Journey's Weekly Homilies

Journey Catholic Community
Trinity Sunday, 6/15/03
Homily:  Nancy

Deut 4:32-34,39-40
Rom.8:14-17
Matt. 28:16-20

To whom do we offer our worship?

Who is the God we name here on the Journey?  We could take the time right now and ask every person here to try to answer that question.  We would be here all night, probably, if we did such an exercise, but oh how amazing such storytelling would be.  In the answering of this question, we would share our faiths and know each other deeply and in the way that is most real in our existence.

Who is the God we just sang to?  We sang, "You are my God, I want to thank you as long as live."   It's so easy to sing those words, isn't it?  It feels like the truth inside me when I sing those words.  Whoever it is I'm singing to, THAT God, the one who is somehow beyond my comprehension, THAT God, is my God, and I do want to thank that One as long as I live.

The church has given us a feast day this day, a feast day to raise up in us this very question about our God.   It's Trinity Sunday.   On this day, year after year, we proclaim obtuse passages of scripture that dance around the unanswerable question.   It's Trinity Sunday, and we are expected, somehow, to meditate on what the theologians and scripture scholars have discerned about the history of the naming of God in this way.  This Trinity idea is a mystery that has inspired libraries full of books, and lifetimes of study and research.  It's a mystery that has invoked our most personal confrontations with belief.  This Trinity is a mystery that has confounded people for at least 1700 years.

I would like you to know where the question begins for me.  We gather here to worship, to offer our thanksgiving, to praise the one who is source of all good, to petition for mercy, to raise our many voices as ONE voice in an offering of ourselves along with the human life of our brother, Jesus, back to the One from whom all things come.  (Whew! Big statement!)  To speak these life-giving prayers, to invoke the Spirit to come among us and remain with us and to transform our bread and wine… to do all of this that we say we will do when we come here, we need to call God "something."   Our traditional gesture, as we cross ourselves, is known worldwide.  People everywhere, whether they are Catholic or not, recognize this gesture, and even know the words that are normally spoken:  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  We have struggled with those words over the years, here.  And we have decided to say, "In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Spirit among us."  We have decided to name some functions of our God, and to back away from agreeing on NAMES for our God, here.  The Creator is a truth about God we could all agree on.  The Redeemer is a truth about God's self that became human and lived among us.  The Spirit, then is the mysterious presence of both the Creator and the Redeemer, still among us, still with us, still promised to us.  It's our compromise (so that God is not only a father in the way we speak), it's our way of facing the impossible question:  Who is our God?  To whom do we offer our worship?  We know our God is mercy, and love…and beyond all names we create.

Naming God, or naming our "gods", is an urge and a longing that has risen up among all the peoples of the earth, over all of recorded time.  We have psycho-analyzed this intuition we all have, we have learned the human truth about naming.  Naming someone, naming something, brings that someone or something under our control.  Naming reduces the "Named One" to human level, to a place that can be understood and controlled.  As a child I was given the nickname of "Cookie."  It was so strong a naming that even in high school, I signed my papers with "Cookie."  It was the name by which I was known and categorized and judged.  I knew that "Cookie" was not truly my name.  As soon as I could transplant myself to a college town, I became Nancy.  I bloomed as Nancy.  I earned respect as Nancy.  And then in my 50's, I changed my last name.  These acts of naming were powerful signs, powerful turning points in my existence.  Everyone has a story about naming themselves, and everyone of us has a story about how we name our God. 

How do we call out to the one who knows us well?  We sing together that in our living and our dying we are bringing our God to birth.  What does that mean?

Our ancestors in faith gave us an inheritance, this Yahweh God of theirs, whose name they were not allowed to speak.  Then Jesus came among us, a revolutionary who walked among all the human beings of his time.  And this radical soul changed everything by calling God, "Abba."   To do this, for a Jewish man to refer to Yahweh with a personal and intimate term, was perhaps the most radical thing that Jesus did in his active ministerial life.    It changed everything.  After Jesus was gone, and they could no longer see his face, they slowly began to realize they had to decide whether or not this extraordinary man was actually the Son of God.  If he was devine, if he was a part of God, if he was FROM God, and if his words were true, if he was the son of the Father, the Abba he names, then Jesus, and his Abba, were the source of the spirit of guidance that was wraping itself around them all in their search.

The love, the immeasurable powerful love, between Abba and the One who came from Abba, flowed through this searching by followers of Jesus…the wind and fire of that love turned them and ignited them … made Pentecost happen.  It was "Ruah."  It was the breath of the Spirit, the acceptable, embraceable explanation for all that was taking place before their very eyes.   
The God - Three in One- idea, then, naturally arose among them:
(1) Abba/Father/Progenitor/Parent and  (2) Son/Human One/One-of-us/Jesus and 
(3) Ruah/Presence/Holy-Breath-of-God/Spirit Among Us…it all fit. 

It took them 300 years to finally speak these truths together as a people, but the results are our inheritance.  Jesus divinity was no longer a question, he was both human and devine.  God was Trinity.  Abba sent this One among us, and the love they hold between them raises the power of the Spirit out of the depths and into the very air we breath.  If only we can believe it.  If only we can take the leap of faith, and trust it. 

Who is our God?  To whom do we offer our worship? …To the God who radiated into consciousness a race of beings we call human, a self-perpetuating line dance of people who join hands over time, giving birth and dying, a dance of life that keeps the memory of the God who made them alive.  

Who is our God?   A human being by choice, a man who shook with our laughter and trembled with our tears, and yet went willingly in our name to a death, so that all death could be undone. 

Who is our God?  A presence of love that permeates everything, within us and around us, between us, over us and under us, dancing in that very air we breathe…This our God who is never absent.  This is our God whom we can try to ignore and avoid.  But this is our God who is Spirit, and who keeps the promises that were made.  We are baptized to act in this world in the name of this God.

Who is our God?  We go on our way searching for an answer to this question.  We go together.  We raise our voices in song and prayer, and open ourselves to what may be asked of us by this God, beyond all names.