Sermon for I Trinity June 7, 2026

Rev. Robert Hart

I John 4:7-21 * Luke 16:19-31

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love…Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”

The First Sunday after Trinity is a very important Sunday. On this Sunday we turn to the second Table of the Law. You see, on this First Sunday after Trinity we come to a time in which Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Passiontide, Easter, the Ascension and Pentecost have all come, teaching us that we are now the Church that became so powerful in the Book of Acts because the Holy Spirit has come to us with His gifts and power. Trinity Sunday follows Pentecost because it summarizes all that has come before in the Church calendar which began in Advent. God fully revealed His name when the risen Christ told the Church to baptize new disciples “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Matt.28:18).” The revelation that God is Trinity in unity did not come by way of a theology professor teaching an abstract message with something akin to a physics formula on a chalk board. In God’s great saving acts of Divine love (agape’) the Father sent the Son, and then the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity was revealed in the same powerful acts that revealed the truth that “God is love (I John 4:8),” the Father manifestly giving us both His Son and His Holy Spirit as first the Son came into this world of time, space, and matter, and then the Holy Spirit came to bring us a second chapter of the Incarnation. The Holy Spirit has come to make the Church into the Body of Christ to continue the mission of salvation.

So it is that now we turn to the second table of the Law. That first table has four commandments that tell us to love God. But we cannot love God; that is, we cannot love God unless and until we know that He first loved us. We find that love nailed to the cross. There He is broken, bleeding and pouring out His soul for your sins and mine. We are forgiven without losing sight of God’s holiness, recognizing that God is both “just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus (Rom. 3:26).” Forgiveness is not approval. It was, though free to us, costly to Him. The ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that redemption perfects and cleanses the human conscience. Indeed, a true understanding of the cross of Christ gives life to your conscience. God loved you, and this is what it cost Him. Sin does matter, because God is holy. And, sin is forgiven, because God is love. And it did not come without the death of Jesus on the cross.

Love is the theme of this First Sunday after Trinity; and that love is the love of God. It is also expressed in English with the word “charity,” and even in that we find some confusion. For the kind of charity that St. John writes about, and that was lacking in the Rich Man in the reading from Luke, is not of a kind that merely throws a little money at something to ease the conscience, or, worse, to impress people. Even if the Rich Man sent food out to the beggar, Lazarus, namely scraps that fell from his table, he nonetheless failed to love his neighbor by God’s standard; i.e. as himself.

 The love that today’s appointed readings speak of is, as I said, personal. It begins not with us, but with God. It begins by having our eyes opened to what God has done for us, and then only by seeing His work in light of how undeserving we are, indeed, how undeserving I am. You can defend yourself and plead your case; you can try to justify every sin you ever committed. That is how the Rich Man lived his life. This is the only parable of Jesus that he did not compose Himself; except, that is, for the ending. It has been discovered that this was a well-known story among the Jewish people of that time, and the story always ended with Abraham saying, “And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.” But Jesus added His own ending.

Then [the Rich Man] said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send [Lazarus] to my father’s house: for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

Indeed, like the Rich Man and his brothers, I can spend my life trying to convince myself that I have God’s approval, that I am just fine. I may compare myself to individuals who are infinitely worse than I am, and so feel that I am righteous enough not to need God’s mercy. I mean, compared to Hitler I look like a perfect saint. You too may indulge in such comparisons. You, no matter who you are and no matter what you do or fail to do, are most probably far more virtuous than Al Capone or Pablo Escabar. But none of those guys are the standard. The gold standard, the only real standard, is Jesus Himself. So, when reality finds you, the truth shall make you free. My own standard is not true enough to take me safely into the next life when I depart this life. Has God spoken? Should we not hear? In Moses and the Prophets we find a moral law that is eternal and unchanging, those Ten Commandments and all that they really mean (which we learn in the Sermon on the Mount). We also see in Moses and the Prophets the great Messianic themes of salvation from sin and death. To prepare for our departure from this life, we have been given quite a lot to hear. We have been given both Law and Gospel. “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith (Galatians 3:24).”

