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TRINITY SUNDAY 2022, Cycle C
Proverbs 8: 22-31 + Psalm 8: 4-9 + Romans 5: 1-5 + John 16: 12-15
Holy Spirit Catholic Church: June 12, 2022
For too many Christians, belief in the Trinity remains disconnected from real life.
But no Christian belief is more down to earth than the Trinity.
Dozens of times a day we show whether we believe in the Trinity or not.
It is the heart of our understanding of what it means to be truly human.
The New Testament, particularly the 1st Letter of John, states over and over again
that God is love.
So, God has always been love, from all eternity.
If there was just a solitary, lonely God who eventually got around
to creating the universe, such a God could not be love,
for there would have been nothing to love until the universe began.
For such a God, love could only have been accidental, not baked into God’s very being.
Since we believe that God’s very essence is love, we believe in a Triune God,
three distinct persons in relationship with each other,
We believe in a God who from all eternity exists as a Communion of Persons
in an eternal relationship of giving and receiving, loving and being loved.
The very essence of God is a relationship of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The awesome reality of God is a community of divine persons bound together by love.
The persons of the Trinity exist, as it were, from their mutual relationship:
The Son receiving everything from the Father, and the Spirit receiving everything
from the Father and the Son.
Thus, the universe is relational at every level.
Relationship is the core and foundational shape of Reality, mirroring our Trinitarian God.
This truth lies at the very foundation of what it means to be a person:
personhood as relationship.
So, the Trinity challenges our modern individualistic understanding of personhood.
For we who live in 21st century America are a people
who are madly in love with individual choice.
We constantly speak of our precious individuality:
my body, my property, my rights, my life.
It goes on and on to the point where other people become not a source of relationship
but a problem for us because they get in the way of our choices.
They make demands, because they want their rights.
Into all of this comes the Trinity, reminding us that as it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be-- a relation of persons as Father, Son, and Spirit.
God exists in relationship as Trinity, and so God exists in relationship with humanity.
It is about relationship, and the truth that only in relationships do we find our being.
Existence is not the result of being an individual.
Existence is the result of relationship: a relationship with the Triune God & with others.
The pretense of autonomy has pushed us apart from each other and from God.
But God is not deterred by our hard-headedness nor our hard-heartedness, for the Triune God continues to entice us and draw us deeper into a life lived in communion with others.
Of its very nature, the Triune love overflows,
because love by its nature cannot be contained.
The Father and the Son are not stuck in mutual infatuation.
Their love overspills in the Spirit. This is a love which is open beyond itself.
Thus came about the creation of the world as we know it,
from nothing, the beauty of creation came to be.
The Spirit, personified as Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs,
“plays” on the surface of the earth, bringing to life all of Creation, with the pinnacle
of Creation being man and woman made in God’s image as very good.
Created in God’s image, we are made for love and made to be in relationship.
The ever-creative Spirit brings life and breath to countless animals and plant life.
So that as we humans enter into relationship with Creation, not dominating it,
but being good stewards of the gift of Creation, we become connected with all that is.
All creation is given to us by God to delight in: the beasts of the earth,
the birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea.
That is why even when delighting in our favorite pet or delighting in a blooming flower,
we become connected with the life-giving creativity of the Trinity,
whose love continues to create and sustain all life.
God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit delight
in the beauty of the created world, which flows from their love for each other.
God delights in the human race, and that delight is never taken away,
even when we stray and refuse to receive the ongoing offer of such life and love.
It seems like God always loves us and cannot stop loving us
and all that God has created.
God delights in us, and God longs to be in Communion with us.
Why else would the Son of God say--- Take and eat, this is my Body given up for you.
Why else would the Son of God say---Take and drink, this is my blood
poured out for you.
So, as we model our lives on Jesus’ self-gift, as we give away our life for another,
we enter into the mystery of Trinitarian Life.
For as we give away ourselves for another,
we move beyond our own small life into connection with others,
with all Creation and with the Triune God.
Fr. Joseph A. Jacobi