Encountering The Triune God

Homily 06 15 2014
Trinity Sunday - A

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The Holy Trinity is a "liturgical late-comer" among the feasts and festivals of the church; officially, it has been an established feast of the church for 555 years, since Pope John XX approved of it in 1334.

Its history began with the dedication of churches to the Holy Trinity in the ninth century, at least one liturgy in the tenth century, and an actual feast celebrated in the eleventh century.

This festival was retained in the revised church year and the liturgy of the church by the skin of its teeth. Some liturgical theologians and "revisionists" wanted to have it deleted from the worship program of the church because it is the celebration of a doctrine, focusing on an abstraction: who has not heard - or delivered - a sermon in which the theme centered on the nature of the Holy Trinity, attempting to explain how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are One God, how each person of the Trinity has "a complete personality but with all possessing a single divine nature?" --Adrian Nocent

Try as we will to make such theology concrete, we are almost certainly doomed to failure; the best we seem to do is in the symbols of the liturgy that attempt to picture the Trinity as a "three-in-one" God.

Small wonder, in view of the abstract doctrinal theology, that so many symbols had to be created in an attempt to make concrete this abstraction. The festival might easily have been eliminated from Roman and other church year lectionaries, but it wasn't.

Something important would have been lost, if the Holy Trinity was removed from the church year, because it is a positive theological emphasis of the church upon the activity of God in the world.

This is accentuated in contemporary theology and gives support to those who argued for retaining the festival in the liturgical life of the church.

God the Father is creator and a redeeming God, who "so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son..." to save the world. Jesus is the "Father-lover" who loves God and humanity so much that he is willing to die to accomplish salvation for the human race.

The Holy Spirit acts through the Word and the sacraments to reach the hearts and minds of people and to become incarnate in them, shaping them into the image of God. The Holy Trinity is celebrated as a festival of the divine love operative in the three persons of God, not as an occasion to attempt to celebrate the abstractions of Western theology.

The Holy Trinity remains as a festival that functions as an octave, not only of Pentecost, but of the entire first half of the Christian year. It sums up the work and actions of a God who has revealed himself as love in what he does as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Once upon a time, so the story goes, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them: " Hey, there is an elephant in the village today." They had no idea what an elephant was.

They decided that even though they could not see it, they would go and feel it anyway. All of them went to where the elephant was. Each of them touched the elephant.

"An elephant is like a pillar," said the first man as he felt the elephant's leg.

"Oh no," said the second man, touching the elephant's tail, "It is like a rope."

"You are quite wrong," said the third man, touching the elephant's trunk, "An elephant is like the trunk of a tree."

"It's like a fan," said the fourth man touching the elephant's huge ear.

"You are all wrong," said the fifth man as he touched the belly of the elephant, "It's definitely like a huge wall."

"No, it is a solid pipe," said the sixth man, touching the elephant's tusk."

So each had their own idea of what an elephant is like based on their own unique own experience.

It can be just like that with our own understanding of God.

Some of us may say God is like a Father - providing us with what we need, but maybe with elements of chastising us when we go wrong, keeping us on the straight and narrow path.

Some of us may say God is our Mother - birthing us, nurturing us and caring for us. How careful we have to be here of stereotypes of mother and father and how different people may have experienced their parents.

Some may say - God is like our brother, sister, friend, companion. Some may say God is like the wind - we feel God without ever seeing what God is like but know the effect he has on our lives. Others may use images of a butterfly, a flower, a rainbow, a rock, a stone, a mountain, a thunder storm, the sea, or fire.

For some it might be sensing God in an early morning sunrise or the quietness of a summers evening. In the smile of a young child or the tenderness of someone we are close to. There may be many simple events that we translate as movements of God's love.

Some may feel comfortable talking about God primarily in terms of Jesus - God's Son. So strong may be their sense of companionship with Jesus that to them God is best expressed through Jesus language. Others may prefer Holy Spirit language, especially those deeply nurtured in the Pentecostal experience of God.

We cannot package God up into one description. There is always so much to discover about God, we must always keep exploring.

Maybe this Feast of the Holy Trinity can help us to remember the tremendous breath and depth of God's reality and prevent us from wrapping him up into a tidy package.

It reminds us there are many ways we can relate to and experience God - and that in Christian tradition these ways have for centuries focused on God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

We are on a life-long journey of discovery of the God in whose image we are created. We are invited to share in the joy of the God who created us, who saves us, forgives and makes us whole, who strengthens us and leads us into truth.

Let us ask God The Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to draw close to us in the coming days and strengthen in his service. We have been commissioned to show what real love is all about, as we are filled with the presence of God's forgiving, restoring, compelling love. All we can reply is: "Here am I. Send me."

I would simply like to close with this thought on the Trinity. It perhaps might help us to understand this doctrine better if we word it this way: God the Father who is for us, God the Son who is with us, and God the Holy Spirit who is within us.

Someone once asked Mrs. Albert Einstein if she understood her husband's theory of relativity. No, she said, but I know my husband.

We cannot begin to fathom the incomprehensible mysteries of God, but that does not mean that we cannot know God. If God, choosing to make himself known to us, comes in the person of Jesus Christ and says I am your brother, and let me show you the Father, then by the Holy Spirit you can know God. Intimately. Personally.

The readings we hear on this Solemnity of the Trinity teach us to plant our feet firmly in creation in order to encounter the Triune God.

They call us to abandon the confines of any narrowly "religious" conception of divinity in order to know our Creator, Redeemer and the Source of our union with God and one another.

The first reading invites us to be surprised with Moses at the tenderness of the God who gave the Law to lead us to life. Paul reminds us that communion is the way we come to know God.

In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus teaches us that God is love, offers only love, and has sent the Son to lead us to love. Rather than being a feast for scholars, this is a celebration for lovers -- and it is none other than God who invites us into share the divine life of love.

jjl

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