Once I see my own need I can appreciate the love of God. Once you see your own need you can appreciate the love of God. We see that salvation from sin and death was not our idea, but God’s own will. Redemption is His initiative, without any suggestion from us.

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins…We love him, because he first loved us. (I John 4:10,19)

God saw that our need involved everything that is meant by that word, “propitiation.” It involved the pain and suffering that was born by Jesus in the death of the cross. And, even so, if you don’t hear the great moral themes and the great Messianic themes of redemption, that is, if you don’t hear Moses and the prophets, Christ’s own resurrection with over five-hundred eyewitnesses, will never persuade you to repent. You need a soft heart that listens and hears. Then the Gospel, the Good News that He first loved us, can enter your mind and heart.

So, this Sunday, we see that to obey the first four commandments, which are summarized by the First and Great Commandment to love God (“with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy mind”), is only possible as a response; it is a reflection. “We love Him because He first loved us.” And, now, in this Epistle and Gospel reading, after celebrating from Advent until today the great acts of God’s love in Jesus His Son that move us to love Him, we turn to the second table of the Law, the six commandments that are summarized in the words, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

And, at the beginning it is personal. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another…” And so it goes on:

We love him, because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar: for he that loves not his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loves God love his brother also. (RSV)

I am reminded always of the singular words in commandments to love. ‘The righteous man considers the life of his beast. But, the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel’ says the Book of Proverbs (12:10). Utopian ideologues since the French Revolution, such as Karl Marx and his followers, spoke lofty words about what was best for mankind. It reminds me of one of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts cartoons. Linus tells his sister Lucy that he wants to be a doctor, a great doctor. She tells him, “You cannot be a great doctor. You know why? Because a doctor must love mankind. You don’t love mankind.” Linus, stunned, retorts “I do love mankind…It’s people I can’t stand!” The ideologues have always loved mankind; and they have made man a neighbor suffer for it. They have offered millions of innocent victims to some idea of “good for the highest number,” and Satanic propaganda about what is best for humanity. Crowds enjoying the spectacle of heads being cut off in Paris, Communists dictating who should live, who should die, and who must go to the camps, and, indeed, the Nazis destroying millions in order to advance human evolution to the state of perfection, believed they were lovers of mankind, saviors of that abstract and impersonal thing called “humanity.”

Hear this from the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew (Translation by David Bentley Hart):

And when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory; And all the peoples will be assembled before him, and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the kid goats, And will set the sheep to his right, but the kid goats to the left. Then the King will say to those to his right, ‘Come, you blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the cosmos. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you gave me hospitality, Naked and you clothed me, I was ill and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the just will answer him, saying, ‘When did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and give you hospitality, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you ill or in prison and come to you?’ And in reply the King will say to them, ‘Amen, I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those to the left, ‘Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Age prepared for the Slanderer and his angels. For I was hungry and you did not give me anything to eat, I was thirsty and you did not give me drink, I was a stranger and you did not give me hospitality, naked and you did not clothe me, ill and in prison and you did not look after me.’ Then they too will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and did not attend to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Amen, I tell you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these my brothers, neither did you do it to me.’ And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age.”

(Matthew 25:31-46).

How often has this been quoted, “the least of these my brethren?” Look again and see what it really says: “One of the least of these my brethren.” “One of…” those are the missing words when this is misquoted, as it usually is. That one is your neighbor, That one is your Lazarus, with his unpleasant and unsightly sores.

The Bible always personalizes it. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Thy neighbor,” not “mankind.” “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen…” His brother, not some impersonal thing called mankind. If only the rich man had known God’s love, if only he had heard Moses and the Prophets, the great moral truth and the themes of redemption revealed to the children of men, if only he had loved God because God first loved us, he would have brought in his brother Lazarus from the streets, and sat him at his own table.

That is the love of God when it is reflected in your heart. How can you know that love? You may begin right now by asking God to quicken your conscience as you contemplate the cross where Jesus poured out His soul unto death for you. It is personal; the gift was given to you there. His words of forgiveness from the cross are for you. His “It is finished” was the full payment and cancelation of your entire debt. You can love God because, as we see on the cross where Jesus died, He first loved you. And, therefore, you can love your brother, your neighbor, your own Lazarus.