Trinity II Sermon

June 14, 2026 | Fr. Glenn M. Spencer

"We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth."

Remember that there are key words in the New Testament — frequently used — the same word with very different meanings. Knowing the life story of Jesus, which is a Gospel, is indispensable to following Jesus and grasping what the Beloved Disciple means when he uses the words “flesh,” or “the world.” When we treat the material world as though it has a life of its own apart from God then we give our hearts to things that are in and of themselves brief, contingent, impermanent. Those who treat the world or the flesh as though they have a life in and of itself apart from God are what I have referred to as naive empiricists who believe that the empirical life is the only reality there is, the only heaven there is, right here, right now. 

We are the children of God and our destiny is to love the whole creation and especially to love one another back to life. When we do that, when we habitually love one another, we are making Jesus’ narrative our narrative and so naturally the world hates us just like it hates Jesus. 

But looming larger than any darkness is the divine love of God that has been shed abroad in our hearts by the gift of the Holy Spirit given to us at our baptism. The word John uses for love, agape or some form of agape, is used 52 times in John’s little epistles. In other words, one-fifth of the occurrences  of this word, which means divine love, in the whole New Testament are in John’s epistles. How little are these epistles? The Little Johns make up one-fiftieth of the New Testament. So in one-fiftieth of the New Testament we have one-fifth of the usage of the word agape — divine love. The word is rare in classical Greek and it is mostly a colorless and banal expression. But Holy Mother Church took “agape” and infused it with our narrative and gave it an intense, radical and quite specific meaning. Agape is the Church’s culture, our milieu, our way of being in the world, and our destiny. Love, true love, is the gratuitous, creative love that flows from God to every Christian and from every Christian to every other Christian and from us to the whole creation. Agape is True Love. True love is the desire, within the will of the Christian, for the good. Agape is so totally divine in origin that twice John declares: “God is love,” that it is no mere characteristic or attribute of God, because God constitutes the very being of love itself. God is not dependent on love — love is love for absolutely no other reason than because that is the way God is. No wonder St. John the Divine is also known as the “beloved disciple” and the “Apostle of Love.” By the way, “St. John the Divine” simply means “St. John the Theologian” because the old word for “theologian” was “divine.” Works of theology used to be called a “Body of Divinity.” 

I want to make one other point: John was more than a theologian; he was an Apostle, which means that he was a “Tradition-bearer.” Mary was the Theotokos – the God bearer. John, like the other Apostles, had the burden of bearing the Tradition of the Word made Flesh; a burden like the mantel of a prophet but easy as the yoke of Christ, and needful as the light of the Sun for the life of the Bride of Christ. And so John’s emphasis on love comes straight from the teaching and example of Jesus himself and it is our way of life and no other way of life is acceptable.

I want to understand and to communicate how different we are from Christians of the past — specifically when it comes to true love, Christian love. Now, I’m not gloomy and pessimistic  by nature. But the more time I spend at the Altar and the more time I spend in the Word of God trying to understand these tiny communities scattered all over the world in John’s day, the more I fear we have wandered far, far from home. My worry is that we are so removed from that time that we are out of touch with her existential reality. What was in reality a horror — like for example the Cross — has become an accessory, an ornament. And now, in our day, the Scriptures and the Liturgies have been translated and revised over and over again; parboiled, plucked and rendered so inoffensive and utterly vapid, cliched, and ugly. The doxological shock, the liturgical slap in the face that might awaken us is no more than half-hearted, badly written and badly delivered poetry that is dedicated to navel gazing and the celebration of personal choice — all very bourgeois. 

We ought to be scandalized by the life Jesus expects from us. After all, the initiatory rite of the Catholic Church, Holy Baptism, is pretty much a funeral! As I said last week this requires our intentional appropriation of the gifts God has bestowed upon us and that requires being attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible to God and to one another. We bow to one another at the Altar, the thurifer censes you with frankincense, the scent, the fragrance that is strictly associated in both the Old and New Testament with sacrifice to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And as the thurifer bows to you and you respond by bowing to him, you are acknowledging that you belong to Jesus and your life stories have been caught up into Jesus’ life story — the smoke of our sacrifices mingled — like the visible smoke that rises in clouds around the Altar  — mingled with the odor of sanctity of Word and Flesh, of Earth and Altar, of matter and spirit. And your role, that only you can play, involves your participation in ultimate reality — in light of that reality one should realize that one can work against reality or one can work with reality which is another way of saying that we human beings are empowered to transform our life stories, to turn life into art pleasing to God. 

In light of all that we have to ask how a Christian ends up in the sorry situation that John is describing in his epistle.

“But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?”

John is almost certainly reporting an actual event in which Christians know, as a matter of fact, that a member of their own parish family is in genuine need of goods or services necessary for life and they turn their back on him or her. John says that they do not merely “see” this situation, but they behold, they gaze, they know the situation. Furthermore, the Beloved Disciple says that those who turned their backs on their brother actually possess more of those goods necessary to life than they personally need. And to top it off, John accuses those who have turned their backs on their sibling of consciously and intentionally shutting down their natural feelings of compassion and sympathy in order to play the villain. There are three things going on here: First there is the desire of those who turned their backs on their brother. What kind of desire provokes one Christian to ignore the needs of another Christian when it is within one’s power to provide those needs? Secondly, it was necessary for the Christians who turned their backs on their brother, in order to successfully turn their backs, to resist and eventually to shut down their interior feelings of compassion for the needy brother. Thirdly, there was the action itself  — the actualization of their desire.

What kind of desire leads a Christian to disordered behavior? What kind of desire is powerful enough to bring a Christian to ignore and shut down his own, natural as well as his infused supernatural feelings of compassion. I say natural because unbelievers universally experience genuine compassion in similar situations. But John is addressing the baptized who have been infused with the heavenly virtues, those who have been grafted into Christ, those whose own bodies have, by grace, been sculpted into the Temple of Flesh in which God is said to dwell through Holy Baptism. Which is the very concrete reality that John returns to — how does God dwell in such a temple?

“But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?”

We will stop here. Over the next few weeks we will explore the meaning and the function of human desire and will. As we explore human desire we will come to see why the Sixth Ecumenical Council was so deliberate, so, like John, black and white on their insistence that in the Incarnation, in his death and his resurrection, our Lord Jesus Christ possessed and healed the faculties of human willing and human desiring. 

“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”