The First 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.” 

As I announced last Sunday, I spent a remarkable few days at a small Russian Orthodox monastery in Nova Scotia this week while taking a few days of retreat. Remarkable for a number of reasons, among them the silence, stillness, and proximity to God that one finds in such a place, but remarkable too for witnessing their lives play out each day.

In some ways their daily lives aren’t totally unusual: most of it is spent working, in their case on their farm the produce of which is sold to support the life of the monastery, and the rest primarily in prayer and study. What’s remarkable though is to think that when I left to return home, their rhythm continued, nothing changed. When I get to the end of my days I tend to try and relax, take some leisure, and maybe in the Summers go on vacation; I know that the Lord willing, I might one day reach an age where, having served for many years in ministry I might  retireme. But not so for them.

For the monks there is no retirement, no pension, no vacation, no leisure – at least not as we think of it. There’s not even, at the end of their lives, a grave-stone with their names on it to look forward to. In life, people who take a vow to become a monastic, a monk or a nun, relinquish their name and take on a new name; in death they don’t have a name, and their grave is essentially unmarked. God has marked you for a life of ceaseless and constant prayer, of fasting, early mornings, and worship – your life ceases to be yours or to be about you at all, and becomes entirely about God.

We bristle at the thought, but that’s because we’re not called to that life. For them, though, there is no greater joy than to be removed from the world and all of its distractions, to die to who you were, to be made new, and seek to serve, to know, and to live in the Love that is God for the rest of your earthly life.

The sacrifice may seem great, but the reward is far greater. It put me in mind of what Paul said about Jesus in 2 Corinthians that, “Though he was rich, yet he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” For the monks it is through their poverty and self-sacrifice that they become rich by the closeness they experience with God, something one can only gain through living that kind of life.

In the First lesson today we hear a brief story about Mephibosheth, the grandson of Saul, the King before David, who had tried to murder David. When Saul and Jonathan (GF and F) were killed, Mephibosheth was carried by his nurse and fled, but she fell, dropping him, after which he never walked again. When David reigned he sought to make peace with Saul’s family and called for Mephibosheth so he could, “show the kindness of God to him”. Mephibosheth came to David fully expecting to be killed, but yet fell on the ground and gave honour to David, but David restored his inheritance and gave him a seat at his table.

It’s a short story and perhaps at first seems not all that important, but it’s a story that is meant to remind us about who we are, and today – taken with the other readings – fills out this beautiful image of what it means for us to live in relationship with God.

You see we are like Mephibosheth – a people who have lost their inheritance, people who are weak and broken, all of us carrying heavy burdens, unable to do things we want but great at doing the things we don’t want, as Paul says. And sometimes we turn on ourselves as a result, beating ourselves up over it all, trying to convince ourselves that we are worthless and unfixable, undeserving of mercy or love – just as Mephibosheth came to David expecting death, but instead found something else.

In the face of our brokenness and weakness God doesn’t respond with anger or with punishment, He responds with mercy, forgiveness, and love, just as David did.

St. John, in this beautiful Epistle today, says more than we have time to break down and talk through, but the gist of it is clear. It is not the case that God simply loves, but that, John says, God is love itself, “and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”  And the love that is God comes down to us as a person with whom we can have a relationship, and in whose presence we can dwell – his son, Jesus.

It’s kind of like at the monastery this week:

In my regular life I often struggle to maintain disciplines and routines; I might try to wake up earlier to commit time to prayer or reading before my day starts, but something will come up one night and I’ll go to bed later, and later the next night, and before I know it I am up late staring at my phone, waking up late in the morning, tired, unfocused, and unable to read. But in the monastery, in this holy place and in the presence of people who are disciplined, who daily draw nearer to God than I do and who don’t have the struggles of cell phones, computers, and news notifications – there I could enter into a rhythm. There, when I lived their life I was also daily entering into the presence of God as they did and felt myself being inwardly transformed. Since I left I’ve been praying more and reading more, sleeping and waking earlier, in part because I remember how I felt in those times even at 5 in the morning on my knees in their chapel in silent prayer and I want that feeling more than I want the dopamine fix that my phone gives me.

My point – and I think St. John’s point – is just this: that if we want to love better, if we want to live better, then we need to draw nearer to and more frequently find ourselves in the presence of that love and that life. We need to participate in the love that is God. John says it right in the first words of the Epistle, “everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”

When we love each other we grow in closeness with and come to better knowledge of God because to love another is to love God. And when we better know God we become new and transformed people. If we don’t – we don’t; “we love because he first loved us…if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” But this isn’t an overnight thing, it’s not a switch to be flipped but something we obtain through practice and daily striving to know God better by loving more and praying more.

None of this should surprise us though, a painter or an athlete does not put brush to canvas or stick to ice the very first time and find themselves an expert, but they become one through daily practice and rhythm, each day striving to improve just a little.

The  good news of course is that though we are weak, weary, and carrying heavy burdens, and though we will often fall short of loving each other as we are meant to, sleep in, stare at the phone, though these rhythms and practices will be hard to keep up…God is always trying to reach across distance between us to draw us closer to Him, to give us life, to transform our hearts and minds, and to become bit-by-bit every day  – like those monks in the monastery living out their ceaseless daily rounds - more like Him whom God sent to show by his open arms on the cross what true love and transformation looks like.

“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.”