In the name of the holy and blessed Trinity ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
So how about Bishop Curry’s sermon at the Royal Wedding? If you’ve ever doubted the power of the Holy Spirit to move in this world, then the events of the last week are your cure. The experts tell us that people aren’t interested in religion, that our divisions are too rancorous to mend, that young people are only interested in rock bands and projection screens. But I didn’t see any of that in St. George’s Chapel – I saw a world captivated by the simple but profound message of God’s love.
Our world is desperate beyond measure for God. There was something about that sermon and wedding that satisfied our souls. As Curry said “When you love and you show it - it actually feels right. There is something right about it. And there’s a reason for it. The reason has to do with the source. We were made by a power of love, and our lives were meant - and are meant - to be lived in that love.” And the Bishop is absolutely right – love is actually the most natural thing in the world.
It’s something that we all know to be true, but maybe we’ve been hurt by the vulnerability of love before, or maybe our love has been rejected, maybe we’ve been told that our love isn’t the right kind, and so we don’t love as freely as we might. St. Augustine once said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And he’s right, but we’ve also found that even if our hearts don’t find their ultimate rest in God, we can at least get a little comfort from other places. Things like money, or power, or pleasures can also satisfy us on a temporary basis. Junk food might stop the hunger, but it isn’t going to build strength and is only going to lead to a stomach ache.
And that’s where we are as a culture – we’ve got a spiritual stomach ache. We’ve been filling ourselves with ego, with pride, with partisanship. And sometimes those things actually feel good, especially when you win – but the hunger of our souls hasn’t yet been satiated. And so when Bishop Curry reminded the world about the love of God as the way, it resonated deeply. It’s why our sin-sick culture has been so captivated by such a simple message – the love of God.
Today is Trinity Sunday, the Feast on which we proclaim that God is a trinity of persons in a unity of being. And though the Trinity can be one of the most complex aspects of our faith to consider, embedded within it is the saving truth of God’s love. As we consider the Trinity this morning, the image from Isaiah will serve as our window into this divine mystery.
The way this passage begins is with the prophet Isaiah being taken up to the throne room of heaven. So often when God comes up, we are told that God is transcendent – that God is bigger than us, above us, and beyond us. And that very well may be true. But that’s the wrong place to start. Rather, we only know about God because God is immanent – meaning that God knowable and available.
This is what was so satisfying in Curry’s sermon – his portrayal of God’s love as something that is with us right now, not as a reward in the hereafter. So often in the Church, we speak about hope, but hope is often relegated to being something that we might one day have, but right now we have to struggle without. But because of the life of Jesus and the sending of the Spirit, we do not live with hope in the future, but rather our hope is immanent today. As Isaiah is carried into the throne room, he hears the seraphim chanting “The whole earth is full of the Lord’s glory.” The hope of our faith is that, indeed, the whole earth is full of God’s love, and mercy, and peace, and justice.
Now, sometimes, I know, it can be easy to forget this. The world has a way of making us forget about God’s love. As Curry noted, love is the source from which we come and it is the place in which we will find our true and final rest. But sometimes we develop spiritual amnesia – we forget where we’re from and where we’re going. We forget that God’s love is the truest thing about us. We forget about how powerful love really is. We forget just how powerful love is when we’re not falling into it.
One of the parts of the Eucharist is known as the anamnesis, that part where the priest recalls the words of Jesus: “Do this in remembrance of me.” This liturgical anamnesis is to help with our amnesia. You are the beloved Body of Christ and you come each week to receive the same, Christ’s own body, given for you. The transforming, saving, self-giving, soul-satisfying love of God is seen through our liturgy each week – that God so loved the world as to be born among us and to rise from the grave after suffering on the Cross. This is what we come to remember, just how redemptive, how beautiful, how glorious God’s love us.
And we come to be re-membered, that is to be restored as members of Christ’s Body. For various reasons, we become estranged from each other – but in the Eucharist, as we receive the bread of heaven, we are made all made members again of Christ’s Body. When we forget that we are a part of Christ, the Eucharist again binds us to the deep and wide love of God. And all of this happens because more than being transcendent, God is immanently with us.
