Solemnity of the Holy Trinity
(Celebrated 1st Sunday after Pentecost)

Solemnity of the Holy Trinity

The Trinity is the term employed to signify the central doctrine of the Christian religion -- the truth that in the unity of the Godhead there are Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: "the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God." In this Trinity of Persons the Son is begotten of the Father by an eternal generation, and the Holy Spirit proceeds by an eternal procession from the Father and the Son. Yet, notwithstanding this difference as to origin, the Persons are co-eternal and co-equal: all alike are uncreated and omnipotent. This, the Church teaches, is the revelation regarding God's nature which Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came upon earth to deliver to the world; and which she proposes to man as the foundation of her whole dogmatic system.

The essence of our faith is belief in the Trinity, but nowhere in the Bible does it say the word "Trinity". It hints to it. But Trinity was something the early church developed through the Holy Spirit; i.e. that this is what we believe, that God is one God in three Divine Persons. Sometimes we don't realize how radical that is. That this is completely contradictory in the mindset of the Jews. That's why they killed Jesus -- because He claimed to be God, and there is only one God. If you saw the movie Jesus of Nazareth when the high priest says "Are you the Son of the Blessed One" and Jesus says, "I am," using the word for Yahweh, the high priest cries out the words that the Jews used everyday and all good Jews said, "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is One." And now Jesus comes and says, "Yes, He is one, but I am part of Him." Totally, totally foreign to the Jewish mindset. As the early Church tried to comprehend what was revealed to her -- Who God truly is, was and will be always -- that took development of doctrine. You can find hints of it, of course, in the Scripture. We hear in 2Corinthians 13:13 "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you." It's already been there from the very beginning.

But what does this mean to us? The Trinity is, of course, far beyond our imagination. How can God be one and yet have three persons? Most of us accept it because of what we've been taught as children. Muslims completely reject that. We're a minority 'in our belief' in that. Patrick used the reality of the shamrock to explain it. Others liked the reality of a candle flame. When you look at a candle very closely, you have a white part of the flame, a clear part and a blue part of the flame. One flame and yet three parts to it. A unity. Something like this could hint to the reality of Who God the Father is and Who God the Son is and Who God the Holy Spirit is. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, the Father is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Son and yet they are one. It blows our mind.

God has always been for all eternity a community of love. Some may think God was lonely before He created the earth. God was not lonely. God has always been a community of love. The Father has always loved the Son, the Son has always loved the Father. Their love is so real it's the person of the Holy Spirit and this outpouring of love one into another has always existed. When God decided to create, what happened was that love was poured out even more and overflowed into creation, and creation was born out of love. The whole purpose of the Alpha and the Omega is to catch us up into this community of love. That's why it's so important that nobody can be a member of Christ without being a member of Christ's body. There is no such thing that me and God have this relationship, because God is not like that. It's just not being God. I cannot say I love God unless I say I love you. I can't do it. I can't say that I'm alone in my relationship with God because being alone in my relationship with God is to cut myself off from the body, and to be cut off from the body would be to be cut off from God.

Everyone of us, when we come to follow God, are called to be members of a community, because God is a community. If God is a community as one person, then we as the parish of Saints Peter and Paul, we as the Archdiocese of Baltimore, we as the Roman Catholic Church, we as Christendom, must be one body in love, where we come together and worship God and are caught up into the God of love. So what I have to do and what you have to do is to examine: "am I a person of community"? Am I a person who comes to Mass on Sunday to put my time in because I want to make sure I go to heaven one day? That would be completely foreign and completely opposed to what has been revealed by God. It is not me and God. Never! Never has been and never will be. It's me, God and you, forever.

The Trinity - by CRANACH, Lucas the Elder - from Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig

What do you think heaven is going to be like? Do you think it's going to be a place where we sit there and we stare forever at God. That would be awfully boring. Heaven is a place revealed by Christ where God will love us and we will love Him and we will love each other intimately forever. That's why if we're not loving people on earth, we're not going to go to heaven. Why? Because we'll hate it there. We'll hate it where we have to love other people and shake other people's hands. We are called to be members of the community of love. When we do that, it means that we have to get messy. When I get involved in other people's lives, it's messy. A priest's problem is that he becomes involved in too many people's lives, which is messy sometimes. But that's the reality of what all of us are called to enter into, as best we can; into the community God calls us to be part of.

As we do that we begin to give a reflection of Who God is. Am I a reflection of the Trinity in the way I live my life? Am I a member of the community and remember that the Father always gives Himself to the Son, the Son always gives Himself to the Father, the Spirit is always the reality of that self-giving. Is that the way I live my life? Was yesterday for me a day of self-giving? Did I give away my life yesterday? Was I a member of the community of God where I gave away part of my life? Now if you care and worked on the carwash you were a person of self-giving love. You gave away your life by washing cars for the community, not for you, but for others. You gave away a part of your life. Every day I have to examine my conscience. If I did not give away my life today, my day was a waste, a waste of God's time and a waste of my time because the purpose God created me for was to give away my life. Because thats what He did. He did it and He made it real. He made the love of the Trinity real when He became a man, When Jesus Christ became a man and He died on the Cross, He said this is what self-giving love is about. Then He says, what I want you to do is to love one another as I have loved you. Go and be part of the community of love. Go and give away your life for others. Go and be a person for others. That is a high, high calling and that is the calling that God gives to each of us. That is the calling, of course, to the Cross of Jesus Christ, that we will embrace the Cross in love. When we do that we begin to bring the presence of the reality of the Trinity in our life so that people will know that the Trinity is real, because they see the Trinity in the way we live.