Homily for the Feast of the Holy Trinity

Call it both a joy and a perplexity - preaching on the Holy Trinity, that is. It's a joy to pause in the Church calendar and ponder this gracious, life-giving, sin-forgiving God who not only created us to be His own, but also entered our fallen world to redeem us from sin and death, and then, on top of that, stays with us to make us holy and sustain us for life with Him into all eternity. And yet it's also a profound perplexity. Just how do Father, Son, and Holy Spirit relate to each other? Just how can three Persons be one God, and how can one divine Essence be three Persons? Our addition-oriented minds, thinking in terms of 1 + 1 + 1 = 1?, just cannot fathom, much less handle, God's very different, "multiplication" way of thinking. After all, 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 is much different way of thinking (and computing). And yet that is precisely how God has revealed Himself to us: One in Three and Three in One.

At any rate, this past Sunday we celebrated our gracious, life-giving, sin-forgiving Holy Trinity, and my homily for the day focused on the Gospel reading from John 3:1-17. Perhaps more perplexity, as this reading seems to be chosen more for its connection to the octave of Pentecost than for Holy Trinity Sunday. And yet Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all make a glorious appearance in Jesus'--the Son's--conversation with Nicodemus. So I chose to include the line from the Athanasian Creed and titled the homily, "Whoever Desires to be Saved."

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