Saturday, May 21, 2016

Trinity Sunday ~ May 22, 2016


Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Trinity
Year C  ~  May 22, 2016

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

if the Word has been made a human being,
 it is so that human beings may be made gods

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity


So wrote St. Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons toward the end of the second century:
If the Word has been made a human being, it is so that human beings may be made gods.
This is the core proclamation of the Church, echoed by the Church’s Teachers – East and West – throughout the centuries. What they proclaim is called divinization or even deification in the Latin West, and theosis in the Greek East. Possibly the Greek is better, because it lacks some distracting connotations that burden our English words. Theos means God, and -osis is the suffix indicating a condition or a process of changing. Usually it has a negative connotation, since we hear it mostly as a medical term, describing a pathology: tuberculosis, sclerosis, necrosis. The meaning is an invasion or infestation, bringing about a change or transformation that is usually not desirable. Something abnormal or diseased.
Theosis, on the other hand is altogether desirable – in fact it is the aim of our whole life: it is the process of human beings becoming God. If you ever wondered what I am muttering when I bless the water being poured into the chalice to mix with the wine at the altar, it is a precise reference to this core teaching:
By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.
This same core hope of our tradition is found in our own Anglican theology. Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester and one of the translators of the or King James Bible, 400 years ago wrote:
Whereby, as before He of [our nature], so now we of His are made partakers. He clothed with our flesh, and we invested with His Spirit. The great promise of the Old Testament accomplished, that He should partake our human nature; and the great and precious promise of the New, that we should be “consortes divinae naturae”,“partakers of the divine nature,”
And in the last century, the Anglican C.S. Lewis wrote:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.
Last week we considered radical equality in the Kingdom of God. The dullest and most uninteresting person can become divine. All persons however wretched, are already images of God and they can become God’s likeness, that is they can become perfect – if limited – reflections of God’s Glory. Lewis goes on to say:
The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command … He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness.
And Pope St. John Paul II recalled the preëminent ancient theologians of the fourth century:
…the teaching of the Cappadocian Fathers on divinization (which) passed into the tradition of all the Eastern Churches and is part of their common heritage… can be summarized in the thought already expressed by Saint Irenæus at the end of the second century: God passed into man so that man might pass over to God. This theology of divinization remains one of the achievements particularly dear to Eastern Christian thought.
It is not a coincidence that the very same theologians – the Cappadocians –  penetrated as far as anyone ever has into the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, whose glory we acknowledge and worship today. The notion of theosis is inseparable from the glory of the Three in One and One in Three; because whatever the Only-begotten Son is by nature, we are to become by grace.
What is the Son’s nature? We say “perfect Love.” But love is not a nature; Love is a relationship, a personal relationship. Love is the relationship between the Three Divine Persons. But they are not the only Persons in this relationship. I have asked before that you look at the ikon and tell how many persons gather around the table. It’s a trick because there are more than the obvious three. The perspective of the picture is reversed, so that its focal point is you, the viewer: there are FOUR persons around the table. The fourth Person is humanity, divinized by conversing with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.


Image result for rublev trinity icon meaning

St. Symeon the New Theologian, at the end of the tenth century wrote,
He who is God by nature converses with those whom he has made gods by grace, as a friend converses with his friends, face to face.
In other words, humanity is drawn into the Divine Life as a participant. That is what it means to worship God as Trinity.
Theosis is not a metaphysical transformation. We still are human even as we undergo the transformation called theosis. But what we are, increasingly is Love, and love is an act not a metaphysical status. When we say that God IS Love, we are saying that God cannot be understood by any static definition of being. We are saying that before God is anything, God loves. Love is an act of will: personal will in the interpersonal Life of the Most Holy Trinity. Christ brings us into this Divine Life by the Holy Spirit.
Here is what the greatest of those Cappadocian teachers of the Trinity – St. Basil the Great – had to say about theosis:
Through the Spirit’s aid, hearts are raised on high……the Spirit makes them spiritual through the intimate union they have been granted. As when a ray of light touches a polished and shining surface, and the object becomes ever more brilliant, so too souls that are enlightened by the Spirit become spiritual themselves and reflect their grace to others…..Thus do they become like God, and most wonderful of all, thus do they themselves become divine.
 Theosis is the eternal process of becoming like God by beholding God’s glory more and more. In the words of today’s Collect we begin here and now, when we acknowledge and worship.  But increasingly, we see. Theosis is seeing, the process of becoming like what we behold. What we behold is the Eternal Act of Infinite Love, the One and Eternal Glory of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

ALLELUIA!
HOLY, HOLY, HOLY 
IS THE LORD, GOD OF HOSTS
WHO WAS, AND IS AND IS TO COME

ALLELUIA!

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