Sixth Sunday after Trinity

Merciful God,
you have prepared for those who love you
such good things as pass our understanding:
pour into our hearts such love toward you
that we, loving you in all things and above all things,
may obtain your promises,
which exceed all that we can desire;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.


The other day; can't remember which, I wrote down a list of my senior moments. When I went to look for it later I couldn't remember where I'd put the list or what the list was about, or indeed, if I'd made a list at all. When I did remember and I found it, all I found was a blank sheet of paper!

Whether or not you've suffered from what seems to be this modern phenomenon of 'senior moments', you've got to admit that the human brain is a very remarkable thing. When you look at the wonderful, quite remarkable technology there is these days in computing; it's nothing compared to what the human brain can do. Nowadays, you tend not to get a book of instructions with a computer. They are put together to be 'intuitive', easy for anybody to find their way about without any sort of instructions. But that just goes to show how very much further advanced the human brain is. We think, as human beings that we are very clever, but creation is light years ahead of anything we human beings can devise.

Those of us who are religious tend to put creation down to God; probably because it is so remarkable, wonderful and even miraculous. But that's not a 'cop out'; because we of faith I think have what we might call a 'knowing'. What I'm trying to describe goes beyond words because we don't have a language to describe it. There are no words. And therefore it's beyond reason. It's beyond even the capacity of our own brain, I hazard to say. It's not emotion either. God isn't a good idea, neither is He a good feeling. So what do we do? How do we get to grips with God if our reason, such as it is and our emotions, such as they are, don't really help in groping towards a sense of God.

The saints that we remember in our Church's calendar describe God as love. And right away we've got to recognise I'd say, that by this we mean that part of love that's beyond emotion or feeling or reason. It's described in words like faith and trust and hope. Those words bring us nearer to it or point towards it. And I think it's that sort of love that I mean when I say that we religious people, certainly we Christians, have that 'knowing' of God. You see how I'm scratching round here? That's because it's beyond reason and emotion. It doesn't mean that loving God doesn't make you feel good. It does sometimes, like it makes you feel bad sometimes as loving a human being makes you feel alternately good and bad.

All this might sound rather vague. But try and describe to someone what it means to love a person and you'll be in difficulty. You'll never be able to say what it means in essence, or what that love is, in essence, it's just there, you 'know'. And it's like that with God. And the Collect today is about that sort of stuff.

Loving God takes us beyond all that we can think or feel, it's beyond our understanding as the prayer puts it, because God is always beyond our understanding. And yet we still 'know'. We can say we know God because we love God. And it's as we come to know God this way and, as we say, 'grow in His love' because we've no better way of talking about our continuing and developing relationship, with God, that we can begin to see that we can ask for his blessing that up to now we've known nothing of.

The Collect puts it this way; 'pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire'. You know, don't you, that when you love someone, blessings come to you from that relationship which aren't in the realm of solid objects like birthday and Christmas presents or gifts given just out of kindness or affection. When you love someone and they love you, the love supports and upholds you through all that life can do to either of you, the love blesses you in intangible ways. Again, we struggle for words. And it's that sort of thing that we are asking God for in our relationship with Him. And His blessings which come out of His love for us and our love for Him have got to be far bigger than the blessings we receive in and through human love. And the reason for that is because we only know what love is because God loved us first. Our love is possible only because of God's love for us. St. John tells us that in his letters.

So this prayer today encourages us to give ourselves to loving God and in that way coming to know God's deep and everlasting love for us and all the blessings that love brings.