Homily For Sunday - June 19, 2011

Homily for the Holy Trinity

When Teddy Roosevelt was president of the United States, he had a favorite political story.  He said he knew it was true because he made it up himself.  It was about a congressman who had been accused of not supporting the Monroe Doctrine.  And the man quickly began to explain.  He said, “I believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I support the Monroe Doctrine. I would gladly die in defense of the Monroe Doctrine. The only thing is that I don’t know what it is.
       And that is a fairly accurate description of how many people feel about the doctrine of the Trinity.  They accept it; they believe it; they are devoted to it. But they are not at all sure what it means.  

            The Trinity is commonly considered the most complex of all Christian doctrines. Many regard it a realm of thought reserved for specialists. The assumption is that ordinary people cannot possibly understand it, so they concede it to the philosophers and the theologians. Let them wrestle with the mystery of how God can be one in three persons and three in one. We do not know what it means and we are more than willing to let someone else do the explaining.
       This attitude is understandable. This is probably one of the most difficult Sundays to preach. But as I reflect on this feast, the attitude overlooks this important historic truth: that the doctrine of the Trinity did not begin with specialists. It did not originate in the abstract thoughts of philosophers or theologians. It stated with and grew out of the experiences of ordinary people. They had met God. God has made a difference in their lives. And they wanted to tell the whole world what had happened to them. In order to do this, in order to share their full experiences, they had to speak of God in these different ways – Father, Son and Spirit. If they had left out any of the ways they spoke of God, the story of their experience with God would have been incomplete. So they fanned out across the Roman Empire telling everyone who would listen about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. They called it the gospel, which means good news.
       The essence of their message was that there is only one God. That was very important. But the ancient world believed in many gods. There was a god of agriculture, a god of wine, a god of fertility, a god of war, a god of the earth. The list went on and on. And those who took it seriously felt a need to honor all of those deities in order to keep them happy and win their favor. It was a demanding and tiresome task.
       When Paul arrived in Athens, you may recall, he walked the street and found altars to all kinds of gods. Among them, he found an altar dedicated to “the unknown god”. It was there for a very good reason. The Athenians feared that they may have accidentally overlooked some god. And lest he should be offended and send misfortune upon them, they built a altar to the god that they did not even know.
       Into that kind of world, the early Christians carried the message of the one true God. They preached it with unflagging zeal. It was good news. Instead of many gods, there is only one, and that God governs the world with righteousness and mercy.
       You and I are quite familiar with that idea. But even yet, we are not entirely sure that it is true. With part of our minds, we believe in divine providence.
With another part, we wonder about blind fate. We trust the one true God. But we also read the astrology charts and wonder if our destiny is somehow written in the stars. Our contemporary world is far from finished, with lucky numbers and magic charms.
       The message of one true God is good news.
But sometimes it seems almost too good to be true. Life is a very complex proposition, fraught with all kinds of contradictions. Good and evil co-exist, living together side by side. And often it is hard to tell one from the other. How can it possibly be true that at the center of all this is one unified reality called God?
       It is not an easy faith to hold. But this is the Christian gospel. There is only one true God. But why isn’t that enough? Why didn’t the early Christians stop there? Why did they feel a need to go on and say more? It was not because they struggled with abstract thoughts and came up with a new idea. It was because they encountered a new fact that became a vital part of their experience with God.
       There appeared among the people a young prophet, a working man named Jesus. He looked like any other person, but there was something different about Him. He talked about God in terms that ordinary people could understand. His religion was alive and vibrant. But the most unusual thing about Him was His love for people. He loved His family and friends, just as most people do. But that was not the extent of it. He also loved strangers, and foreigners and social outcasts. No one was beneath or outside of His interest and concern. The strangest thing of all was the way He regarded His enemies. They lied about Him and insulted Him, but all of their abuse never provoked Him to hatred or bitterness.
       This ordinary, but unusual person had a dramatic effect upon their lives. He brought God into their lives in a way they had never experienced before. How could they explain?
       At first they said “God sent Him.” But that was not enough. He was more than a messenger from God. Then they said “God was with Him.  But that was not enough either. And finally they said, “God was in Him.” It was a profound mystery. But somehow God had come into their lives in and through this man named Jesus. At some point, Peter said to Him what all of them were thinking…“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” So they came to speak of God the Father, and God the Son. The fact was, Jesus had stretched their understanding and experience of God.
       Then something else happened. Jesus was killed by His enemies. They thought He was gone forever. But the following Sunday, he walked back into their lives as God raised Him from the dead. After 40 days, he ascended out of their sight, never to be seen again.
       We might expect them to have felt terribly lost and alone. But they said that He was more real to them than ever. God had become a part of their lives in a new way. His Spirit dwelled within them and God was with them wherever they might go.
       So they added another dimension to their understanding of the one true God. He was God the Father in heaven, God the Son in history, and God the Spirit in their hearts. This is how the doctrine of the Trinity very simply came to be. It was the only way those early Christians could fully explain their experience with God.
       The president of a major bank returned to his Alma Mater for his class reunion. He dropped in on his old Economics professor. As they were chatting, the professor said, “Here’s something that might interest you – this year’s final exam.”
       The bank president scanned the exam, then said, “I could swear these are the identical questions you asked my class twenty years ago.”
       “They are,” said the professor with a smile. “But if you always ask the same questions, don’t you think the student will get wise?” “They do.”
       “Well, don’t they pass the questions on to the next year’s class?” “Of course they do.”
       “Then doesn’t everyone get an A on every exam?”
       “Not at all,” said the professor. “In Economics, the questions stay the same, year after year – but we keep changing the answers.”
       I believe that we keep looking for hard and fast truths, truths written in stone that will last forever – permanent truths that we can apply to every possible challenge and question that life throws at us. But truth is a process. God – the Father, the Son and Spirit – is a lasting reality. But God continues to reveal Himself. God is still leading us into a greater realization of what Jesus means in the gospels. May we be open to “the Spirit of truth” dwelling within each one of us within our Church, so that we may understand and bring God’s presence to all.
       The sign of the Cross.