Walk with me

This is my homily for today, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Cycle B.  The readings for the day are here.  Assigning the deacons to preach on Trinity Sunday is an old pastor's trick :-).

Are there words from the bible that give you comfort?  Many people through the years have found comfort from the 23rd psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall lack for nothing."  And many have found comfort from that famous passage from John's Gospel, "God loved the world so much, he gave us his only son, that all who believe in him might have eternal life."

The last line from tonight’s Gospel reading, which also is the very last line of the entire Gospel of Matthew, gives me comfort and hope.  Here it is again: “Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”  “I am with you always”.  Isn't that comforting?  Just a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated Jesus ascending into heaven.  But he hasn’t left us.  He is with us still today, and will be tomorrow and the next day, and through the rest of our lives – if we’re willing to walk with him.

How appropriate, on this feast of the Holy Trinity, to recall that God the Son is with us always.  The fact is, all three persons of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, want to be with us.  They want to walk with us through this life, and then be with them in the life to come.  And all we have to do is let them.

The Trinity would be a great mystery even if we had never been created, and fallen, and been redeemed.  But because all those things did happen, the triune God, Father, Son and Spirit, has reached out to us throughout salvation history, to call us to spend time with him.  Because God wants to be with us.  And to our great, great blessing, all three persons of the Trinity have spent time with us.

The tragedy of the story of the human race is that God wanted us to walk with him in the paradise he had created for us, but we were disobedient.  In those early times in the history of humanity, God lived in intimate communion with the two human beings he had made, Adam and Eve.  This was God’s original plan: that we would be with him, would get to know him, and he would teach us many things.  To Adam and Eve, God the Father really was a father, a good father who teaches his children important things.  Theologians have a term to describe that state of things, when God strolled in the Garden of Eden with his two created human beings: that was the state of Original Justice.

Just try to imagine what that must have been like for Adam and Eve: to spend time with God every day, seeing his face, listening to what he told them, growing and learning every day.

We ended the state of Original Justice when we fell into Original Sin: when the serpent tempted us, we disobeyed God, and a great rift opened in our relationship.  I imagine that, on that occasion, God the Father felt much the same as we feel when someone is unfaithful: anger, disappointment, and perhaps underlying it all, a tremendous grief.

But even then, God the Father didn’t despair.  He is too good to give up on us like that.  Salvation history is the story of God the Father not forgetting us:  He led us out Egypt to freedom. Time after time, he has forgiven us and called us back, even when we were like unfaithful spouses.  We had no reason to expect or deserve to be welcomed back, and yet the Father welcomed us back anyway.

And then, finally, at the pivot point of salvation history, the Father repaired the breach between us and him by sending us his Son.  And we met the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God the Father’s only-begotten son Jesus.  It’s notable that the Son didn’t come to us in the shape of an all-powerful divinity.  Instead, to use the phrase from that wonderful canticle in St. Paul's letter to the Philippians, God emptied himself and came to us as a human being – he came to us as one of us.  God humbled himself to be like one of his own creatures.  And because he did that, once again humanity was able to be with God face to face; this time with God the Son.  In Galilee and Samaria and Jerusalem, we walked with God and listened to him and learned from him. 

(Of course, this age of walking with God wasn’t in a paradise: because God the Son chose to be one of us, he entered into our fallen world.  The world in which Jesus walked with us on earth was characterized by oppression, vast inequality of wealth and position, injustice, suffering and cruelty.  And of course, the devil was very busy at that time and place.)

During that time, Jesus tried his best to help us appreciate just what a blessed time it was, to have him walking by our side.  For example, when he was in the home of Mary and Martha, he told Martha that her sister Mary had chosen the better part by listening to him.  Those who recognized Jesus for whom he was, like the man born blind, had sight, while those who didn’t were blind.

In due time, God the Son, the 2^nd person of the Holy Trinity, ascended back to God the Father again.  But in another great mystery, he also is with us here.  At the Last Supper, he gave us the means to not forget, to continue to celebrate the climactic moments of salvation history, the paschal mystery of Jesus’s death and resurrection.  That very same sacrifice of God the Son continues, eternally, out of the limits of time and space – it continues every time we gather around the two tables, of word and eucharist, as we’ve gathered here this evening.  We’ve been given the gift to be with God sacramentally in intimate communion, as close as Jesus was with Mary and Joseph, and Peter, James and John, here on earth; as close as Adam and Eve were with God the Father in the Garden of Eden.  Indeed Jesus hasn’t left us.  He’s invited us here tonight to continue to be with him.

And even that isn’t all: so great is the love of Father and Son that the Holy Spirit of their love proceeds from them, and is with us right now.  The Spirit is the giver of life to us, and the giver of many other gifts as well.  Whatever knowledge, whatever wisdom, whatever courage, whatever holiness we have comes from the Holy Spirit.  By giving us his Holy Spirit, Jesus enables us to be with God today.

And finally, when the time comes for our journey here on earth to end, we’ll return to God and be face to face with him, and perhaps walk with him, again.   I did a burial service today for a longtime parishioner, a good man who had been a Eucharistic Minister here for years, and an usher for a little while.  His widow, his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren were gathered around his remains, and we all prayed in that sure and certain hope that, because this man was baptized, he is with God face to face now, and that we who are baptized in the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit will also follow in his footsteps in due time and we’ll be able to be face to face with the Father, too.  

“I am with you always”, said Jesus tonight.  God walks by our side, no matter what we've done, and through everything that life can throw at us.  St. Paul, reflecting on this, noted, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God.”   My brothers and sisters, I urge you to take these words to heart, and be comforted.  No matter what life throws at us, God walks with us always.