, but we’re ashamed of the intiail lateness and so our pitiful response is to ignore it further. A shame I know well.

  With God it’s often the same for us; we ignore, we sin, we drift from God and think that we’ve crossed some threshold from which we can’t return, and rather than trying we just give up and drift further, fabricate excuses, “I’m too far gone,” “not good enough”, etc.

The son returns knowing that his father is sure to hate him and disown him, but the Father experiences nothing but joy at the return of the son. He doesn’t berate son, shame the son, disown the son – he robes him in even finer clothes than when he left and throws a feast, “What was lost is found.”

Our first reading today is something of the same, although you need a bit of context. Mephibosheth is the grandson of Saul, the king before David who had tried to murder David; when Saul and Jonathan (GF & F) of Mephibosheth were killed, he was carried by his nurse but dropped and never walked again. In David’s reign he sought to make peace with Saul’s family and called Mephibosheth so he could, “show the kindness of God to him.” Mephibosheth came to David expecting a trap, knowing that it was David’s chance to kill him, but yet he fell down and honoured David who restored his inheritance and gave him a seat at the table.

In his Epistle, John helps make these things clear – how can this be, how can God whom we so often turn away from, whose inheritance – the gift to us – we so often squander, the God who gives so much to us who like selfish and ungrateful children whom we would sneer at if we saw them behaving in such a way in a restaurant, love us so completely? “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them,” he writes.

God. Is. Love. And so our being what we wish we could be, loving as we wish we could love, or forgiving as we wish we could forgive – depends upon how near we draw to God, how much we choose to participate or abide in the love that is God. And this goes for most aspects of our spiritual lives; if we find ourselves struggling to worship, or feeling as though we’re not ‘getting something out of it’, if our spiritual lives feel more like a dry riverbed than a spring of living water, then we need to take stock of how we are drawing near to that love, or not

Like a single light illuminating a room in which we are trying to read a book, we’re not going to be able to see if we are off in the far corner, move closer to the light, allow the light to be around us and suddenly things become clearer and more comprehensible. This will be the overarching theme for the remainder of Trinity season – that God is this transformative and all encompassing, sustaining love, and when we participate and abide in it, as we must, God abides in us.

But abiding in this love is no simple or passive task, not something that we sit around waiting to have happen to us, but something we strive for, or face the consequences of a life lived without it.

This is what the Gospel today is offering to us, this story of the poor man Lazarus and the rich man at whose gate Lazarus sat. Our focus should be drawn to the fact that the rich man is in torment in hell after his death while Lazarus enjoys the embrace of Abraham. The rich man being where he is isn’t some arbitrary punishment that God gave simply because the rich man didn’t do what he should have, but what he endures there – being parched to the point of longing for even a drop of water on his tongue, dryness, aridness, heat, torment, regret – these are rather an image of the rich man’s interior life. It is rather an image of the soul that is not participating in love, a soul that has rejected the abiding presence of God.

When we reject love, charity, when we refuse to live by those virtues – what is left for us? Anger, bitterness, shame, regret, hatred, envy – all things which will devour us from the inside out like flame, it will torment us, it will leave us dry, arid, and barren within longing for even a drop of the living water which we already rejected.

Participating in love, in God, is about cultivating sanctity or holiness of life: pray more, study the word more, receiving the sacrament more often, confessing more often, being more charitable, more forgiving, more patient, in the words of St. John in the Epistle today, “The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

This love isn’t the modern garden variety of wishing the best to those we deem right, or good, or on our side but otherwise ignoring them; this is the love of doing good to those hate us, loving our enemy, seeing the poor man at the gate for who he is and treating him as we would a brother, this is the love of begging forgiveness for those who nail us to a cross.

Abiding it. Growing in holiness depends entirely on our fidelity, our obedience to live that commandment, ‘those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.’