Most Holy Trinity Sunday C

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Word Made Flesh.  At Easter we celebrated his resurrection and 40 days later his Ascension into heaven.  And last week, we celebrated the great feast of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost.  When do we ever celebrate God the Father, the first person of the Trinity?  Well, we have today.  Or at least one third of today, the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Where is the love for Father, the begotter of the only begotten son of God and the processor from whom the Spirit proceeds?  Today, I want to celebrate the first person of the Trinity.

It is a story that really begins with love.  God is love.  And love has a certain destiny to reach out, to extend itself.  So love found a beloved in Jesus and the love of the Spirit bound them together.  It is in this interplay of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit that love once again sought a beloved, something to lavish goodness and peace upon.    God created so there would be an object of God’s love.  Thus came creation. Thus came us.

When we ask who we are, we have no fuller response than to say that we are created, created out of the goodness and perfection of God, for he spoke a word and then decided what had come from that word was good.  Before we belonged to our parents, the universe or anything else that might claim us, we were created in the image and likeness of God and if that phrase is to carry any meaning, it means that we hold within us, at a level more grounded than our DNA, is the love of the Trinity.

Of course, we do not know ourselves at all unless we know ourselves as loved.  We are almost unidentifiable as human without love.  Think of what you have learned from the experience of being loved. You have felt your worth and been told of your beauty.  Through the act of love we have discovered unknown horizons within us, we have brushed against the eternal for love never dies. God’s love, meant for each of us, is the truest realization of that feeling, that experience.

Having been loved, the beloved has but one desire – to return that love.  And since all love originated from God, the only love we have to share is God’s love.  Whether the most ardent believer or the most staunch atheist, we are always sharing God’s love because there is no other kind.  It is the true gift of faith however to direct our imperfect return of perfect love to the one who created us.  We are not all we can be until we realize in ourselves the ability to love our original lover.

And I guess there is no better way to do this than thankfulness.  Oh, we turn to God for many reasons: to petition for ourselves and for others – to seek guidance.  But at some point, we have this great gift, the most human of gifts, to stand in the presence of our God, to dwell on what we have been given and say a loving thank you to the one who created us to know love.  And if we were simply to stand in one place, and allow everyone who ever touched us, everyone who ever blessed us and every beautiful thing we have ever witnessed to wash over us, I think we would melt.

And maybe that is the task. To be so consumed in our choseness, in our oneness with each other through creation and our oneness with our God by grace that we would simply melt into the love of God. To be caught up in the play of the Holy Trinity, to be surrounded by a grace older than the universe, to experience a love beyond love.  That is the gift of the Father, the maker of all things, visible and invisible.