Awe

Homily for May 22, 2016 (Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity)
Proverbs 8:22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

How do you describe an experience of awe?

There have been a number of instances in my life where my mind and soul as well as my body have been stopped in their tracks when beholding something so vast, so beautiful, so mysterious that was hard to take it all in:  a vibrant starlit sky on a clear night in rural Montana, a seemingly endless stretch of desert in Saudi Arabia, the rustic elegance and power of Spokane Falls, and gazing into the eyes of a newborn child.  In those times, I often remembered this phrase from Psalm 8:4:  “What are human beings that you are mindful of them/mortals that you care for them?”

This Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity is a celebration of a particular way in which God has been revealed to us:  Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons yet one God.  The fact that it’s still hard to wrap my mind around this revelation—even after years of study and religious formation and being expected to preach on it—also forces me to recall something else:  God is still a mystery.  Our human words, philosophical understandings, metaphors and images can only scratch the surface of who God is.

God is our Father yet also our Mother.  Jesus is our Savior yet also a brother and servant who washed the feet of his disciples.  The Holy Spirit, as our Creed tells us, “proceeds from the Father and the Son,” yet also fills us and works through us.  The limitations of our language are especially apparent when we speak of the Spirit.  The Latin Spiritus is masculine; the Hebrew Ruach is feminine; and the Greek Pneuma is neuter!  This Holy Spirit, which Jesus promised to give to us to guide us “to all truth,” lives forever in communion with the Father and the Son.

Through the grace of our Triune God, we have been brought into that mystery of communion.  As St. Paul testifies in Romans 5, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” and “the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  Brought into the mystery of divine communion, we are called to draw on that love and build communion here on earth, beginning with our church and our families and extending everywhere we are.

One of the great global maladies of our time is the breakdown of communion.  We see it in the civil wars raging in places like Syria, the coarseness of our political discourse and the paralysis that prevents our elected officials from fulfilling even their most fundamental duties like passing a (hopefully balanced) budget, the distrust between people in our neighborhoods and the police who are sworn to serve and protect them, and the growing gulf of wealth and interests between those who own and run our companies and the workers who create the goods and provide the services.  In light of this, the Holy Trinity is more than a mystery; it’s also an invitation and challenge. +