Homily for Trinity Sunday

Homily for Trinity Sunday

May 21, 1978

2 Cor 13: 13

St. Andrew’s, Upper Arlington, Ohio

My first homily as a priest.  I was ordained 2 days earlier.

Holy Trinity (Hendrick van Balen, 1620--St. James, Antwerp)

We began this Trinity Sunday Mass with a greeting taken from the end of St. Paul’s 2d Letter to the Corinthians.  We heard it again when the lector read the last 3 verses of that letter just a moment ago.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”  Paul is summing up all the best things he can wish for the Christians at Corinth, a community of believers to whom he himself had given birth.

But 1st you heard Paul rebuke his listeners.  He told them, “Mend your ways, heed my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace.”  His whole letter is a father’s attempt to patch up the quarrels between them and himself.  The Corinthian Christians were no more an ideal bunch of believers than the folks of St. Andrew’s today, even though their church was founded by St. Paul.

What is it that Paul wished for that Christian community—which is the same thing that the whole Catholic Church wishes for this Christian community at McCoy and Reed today?  “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

You and I are being called to and blessed with God’s own life, the inner life of the Holy Trinity.  We praise the Trinity today because the Trinity has shared itself with us; it has called us to be part of itself.

Jesus Christ offers us God’s grace, that is, his favor.  You know what a favor is.  It’s something you have no claim to; you can only ask for it as a gift.  Our Father in heaven loves us so much he gives his favor to us in the life, death, and resurrection of his only Son.  He adopts us as his own children.  We live out this new, divine life in the Church.  In a little while, I will pour some water into the wine of the chalice on the altar and say as I do so, “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

Jesus adopts us into the divine family.  He acts because his Father tells him to.  You might say it’s real.  And it didn’t just happen in Galilee 2,000 years ago.  It happens now, here, in 1978.  How?  By the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Father and Son are united in a love and fellowship called the Spirit, and that Spirit hovers over the Church and within each Christian, linking all of us in an intimate fellowship with God our Father and Jesus our brother—a fellowship more intimate and more lasting, really, than even the union of a husband and wife.  When we eat the body and blood of Christ, we become that body.  And if you listen to the Eucharistic prayer very closely, you’ll hear me invoke the power of the Holy Spirit to make that union and that change in the bread and wine happen.

So we come together this morning to celebrate our Christian calling to grace.  That is what our Eucharistic liturgy means—we say thanks to the Father for inviting us into the family and we renew our fellowship with his Son and one another.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”