Trinity Sunday 2013
Roscoe was fifteen and had just gotten his first job running errands
for an office. On his first morning his boss sent him on his first
errand. Roscoe took a thermos and went to a nearby Dunkin
Donuts. When he got there he held it up to the girl at the counter
and said “Is this big enough for three large coffees.” She looked at
it and thought and said “Yes.”
He said good, give me one regular, one black and one decaf.”
This Sunday
we celebrate the Mystery
of the Holy Trinity
three persons in one Divinity.”
SLIDE 1
How do I talk about the Trinity,
which is by definition an unfathomable mystery.
So we talk about Shamrocks
or Triangles
or Venn Diagrams
SLIDE 2
SLIDE 3
SLIDE 4.
Let’s look at our readings today and see what sort of
TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY comes out of the scriptures.
Then, after we see what Trinitarian Theology looks like
I’m going to offer two practical applications.
One personal application.
One Communal application.
So, on this Trinity Sunday you’ll get three sermons in one homily.
1
Our reading from proverbs tells us about God the Creator – first
person of the Trinity and God the Holy Spirit – third person of the
Trinity. We are told the Holy Spirit under the name of Wisdom is
present at Creation. What I love about this reading is that the Holy
Spirit is playful. She brings delight to the Creator by playing over
the surface of Creation. I also love we are told that God delights in
creation, particularly human beings.
So we have this wonderful image of a relationship.
Creator and Spirit at play, caught up in delight.
I love that image, God sharing in delight at Creation, being
delighted with us.
How do we enter into this Divine relationship?
That’s where our reading from Romans comes in.
We read,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
Christ,
through whom we have gained access by faith
Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity,
Christ is God in History
who has given us access to the God of mystery.
We have that access to God by our faith in Jesus Christ.
Romans goes on to say that
the love of God has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
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We receive access to God through our faith in Christ and that
faith brings us the gift of God’s love that is given to us by the
Holy Spirit.
Finally, we have the gospel of John. Our reading today
reinforces the Holy Spirit as the Seat of Wisdom.
We are told that
the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.
If we have faith in Christ then the Holy Spirit will be with us
to guide us to the truth that we seek.
The greatest truth is God
A god we call trinity
A God who is a mystery
But we understand as a community
of three persons.
Our readings give us a theology of the trinity as Three
Persons in Community.
The Creator who is veiled in mystery
Jesus Christ, God in history
The Holy Spirit the God of hilarity
the one who delights in us and pours God’s love into our
hearts.
3
Let’s see how the theology of God as Trinity might work out
personally. For that I want to use a famous prayer, which is
attributed to the great Protestant theologian of the 20th Century.
Reinhold Niebuhr.
A prayer I suspect you know.
A prayer I often pray.
SLIDE 5
God,
Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I can’t change.
the Courage to change the things I can
and the Wisdom to know the difference.
The Serenity Prayer, as it is called, invokes the Trinity for me.
For me, this prayer addresses the Trinity.
Let me show you what I mean.
Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I can’t change.
SLIDE 6
First we ask the Creator God for serenity.
One of Thomas Aquinas’ definitions of God is
the unmoved mover,
I hear that as
The God that is always there for us, always loving us
no matter what happens.
The God of Peace, the God of Shalom.
God who is our coolness in heat, our solace in the midst of woe.
When we wish each other Peace Be With You we are saying the
Peace of God, the Peace beyond human understanding, that
Shalom of total well-being be with you.
4
We are limited by time and space and our native intelligence and
our upbringing and our situation in life we are limited and our
limitations cause us anxiety. God is not limited, God can help us
move from anxiety to acceptance, acceptance of life on life’s
terms.
Then we ask Christ for Courage.
SLIDE 7
the Courage to change the things I can
Jesus Christ’s integrity and fortitude speaks to me of courage.
The one who stood against the religious and political powers of his
time. Who in the end, stood alone against the condemnation of evil
men and suffered their cruel punishment and unjust execution.
Once when I was on retreat I was praying for the gift of courage
and I talked to the retreat director about it. He pointed out that
courage comes from the same Latin root as the word for heart.
from Latin cor ‘heart.’
Just in common parlance, we talk about somebody having a lot of
heart. – the willingness of an athlete to get up and try again after
they have failed. We say that person “has a lot of heart.”
When we say someone has heart we also mean that they are
compassionate. Someone with heart can feel the suffering of others
and want to do something to help them.
Christ was the compassion of God who showed us what true
courage looks like, it is a strength born from compassion.
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and the Wisdom to know the difference.
SLIDE 8
Finally, we ask the Holy Spirit for Wisdom.
Wisdom we are told in Isaiah 11 is the first gift of the Holy Spirit.
Wisdom is the gift that allows us to know things deeply.
The discern things as God discerns. Allows us to make right
choices. Not just head knowledge but heart understanding.
Divine Wisdom give us Insight into human nature.
Another way to say this is to think with the mind of Chirst.
Our goal as Christians is to grow into being like Christ,
to be more deeply incorporated as a member of the Body of Christ.
To become an alter Christus, another Christ.
To be Christ for others.
SLIDE 9
The Spirit, we are told in today’s Gospel of John, is the one who
leads us to all truth, which is to say, to see things as Christ does.
There are so many ways to see things,
there are not just two sides to any story
there are as many sides as there are story tellers.
We want to see things as Christ does so we can act as Christ.
“Grant me the wisdom” is to say help me think as God does not
from my own ego driven desires, not from my personal pessimism
or overinflated optimism but as Christ does.
6
We don’t do any of this in isolation. We are members of the Body
of Christ, buy our faith we are brought into the relationship of the
community of divine persons, we are in relationship with God and
with other believers.
Now, briefly, let’s practically
APPLY TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY COMMUNALLY.
God exists as a community.
The Trinity is the original small community of faith.
We are built for community.
Community is where our faith grows.
Where conversion happens.
We have a long history here at the Paulist Center of small groups
of faith, groups of people who meet in homes as schools of
discipleship. The place where individuals grow deeper in their faith
by sharing with other believers. We learn from each other and by
speaking our own Spirit guided truth.
SLIDE 10
Last Lent we started the latest interation of these faith sharing
groups. This was first objective of our Pastoral Plan and our
intention is to use the summer to plan and to start up neighborhood
groups again in the fall and continue to grow these groups.
SLIDE 11
My vision is that these small communities of faith where people
grow together in their faith, their relationship with God. They meet
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God in scripture and meet each other in sharing their faith. They
become the schools of discipleship.
They also become the primary source of pastoral care. If you are
sick, these are the people who bring you casseroles and
communion.
If you are discouraged, these are the people who offer
encouragement.
If you are having trouble raising your kids or getting trough some
life challenge, this is where you meet someone who has gone
before you and can help you along the way. SLIDE 12
We believe as Catholics that our God is a small community of
faith.
We believe that we share in that divine life through our faith in
Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
We believe that we are called to grow as disciples and we are
called to grow together, as a community of faith.
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