Trinity: Cycle C 21-22

THE SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY 

Proverbs 8:22-31 | Romans 5:1-5 | John 16:12-15

God, our Father, who’s sending into the world the word of truth and the spirit of sanctification, make known to the human race your wondrous mystery.  Grant us, we pray, that in professing the true faith, we may acknowledge the Trinity of eternal glory and adore your unity, powerful in majesty.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

In 1960, I was a sophomore in college, and I had a lot of things on my mind, trying to figure out who I wanted to be and who I was.  And I remember so much thinking that the things of the world, the different occupations I would kind of thumb through in my imagination never seemed to be enough for me, and so I had this weird idea that maybe I should try a seminary.  And I don’t even quite know why I felt so strongly about that, but it was enough to move me from my years at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas, a Catholic school, and I entered the seminary.  And I have looked back on that decision over and over again and wondered, “What was it that made me long for something that seemed very, even at the time, etheric and mysterious, working for the church?”  I wasn’t drawn to the church.  I wasn’t drawn to religion, and that became clear to me.  But the thing that was in my heart was this incredible love for human beings.  I always had this sense of, I don't know, wonder about humans.  I remember even in my family of origin, they would say, “Why are you always so interested in getting to know everybody in the neighborhood,” or something.  I don't know.  I just had that, and I think it was the gift that God gave me that drew me into a work that I think it’s now clear to me why I’m in it than ever before.  And that is because I really believe, with all my heart, that this wonderful thing, called my Catholic Church, and all the churches, have such an incredible, deep responsibility of putting people in touch with God, and yet in so many ways, because of our human nature, I supposed, because we’re in a period of transition more intense than maybe we’ve ever been before, religion can fail pretty miserably at doing what I think it’s intended to do, to really care for, love, take care of human beings and nurture them into becoming who they were created by God. 

The image in the readings, or at least in the Psalm, is that we’re made just a little bit less than the angels.  What an incredible thing that God created human beings with such dignity and value.  And so in the first reading from Proverbs, we go back to the moment of creation.  Last week we celebrated the Feast of Pentecost, which is the beginning of the church, the beginning of this thing we call religion, and in that moment that God created this thing, we were told that the manifestation or the work, I would say, was to manifest God for who he is and the incredible, wonderful, marvelous works that he accomplished.  That’s what we celebrated in that feast, of some human beings in one place talking about this God and all that he did and all that he’s doing, and everybody around from all different parts of the world that couldn’t begin to understand their language understood something flowing out of their hearts.  And that is the wonder of God, the beauty of God, the love of God and the dignity he’s bestowed upon human beings.  That’s the beginning of the church, and then as she evolves, she gets caught up in the things of the Old Testament.  And we know that the temple was the great burden that Jesus carried in his life as he loved in human beings and wanted to bring them into a life of fullness and wholeness, and he saw the temple as the enemy, as the one who was robbing them of their dignity of knowing God, feeling God’s presence.  God was presented through the temple as a law, a demanding law that, if you failed that law, you had failed God.  And that’s the shadow of all religion: judgment, condemnation for your imperfection as a human being.  Yet God created us this way. 

So we have in this particular feast, the Feast of the Trinity, we have the most important teaching about the nature of God and his relationship with human beings when it comes to who we are to become through the communities that God forms called churches.  And we’re to be people filled with an awe and a wonder of who God is and what he does for us and an absolute understanding of the role of Jesus, who is the one who came to manifest to us who God really is and how he longs for us to see him in our life.  And then we’re to know something about this Holy Spirit.  So it seems to me that, without all three of these mysterious ways in which God describes himself, if we lose any one of them, we’re really in a dangerous place, and religion can skip some of them, I think, in what happens and not stress the wholeness of who God is because — let’s look at the wholeness of God for a minute.  That’s what this feast is all about. 

God the Father, who is he?  Well, he’s always existed.  That’s easy to understand, right?  He’s always been alive, always been around, and at one point in his imagination, he decided to create a world.  And he was motivated by this sense that he has of who he is.  It’s called wisdom, and so the world that he created is extraordinary in terms of its beauty and its interconnectedness.  It’s so fascinating to me that God created a world where everything about its nature, every single aspect of one part of what he creates is blessed and nourished by another part, especially that comes true with animals, that every animal is in sort of a cycle of an ecological system where, if you take one of the animals out of that system, the whole thing kind of falls apart.  So in God’s creation, everything fits together.  Everything makes sense as one.  That’s the wisdom that was there in God as he created the world, and the first reading from Proverbs is so beautiful, because it’s describing God creating the world.  That’s God’s role as an artist, beautiful, beautiful artist creating the world, and of all the things that he created, wisdom is there.  That’s the wisdom that is in God, and it’s like this thing that he’s creating is so interconnected, it’s so filled with wisdom and a connectedness and a beauty that is beyond anything any human being could ever, ever imagine.  So you have God creating the world with the gift of wisdom as his guide, and I love the image of wisdom.  It’s feminine in this whole beautiful passage of Proverbs.  It’s masculine in the gospel, but that doesn’t mean that wisdom is either feminine or masculine.  It’s both, but the beauty of this image of wisdom is that there’s such — such beauty and balance and integrity.  And it all makes sense if you could just see it for what it is.  That image of the Spirit as wisdom is so beautiful in the creation of the world and in the creation of the communities that God calls us to live in, called churches, called religion.  The wisdom has to be there as those institutions grow and are created by the human beings that run them.  It has to be guided by wisdom.  It has to make sense to us.  It has to be something that, when we see it for what it is, our hearts melt in its presence, and we want what it promises. 

