Every year, on
the Sunday after Pentecost, after the end of our Easter season, we celebrate
the Holy Trinity in a very special way. In
fact, we have been celebrating the Holy Trinity on the Sunday after Pentecost
since the early 14th century, as declared in an edict by Pope John
XXII. We try to use human concepts and
human words in order to understand God and in order to describe God as a
Trinity. Ultimately these concepts and words do the best job they can, but they
are far from perfect.
Last weekend,
I had four Baptisms: three in Belzoni with two Hispanic family, and one at St
Mary’s with the baptism of Katherine McKay Choate, the daughter of Will and
Elise Choate. All of the little babies
were dressed up in beautiful gowns or little white suits, and family members
and friends came from near and far in order to celebrate this wonderful day. We hear the command from Jesus in our Gospel
today to go and baptize new believers in the name of the Trinity, in the name
of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In
fact, baptism is recognized as valid by most Christian churches, including the
Catholic Church, only if it is done with water and in the name of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no
getting around this, and it shows how important and essential our belief in the
Trinity is to our faith. In fact, I
remember when I first arrived in Milwaukee as a seminarian, I had heard a story
that the new Archbishop there had heard about a parish in his archdiocese that
wanted to use inclusive language in all its forms in its expressions of worship
and in the sacraments, so much so that it was baptizing in the name of Creator,
Redeemer, and Sanctifier, not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One of the first things the new Archbishop
did was to alert this parish that it was going back to the correct wording of
the Trinity in the baptismal formula, and that it would have to re-baptize all
of the children in which the Trinitarian formula was not used, because those
baptism had not been valid.
Gregory of Nyssa, one
of the early Church fathers from the 4th century, wrote that when we
are baptized, we do not receive this sacrament of the Church in silence, but
while the names of the three sacred persons are spoken over us, for we believe
in the three persons of God, in whom we place our hope, from whom comes both
our present and our future existence.
The Trinity is so
important to our faith in God that it has been the focus of much theological
discussion in our Church, from the early days right after Christ’s death and
resurrection. In fact, new vocabulary
words developed in to describe the Trinity.
As you know, in the new translation of the Nicene Creed, we now say that
Jesus is “consubstancial” with the Father, meaning that they are of the same
substance. The Greek word “hypostasis”
was used to describe the Trinity as persons that make up the God we believe in,
that each of these three members of the Trinity is an individual,
non-interchangeable subject in itself.
For me as a priest,
it is so important for me to bring out the message that God is love for us,
that our God exemplifies love, mercy, and compassion. To even begin to
understand what the love of God is all about, we need to see the mutual love
that exists in the three persons of the Trinity, the loving way in which they
interact with each other, the way those three persons are bonded together in
love. As believers in the Trinity, and as beings made in the image of God, it
is most important that we experience God’s love in our relationship with the
members of the Trinity. The members of
the Trinity are in relationship with themselves as the one God, and as such, we are
all called to discover more about ourselves as followers of Christ by
recognizing and learning about the relational nature of God.
And perhaps Paul
gives us a glimpse of our relationship with the Trinity in our second reading
from the letter to the Romans. Paul
tells us that the Spirit leads us to identify ourselves as sons and daughters of
God, but children of God through adoption and not through slavery. As such we are able to call God “Our Father,”
“Our Dad.” This makes us heirs of the
Father just as Christ was an heir, and so we go through sufferings here on
earth, we unite our sufferings with the sufferings that Christ endured, and so
are able to be united with God’s glory as well.
When I was recently
on pilgrimage in Spain, there were certain “saints” that I prayed to for help,
including some of you parishioners here.
I prayed with you on that pilgrimage, I prayed for you. I thought of Father Jeffery, the rectory of
St Peter’s cathedral, of Sister Paulinus Oakes, my feisty Sister of Mercy
friend in Jackson, of Suzan Cox, the liturgist at St Richard, and of Martha Ueltshey, one of the parishioners of St
Richard who is very good friends with two of the ladies who went with me. My pilgrimage was made so much richer by the
relationships of those whose spirit I felt with me as I walked across Spain
each day on my way to the cathedral in Santiago. In a similar way, as we interact with the
different persons of the Trinity in our lives of faith, we will grow more and
more in our faith, and our faith life will seem so much more richer.
I want to close with
a blessing that comes at the end of the sacrament of the anointing of the sick,
that asks the blessing of the Trinity in our lives:
May God the Father
bless you.
May God the Son heal
you.
And may God the Holy
Spirit enlighten you.
May almighty God
bless all of us – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – Amen.
