Homily for Trinity Sunday 2010
Deacon Joseph E. MacDonald
I could stand here this morning and talk about how three can be one. I can use all the analogies that have been used through the ages, like Saint Patrick’s shamrock or I could make up my own. The thing is, that greater minds than mine have tried to explain the trinity and some have committed heresy in the process. But I have no intention of committing heresy today.
The trinity is something we have to accept on faith because it’s beyond our human experience. We could, and should, prayerfully reflect on this mystery for our entire lifetimes and still there would be room to reflect more because the mystery of God is so vast, so eternal, that our finite minds can never fully comprehend it.
But let me take one line from the First Letter of John. It is one that we’ve all heard many times, perhaps so many times that we’ve become deaf to its meaning: “God is love.”
Love doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There has to be an object of love, someone to whom love is given. God, who existed before all of creation, being the essence of love, must have given that love to someone.
God, who we call Father, loves the Son, who is also God, so completely, that as the Gospel pointed out this morning, He gave everything to the Son. And the Son, loves the Father so completely that he gives everything back again. The love that flows between Father and Son exists in God the Holy Spirit. God is Love and God is three. God is the perfect communion, the perfect union of persons.
Why is that important? Why is it necessary for us to understand what it means more than to understand how it can be? Because we are made in God’s image and likeness and if this unity exists in God, then because we are made in his likeness it’s something that’s natural also to us. It’s something within our reach and it’s something that we instinctively strive for.
If three can be one - then two can be one in the sacrament of Marriage. Christian marriage reflects the unity of the Blessed Trinity. “What God has joined let no one divide.” And just as the eternal love of Father, Son and Spirit spilled over into the marvel of creation, so too marital love has a share in the creative vocation. The love that exists between Mothers and Fathers produces children. This family, mother, father and child form a kind of human trinity. It’s not perfect. But the ideal is there, a love so complete that it empties itself for the sake of the other.
In a few minutes we’ll come forward to receive Holy Communion, the sacrament of unity. We know that when we receive the Eucharist we become one with Christ and Christ with us. What we often forget is that the words of the priest, deacon or other minister of communion is somewhat ambiguous. We don’t say “the body of Jesus” or “This is Jesus,” we say “the body of Christ.” In baptism we are baptized into Christ, we are joined to the body of Christ, the church. So, when we say “Amen” at communion we’re saying yes not only to Jesus but to the whole church and what she teaches. We say Amen to each other. If two can be one and three can be one then so too the hundreds who worship here every weekend are one; millions of Christians throughout the world are one and those who have gone before us in faith or that will come after us are also one. The same unity that exists in the Blessed Trinity exists between all of us through the Eucharist. Young and Old are one. Conservative and liberal are one. English speaking, Spanish speaking and Chinese speaking, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, people of every nation, race and tongue are one in Christ and with each other. Holy Communion is not so much about God and me as about God and we.
Jesus himself, on the night of that first Eucharist lifted his heart and voice to the Father with these words: “I pray… that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.”
Jesus wants humanity to recognize that he IS the one sent to redeem the world and that people will come to recognize and believe in him through our unity with each other and with Him. We are the sign of that unity, that Trinitarian unity. We give it flesh. How the world sees that unity lived out in our faith communities is our shared vocation. Does what the world see in us, draw people closer to the Lord or drive them away? Does it draw them toward that perfect union that Jesus prayed for or does our failure to live what we believe so scandalize others that it blinds them to the treasure that God wants them see?
Today’s Gospel tells us that everything of the Father has been given to the Son and that through the Holy Spirit the Son gives everything to us. Nothing is held back – there is no selfishness in the Trinity. God who is Father, Son, and Spirit is not afraid of being left empty handed. God is not concerned that He will have less if he gives everything away or that he will BE less if someone else gets more. What better model of this than the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
This is our example. This is our calling and our mission statement. To live in perfect union with each other and our God; To love completely; to give generously; to become less so others can become more; to live in a way that brings people to faith. When we do this, the word of God we just read in Proverbs will come to pass - God will take delight in the human race.
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