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