Trinity Sunday - June 11, 2017

Homily for Trinity Sunday

June 11, 2017

Attributes of God

 

            I was walking out of a particularly beautiful Mass at my college one day when a dear friend came up to me and exclaimed, “Don’t you just love God!” Of course I do – and of course we all do. But to love God, we must understand who He is. Luckily, He revealed Himself to us!

Today’s readings talk about God. You might be saying, “Of course they talk about God! It is church, after all!” But they talk about who God is – in His very nature! We need to know who God is before we can worship God.

            Yes, God is a mystery. But a mystery, in our Catholic terminology, is not like a Hardy Boys mystery. Mystery does not mean that something is unknowable – it means that something can never be fully known. It is infinitely knowable! We can say many things about God, but we can never know Him fully – even after all eternity, there will be more depths to the mystery! It’s kind of like a spring of water – we can draw water from it to drink, but it continues to flow and we can go back again and again without ever exhausting the source.

            So let’s talk about two of the aspects of God that we see in today’s readings, and how they apply to our lives.

            Our first reading reveals something important: the Name and essence of God. When the Lord passes by Moses, God calls out His name. Now we use the sanitized translation which has Him saying, “The Lord, the Lord!” But the Hebrew word is “Yahweh”. Yahweh is the name of God that God revealed to Moses at the burning bush. Yahweh means, “I Am Who Am.”

            So when God reveals His Name, He reveals who He is: I Am. Sounds confusing to modern ears – but God is basically saying that He is existence itself. There is no past in God – He is not “I Was” – and there is no future in God – He is not “I Will Be”. He is always in the present; or rather, all time is in Him. This is a mind-blowing mystery – that God is outside of time and space. He is the creator of time and space, and He is present in all time and all space. That means there is never a place or a time where God is not there. He is there at the top of Mount Everest and in the depths of the sea and in your house and this church and in the brothel down the street. He is literally everywhere. Yes, His presence can be sensed by us much more in a church than elsewhere – and we as human beings need sacred spaces to set apart for worship. But there is not a place where God is not.

            In the same way, God is outside of time. Kids always ask me, “Who created God?” But creation implies that there was a time when something didn’t exist – there was a time when I didn’t exist, and when this church didn’t exist, and when this planet didn’t exist – but there was no time when God didn’t exist. This is hard for us to grasp because we have never experienced being outside of time. But God is outside of time!

            So how does all this apply to our lives? Because sometimes we think that we are too far for God to reach. That our sins and our past are too dark for God to be there. That our problems are too big for God to handle. My friends, if God is everywhere and the creator of space and time, I can promise you that He is not only “Yahweh” (I Am), He is also “Emmanuel” (God with us). He is big enough to love you for who you are, and big enough to make you into a saint! The entire universe depends upon God for its existence – we can depend upon God for our needs and troubles! At the same time, since He is the source of our existence, then we have the duty and obligation to worship Him and seek Him.

            There is a second thing that our readings teach us about God. In the Gospel we hear that famous John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world…” That should give us pause. God loves the world? Most of the time I’m pretty annoyed at the world! But it reveals that God’s nature is love. John tells us, “God is love”. We tend to think of love as a feeling, but love at its deepest core is wanting what is best for the other person. He is always “willing the good” – working for the benefit – of all creation.

            This should apply to us immediately! Sometimes when things don’t go our way in life we say, “God, what are You up to? You should have done something different!” But God is pure love – He can never do anything not loving, not for our benefit. We need to realize that in every circumstance, especially the difficult ones, we must give thanks because He is always acting for our good, even when we might not see it.

            My friends, who God is determines how we worship and love Him. Knowing that He is the Almighty, the Creator, the Source of Being, and Pure Love allows us to order our lives in the proper way. God truly is great!