Trinity

Propers: Holy Trinity, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

To say that God is Trinity is to say that God is love. But this is not to say that all love is God.

Love, according to the Rabbi Abraham Twerski, is a word that in our culture has almost lost its meaning. In his words:

There’s a very interesting story about the Rebbe of Kotzk, who came across a young man who was clearly enjoying a dish of fish that he was eating. And he said, “Young man, why are you eating that fish?” And the man says, “Because I love fish!” He says, “Oh. You love fish. That’s why you took it out of the water and killed it and boiled it.” He says, “Don’t tell me you love the fish. You love yourself. And because the fish tastes good to you, therefore you took it out of the water and killed it and boiled it.”

So much of what is love, alright, is fish love. And so, young couple falls in love. Young man, young woman, fall in love. What does that mean? That means he saw in this woman someone who, he felt, could provide him with all his physical and emotional needs. And she felt, in this man, she’d [found the same]. That was love. But each one is looking out for their own needs. It’s not love for the other. The other person becomes a vehicle for my gratification. Too much of what is called love is fish love.

An external love is not a “what I’m going to get” but a “what I’m going to give.” We had in Ephesus Rabbi Dessler, who said the people make a serious mistake in thinking that you give to those whom you love. And the answer is—the real answer is—you love those to whom you give. And his point is, if I give something to you, I’ve invested myself in you. Right? And since self-love is a given, everybody loves themselves, now that part of me has become in you; there’s part of me in you that I love. So true love is a love of giving, not of receiving.

Quite so. Love, I am at pains to point out, is not simply an emotion. Love is not the same thing as feeling in love. Love is when we put the good of another before our own, when we give of ourselves—we sacrifice—for the beloved. And that’s who God is. He is always giving of Himself. That’s why God is love.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Not because He needed to. He wasn’t lonely or bored or needed someone to talk to. God is, in His very Being, a perfect, eternal, and infinite act of love: the love of God the Father poured out into God the Son; the love of God the Son offered up in full to the Father; and God the Holy Spirit as the living flow of that love between the Father and the Son. Thus God is Three and yet One: eternal, uncreated, infinite Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

God doesn’t create because He has to, because He needs or lacks anything within His own self. The dance of the Trinity leaves nothing to be desired. Rather, God creates freely, selflessly, purely out of joy and superabundant love. God gives of Himself for the beloved. And He has loved us from before our world began.

Theologians have pointed out that if there were not multiplicity within the Godhead—if there were not some otherness even within God’s own unity—then there would be no way to know otherness outside of God’s unity. Put another way, God must be Trinity in order to truly create (at least so far as we can understand Him). Regardless, God’s act of creation is an act of love. And I don’t mean that sentimentally. To love is to give of oneself, and in order for creation to be created, there had to be some space opened that was not God. The biblical word for this is kenosis, self-emptying, and God had to empty Himself—to limit Himself voluntarily—in order for there to be room, so to speak, for Creation. Even this is an act of love.

God is Being itself, the Source and Ground of all reality. And for us to have being—that is, for us to be real, for us to exist—God gives of Himself, gives to us our being. And so Creation is not just some Big Bang 14 billion years ago. Creation is every moment that we exist, every heartbeat, every breath. We exist from moment to moment because God loves us. If God were ever to stop loving something, stop giving of Himself for the beloved, for even a split second, that thing would cease to be, cease ever to have been. God loves all that He has made. And our proof of this is that we’re all still here.

But this wasn’t enough for God; He wanted to give us more. He gave to us awareness, morality, and will. He gave to us reason and the freedom to choose. Unfortunately we chose poorly, selfishly. Humanity chose to judge good and evil for ourselves. And thus our will is now bound by our sin, and our reason lies fallen from grace. We are enslaved by pride, separated from love, exiled from Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

Yet still God loves us. Still He calls to us. Still He gives to us all that He has. When we broke the world, shattering the harmony intended by God, He came with us out from Eden. He provided for us from the bounty of the earth. He sang to our poets and teased our philosophers. Atop Sinai He revealed His Law to His chosen people and sent to us His promises through the prophets. Then, in the fullness of time, God gave to us His most unspeakable treasure: God gave to us His only Son, who is God Himself, the visible Image of the invisible Father. And God became Man in Jesus, to walk with us, weep with us, heal and teach and liberate us, to free us from our sins and raise us up from death!

And once again, we responded to the love of God with violence and wrath. We nailed our Creator to the Cross and tried to feed the murdered Son back to His Almighty Father. Yet even this ultimate act of desecration—the most heinous murder imaginable, of a Father’s only Son—could not separate us from the love of God. For by the mysterious and terrible workings of His providence, God took the Cross we inflicted upon Him and used it as His means by which to redeem the entire world!

From that Cross, Christ poured out His life for the world, poured out from His wounded side the water of everlasting life and the Blood of the New Covenant. And then, mirabile dictu, He poured into us His own Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God the Father, the Spirit of Jesus Christ: the Spirit who is Himself the very bond of life and love and breath that flows eternally from Father to Son and back again.

In other words, God made us into Him. He put part of Himself into us. We are given His Body and Blood, His Name and His Spirit. Together we are members of the Body of Christ, with Jesus our Head and the Spirit our Soul. We are pulled, body and soul, into the dance of the Trinity, into the selfless love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that is God Almighty. We are promised eternity and freedom and perfect, infinite joy, not in some fantasy world, but within the very heart of God—made one in Him, yet still ourselves, so that we, like our God, are many and yet are one.

I know that’s a lot to digest. Honestly, I don’t think any of us can truly come to grips with the enormity of such a promise, any more than we could fit the ocean into our heads. So far is the love of God beyond our comprehension. We speak of God as Trinity because God is love and God is made Man in Christ Jesus. But in truth, the Trinity is a mystery—the greatest and central mystery of the Church—and in Christianity, a mystery is something that cannot be explained, but must be experienced for oneself.

And so I invite you, brothers and sisters, to know the Trinity in bread and in wine, in Word and in Sacrament, in the love of this community and the wounds of a world still very much in need. Everything you see here is God: His Spirit dwells within you; His Body here surrounds you; His Father reigns above you. And He claims you as His own.

Yes, dear Christians, God is love—a love so brobdingnagian that it fills us up, overwhelms us, drowns us and raises us to new life, spilling over, overflowing from us into all the world around us! We can neither comprehend nor contain the love that is God; we can only let it flow through our lives as the Holy Spirit. And when we thus love others as God has first loved us, the world may come to know Christ through our lives, and at long last all of humanity may join in the dance of Trinity, which knows neither bounds nor end.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.