The First Sunday after Trinity opens the long green season that carries the Church from Trinity Sunday through Advent — the season in which the mystery of salvation already accomplished is worked out in the daily life of the faithful. Trinity Season is the Church's great season for growth in holiness, sustained by the cycle of Scripture, prayer, and the Sacraments, and its Collects form one of the most spiritually rich sequences in the entire Prayer Book.

The Collect for the First Sunday is a model of evangelical humility: O God, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed. The petition acknowledges the double truth that undergirds all Christian ethics: that good is commanded, and that it can only be done by grace.

The appointed Epistle from 1 John 4 presses the commandment of love with apostolic urgency: Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. The foundation of Christian love is always the prior love of God: herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. The appointed Gospel from Luke 16 sets before the congregation the Parable of Dives and Lazarus — a story that makes the eternal cost of lovelessness irreversibly and soberly plain.