A Trinity Homily
In today’s first reading, Moses asks the people: has anything so great ever happened before? As another translation has it, has a word ever been spoken that was so majestic?
Why is Moses so triumphant? Moses and the Israelites are on the bank of the Jordan River. After many cycles of betrayal and reconciliation in the desert, they are finally ready to enter the Promised Land. God has forbidden Moses to go with them. But Moses accepts this discipline and instead of grumbling, he glories in a wholehearted testimony to God’s greatness. He reminds Israel of their experience, their history with God. He recounts how the creator made a covenant with them, calling them out of slavery both to the Egyptians and slavery to their own pride and folly.
Moses reminds Israel “this is what God is like,” in contrast to other possible ways of imaging God. It’s so easy to get fixed on the wrong image of God and what matters.
Moses is reminding them and us all about the deeper story. He’s talking about how God works and reveals himself in history, through a covenant with this particular people. He is full of wonder at what God has done and he is exhorting us to remember, to fix God’s story in our hearts, to make sure we proclaim the truth to our children’s children.
Today’s second reading from Romans has the same energy, the same longing to confirm the connection between God and his people. St Paul says today that through Christ, we Gentiles are adopted into this same covenant. We are heirs, sons and daughters of the Father. That is why we cry out – “cry” is the verb, capturing urgency, a longing - for “Abba, Father.” It’s a longing to root ourselves in what is ultimately true, a thirst to know and be known by our Creator.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus invites us into this communion. When he sends the apostles to make disciples of all nations, to baptize in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, he is throwing open God’s covenant with Israel, inviting the rest of us to join the intimacy of the Trinity, to sing in the chorus with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
In his treatise on the Trinity, St Augustine begged: “Let me remember you, let me understand you, let me love you.” To follow the Son and cry out “Abba, Father” is to ache and long for harmony with the Trinity. As Augustine says elsewhere, our hearts are restless until we finally rest in thee, and nowhere else.
When we walk into a church, and we put our fingers in the holy water by the door, and we make the sign of the cross over ourselves, we are re-inscribing our own baptism in the name of this Father, this Son, and this Holy Spirit. At the beginning of every Mass, we again sign the cross over our selves, invoking the Trinity. In a few moments, we will profess our faith in the creed’s description of God as three persons. When we do all these things, we profess that God is this way, and not some other way. When we confess that God is Triune, we proclaim that in God’s very self, there is a gaze between lover and beloved, generating a Spirit of love overflowing in which we are invited to participate. When we do these things, we join ourselves to Moses, to St. Paul, to St. Augustine, and to all the holy men and women who hungered and thirsted for the true God.
This Triune God is not tame, but richly generative, a torrent, a Niagara Falls of inexhaustible possibility. When we trust in this divine communion of persons, it reorients our lives. To profess the Trinitarian God is, at the same time, to turn our back on all the mythologies extolling pride and self. To seek union with the Trinity means being pruned of all selfishness – this is what Paul means in the second reading when he says that sometimes we suffer for the sake of glory. If God is a communion of persons, then any act of love is a step closer to fulfilling the image of God in us, to becoming who we were created to be. And while suffering may be an obstacle to a self-centered life, suffering is no obstacle to the Trinity. Indeed, if we are open to suffering as an occasion to give and receive love, then we have discovered one of the keys to being fully alive in the image of our Triune creator.
But here’s the thing – we constantly get distracted from reality. We drift and dodge. We hedge and negotiate. We try to evade God, as if authenticity could be found somewhere else, denying our identity in the image of Triune love. Unlike Moses, we don’t typically accept God’s discipline, and so we shirk from suffering, jealously protecting our prerogatives. In today’s Gospel, we read that the disciples both worshipped and doubted at the same time. We too are typically a very mixed bag, trying to serve two masters, not fully trusting that Triune love can be the foundation for a life.
This is where spiritual disciplines and habits come into play. We need the long, slow, practical, dogged, and patient work of daily prayer, weekly Mass, and monthly confession to stay centered. We are much happier when we live this way, but we are so easily distracted.
Last weekend, down at the cathedral, the Archbishop ordained three young new priests. One of them was a friend of mine, and I sat in the front row. In his homily the Archbishop thanked the three young men for listening to the quiet voice of God, and trusting their lives that it was real. A new priest’s road from initial inquiry, through seminary, up until ordination will take the better part of a decade, and all along, these young men have to stay centered, staking their whole identity on trust that the Triune God is real, the answer to our heart’s desire.
When any of us say yes to God and his invitation to us, when we discipline our lives to stay in that center and live from that place, we will find that we’re caught in a cycle of love and service, of worship and growth. As we approach this celebration of the Eucharist, let us marvel at the Trinitarian mystery, and praise God for being love in his very essence. Let us thank God that he has revealed himself as a God who gets involved with his people, who hears the cry of our hearts, and invites us into his eternal communion of persons.