There is, though, an aspect of God’s love that is transcendent – not because it is inaccessible, but because it is different. The seraphim sing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.” “Holy” is a word that means “distinct” or “set apart.” While God is absolutely with us, God is not us. If you added up everything in all of Creation, you still wouldn’t have God – God is beyond that. This is what makes the love of God such an attractive force. The saving, gracious, restoring way of love is so unlike anything else.
Love really does run counter to most of the lessons that we learn in this world, both from business and biology. Love is transcendent because it crosses boundaries. Love is no respecter of persons, love doesn’t ask “are you worth being loved” or “do you deserve love?” No, love loves. Love isn’t interested in profit-margins, love doesn’t pursue survival of the fittest, love is self-deferential – love really doesn’t make too much sense from a human perspective. But from a divine perspective, love is the only thing that makes sense. That’s why the way of love is holy.
Left to our own devices, we’d never had considered that salvation would come through the Almighty being born into poverty to an unwed, teenage mother; we’d never think of turning the other cheek as being a power-move; we’d never come up “the least shall be the greatest;” we’d never realize that “Just as you have done it to the least of these you have done it to me;” and certainly, we’d never come up with the most amazing, beautiful, radical, and unimaginable story of new life emerging from the tomb on Easter morning. Love pulls us out of our default ways into the redeeming and sanctifying story of God.
What gets me most excited about all of this is that we’re just at the beginning of what love can do. In Ephesians, St. Paul writes that, “working in us, God will do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” And Jesus, in John, tells the disciples that they will do “even greater works” than he did. I don’t know about you, but that’s invigorating, that’s what we saw captured in Curry’s sermon, that’s what the Spirit has in store for you and me, and for all of us at St. Luke’s. Amazing things, things so wonderful and beautiful that we can’t even conceive of them are going to happen because the love of God flows through us and among us.
And at its core, this is what the Holy Trinity is about. God is not an insulated and singular entity. Nor is God a binary – God is not “this or that.” Instead, God is Trinity, and in this triune nature, there is dynamism, there is relationship, there is interaction. God, as Trinity, is a dynamic relationship of love, and by God’s grace, we are brought into the life of the Trinity.
There’s been a lot of media coverage of Bishop Curry’s sermon, and I’m thankful for that. There have been a lot of people, myself included, that hope that this moment translates to more people knowing about God’s love and coming to their local Episcopal congregation. And truly, I do hope for that. Our Anglican heritage is one that is ready to introduce people to the love of God more fully, and I really do hope that people connect the dots between the Royal Wedding, Bishop Curry, the Episcopal Church, and God’s love for them. But if Curry’s sermon ends up being just a fantastic public relations event, then shame on us.
The world is paying attention to a sermon about love and wondering if that love might be about them. Our response cannot be “Hey, we’re the same denomination as that guy and our doors are open, so come on in.” No, just as Isaiah is commissioned after encountering the holiness of God to go and be sent – we are sent in the love of the Trinity. Let us not squander this opportunity. People are talking about God and love. The hard work of evangelism, of finding a way to talk about God to others has been done for us by the Holy Spirit working through Bishop Curry.
So you know that friend, or colleague, or neighbor that you’ve been thinking needs to hear about God’s love – you’ve now got your opening line. You don’t have to worry about “How do I bring this up?” You just say “How about that Royal Wedding?” Or maybe you’ve been wanting to go deeper in your faith and you’ve just been so proud as an Episcopalian over the past week, so take this as your invitation to come to know God’s love for you more deeply.
Yes, we have a wonderful congregation and heritage, but this moment is God asking us “Who will go for us?” It’s not enough for us to say “We’re here when you want us,” we need to be out there saying in love, “We’re here with you.” This love of God that caught the attention of the world is something to take with us to work, to the grocery store, to Rowan Helping Ministries, to the ballot box, to the jail, to the hospital, to our schools, to our legislature, to our homes, to our prayer lives. The thing about the love of God that we see in the Trinity is that it is ecstatic, that is, it is always dynamic and moving outward.
As we celebrate and proclaim the Holy Trinity today, we thank God for Bishop Curry’s sermon that has reminded of God’s immanent, holy, and saving love.
