It's About "We" Not "Me"

HOMILY FOR MOST HOLY TRINITY SUNDAY, June 7, 2020. The Gospel of John 3:16-18.  It’s About "We" Not "Me"

Today is Holy Trinity Sunday and to be honest with you, it’s a liturgy that most minsters fumble and stumble to preach about. I mean, how in the world do you talk about such an unfathomable mystery as God being One and Three? If we focus on the intellectual doctrine of the Trinity, we often we end up with either a boring lesson in theology or just saying a lot of things that sound noble but don’t really speak to our lives in a meaningful way. But I think that if we stop to really ponder what it means to say that our God is a Trinity and yet is still but One God, it can deliver a powerful message to us.

As we all know, by Blessed Trinity we mean that God has revealed himself to be three distinct Persons equally sharing in the One Divine Nature.  Furthermore, they exist and act in a perfect interpersonal relationship with one another as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s the basic plain and simple theology of it all.  But I think we need to go beyond the theology and enter into the mystery of the Trinity.  In doing so, we can leave the vocabulary of theology behind us and say, as I recently heard a radio priest put it, that the Trinity shows us that God is a “we” and not a “me”.  This means that God is harmony, unity, relationship and love. What a powerful message that is for us today! I think it helps us, at least I know it helps me, to begin to wrap our limited human minds around this awesome unlimited divine mystery

But there’s another unique Christian teaching that today’s liturgy brings to mind, another mystery that flows out of the Trinity and touches our lives in a significant way.  And this is the Incarnation. Theology tells us that this means that the Second Person of the Trinity became flesh as Jesus of Nazareth.  But once again we can leave the theological vocabulary behind and delve into what this mystery means for us.  And once we do this, we see that Incarnation means that Jesus became one of us in order to make it possible for us to share in God’s harmony, unity, relationship and love.

The very first verse of today’s gospel, John 3:16, speaks to us about this and of how each one of us can enter into this divine relationship.  It says, "God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life." It proclaims that the Father loves us and so he sends the Son to us. The Son loves the Father and us, so he eagerly agrees to be sent, even though it means his ultimate suffering and death.  And the Spirit is the divine power of God making this all happen and bringing each one of us into their relationship of harmony, unity and love through our faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior.

That’s all pretty awesome stuff, but here’s the thing: it’s not enough to know these teachings intellectually. It’s not enough to know in the head that God is love.  And it’s not enough to know in the mind that Jesus came into our world as its Savior.  Like all aspects of our Faith it has to go from the head to the heart, and from the heart to our tangible choices and behaviors. Otherwise, Trinity and Incarnation remain just lessons in the catechism and subjects to study in theology class. And no one was ever healed of sin and filled with grace by lessons in theology or the catechism!

 If God’s Word in John 3:16 doesn’t effect a change in us, then it’s nothing more than a consoling Bible verse that we memorize for difficult times; nothing more than ink on a page.  We have to live it, embrace it, allow it to enter into us and transform us.  It must move us to not only share in the Trinity’s relationship of unity, harmony and love but to make these things a reality in our everyday lives. What this means is that as children of God the Father, as brothers and sisters of God the Son, and as living temples of God the Holy Spirit we are to be a reflection of their harmony, unity, relationship and love.  We are called to make the love of God a motivation and reality in our relationships and social behavior.  We are to bring this love into our daily interactions with those among whom we live, work and socialize.

In other words, I think this means we need to remember that because God is a “we” and not a “me”, our lives are not meant to be jealously kept to ourselves as our own.  They are meant to be shared, to be given, and to be put into service for others. This is what it means to live as Christ, to live as a Christian.  And this is precisely what our troubled, divided, confused and violence torn world needs from us right now. And it’s up to us who have been baptized into the Trinity’s unity, harmony, relationship and love to be instruments and ambassadors of these things in a tangible way to a world that is desperately in need of them.

What this looks like in reality can be confusing to some people because many are confused about what love really means.  Too often, we think that love means a warm and fuzzy feeling or a way of acting and speaking that tolerates intolerable behavior. I think this makes us Christians afraid at times to speak the truth and extend God’s invitation to others.   But we need to keep in mind that love is not an emotion, although it may touch our emotions. Love is a choice, a decision.  It’s choosing to treat someone the way we want to be treated.  It’s choosing to speak what someone needs to hear even if this means enduring some difficulty. Love is being willing to let others know that God so loved that world that he sent his only Son and that turning our wills and our lives over to this only Son opens up to us a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of loving, and a whole new way of being.

We hear endless speeches these days about peace and justice, about equality and coexistence. Committees are formed to discuss these things. Laws are passed to enforce them. Mandatory classes are initiated in schools and workplaces to promote them. But none of these things can actually change the situation!  They can only force external behavior to comply, but they cannot touch and transform the human heart which is necessary for real and lasting personal and social change.

Racial harmony, social justice, peaceful cooperation, respect for the rights and lives of others can only come about by interior personal conversion. This means a radical change of heart in a person reborn spiritually by being healed of sin and filled with grace. A person who believes in Jesus as the only Son who came into this world to teach us Godlike living that is rooted in harmony, unity, relationship and love.  And this brings us full circle back to where we started this reflection – to the mystery of the Trinity -  to the praise and worship of our God, who alone can change the human heart and make it a reflection of who he is as “we” and not “me”.