And we can’t talk about God the Father and the Holy Spirit without talking about Jesus, who makes up the third part of the Trinity, and what we see in Jesus is the manifestation of the kingdom taking flesh so that we don’t have it as an idea but as a — it is witnessed to us by Jesus, who is a man, a human.  Don’t get caught up in the male part of him.  He is everyone.  He is human nature.  He is humanity, and he is coming into the world to manifest the wisdom of who God is and how he functions in the world.  And Jesus is the one who says, “I come into the world through human nature.”  And that means, when we think about church, it means that the witness of who God is, is going to come primarily from the people around you, people who are living this gospel.  In other words, the gospel takes root when it’s in a human being functioning.  When a human being is there for others with no judgment, no condemnation, only love, only forgiveness, that’s the manifestation of God in human beings, and that’s what makes up religion.  That’s the most attractive part of it.  Talk to anybody that’s had a really wonderful experience with religion.  You say, “What was it like?”  “Well, we had these wonderful people around us, these friends, these people that I spent time with, and we were loving each other.  And we seemed to understand each other, and we were forgiving each other.  And we were living in a world that we felt was so idyllic.” 

And then the shadow of religion often comes in, because the shadow of religion is when wisdom slips away, then what’s left is something dangerous.  The absence of wisdom leads to control, and control is power over people.  And when you have a religion that becomes power over people, it has to have a reason to have that power, and it claims that, if a person isn’t reaching a certain goal, if they don’t reach a certain kind of wholeness or perfection, they are unacceptable.  That’s the most dangerous, frightening thing about all religion.  It can become judgmental, narrow, fixed, demanding, and in a way, frightening as it may sound, resentful that you haven’t achieved a certain goal that you’re supposed to achieve.  It’s the antithesis of wisdom, the antithesis of what God wants.  And why would I say that?  Because the wisdom that is at the heart of what God reveals to us in the Holy Spirit is this awesome reverence for human nature.  When God said, “I created you just a little bit less than the angels,” what is he saying?  He’s saying, “Of all the things I’ve created in this world —” He created angels also, but of all the things I’ve created that make up the world that you and I live in, there’s nothing more precious to him than human beings.  Nothing deserves more honor, more respect, more forgiveness, but also nothing less than honoring a human being’s freedom of choice.  Freedom of choice, isn’t it amazing?  A religion that becomes dominant over a person’s personal life and becomes demanding and claiming that they have to live in a certain way, they have to reach a certain goal, they have to be free of certain problems in order to be a member of this church, that kind of thing just does violence to the very dignity to a human being who has within them the presence of God, as in Jesus, and the presence of wisdom.  And what is wisdom within you enabling you to do that you couldn’t do without wisdom?  Make choices, discern your weaknesses, recognize there has to be in all things some reason for being, and all things work together for the good so that our weaknesses become the very tools that we need to work through in order to reach the goodness that is our nature.  All of that works together, but if something comes along that decides it’s going to rule this system of evolution of growth and change by not allowing it to be its natural — take its natural course, which is sin, problems and rejection, all kinds of weaknesses, as the scripture today talks about.  There’s weaknesses in our human nature, and they create character. 

So what I want you to feel with me is that, in God’s plan, you have this extraordinary gift of God’s wisdom living inside of you, that if you turn to it, you will find, as the Proverb says, you will find life, and things will make sense.  And you’ll have the most amazing capacity to look at yourself and see yourself as this creature that God creates that is meant for growth, change, evolution, and it does it through mistakes and being forgiven.  But most especially it develops inside a human being a capacity to see, understand, to make sense of the things that you can’t understand with your brain, but it makes sense to a heart that realizes that this God, who created you, would not create you for freedom without giving you the tools that you would need to make the right decisions.  And without freedom, you know what can’t exist is love.  Love of its very nature is a free gift of self to someone else, not something that you’re told you have to do in order to have a relationship with someone else.  That’s not love.  No, love is the most divine attribute that we can take on, and its very nature is to say, “I am freely — I am freely offering my service, my goodness, my presence to help someone else, to help myself to be a source of goodness in me and in others.”  That’s what wisdom gives, and the reason why it becomes so strong and so powerful is because you see what it does.  When a person feels love for who they are, when they feel forgiveness, when they feel that you would be there as a source of wisdom and guidance for them, and that guidance comes through you, because the Spirit doesn’t just dwell in you for you but for you — as it takes root in you, you’ll share it with someone else.  That whole process is the most beautiful, most, I think, amazing description I can make of what religion is intended to be, the most experience of God in you, living in you, guiding you, awakening you to the truth and then enabling you to be that truth to one another. 

Father, your wonder, your awesome beauty and goodness are so beyond our comprehension, so beyond our ability to grasp fully who you are.  So bless us with your most precious gift of wisdom so that we can see you in all things that you’ve create, honor your beauty and your goodness in all things and find a reverence that’s beyond anything else I could imagine that would guide us in moving toward a life that is an instrument of goodness to the world.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.