Most Holy Trinity
May 17-18 2008
"A Sacred Community"

Today as a church we celebrate the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is a sacred community of three persons so intimately related that they are but one God. St. Anthanasius spoke of this intimacy hundreds of years ago in this way: “Our triune God is so intimately one divinity yet three persons that whatever you can say about one person you can say of another, except that the one person is the other.”

What this means is that all create, all redeem, all sanctify. Yet our one God remains three persons.

I know that my homilies are published in written form, so you can take this up later and read over it until it sinks in. But today, let’s not get bogged down too much in the mystery of who God is in God’s self. Instead, let’s celebrate that this sacred community who is God welcomes us into relationship. In Exodus, we see Moses bow down to the ground in worship and say, “If I find favor with you, O Lord, do come along in our company.” The question becomes – does God find favor with us? The answer is found in the gospel of John we hear today. “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” God finds favor with us, loves us beyond our imagining. God not only comes along in our company, but God welcomes us as community into relationship with God’s divine company. God’s divine community – the most Holy Trinity itself.

You see, we are not merely a collection of individuals gathered together here because we happen to be going to the same place, like an elevator full of shoppers going to the same floor in a department store. No, our connection to one another runs deeper than this. It’s grander! We are to community like fish are to water. We are born into concentric circles of community. Creation – humanity – a nation – a neighborhood – a family. We are by God’s grace then reborn into concentric circles of our faith community as well. The community of the church throughout the world and history. The United States Catholic Conference. The Archdiocese of Louisville. Epiphany parish. The 5:30, 9:00 and 11:30 mass. And our family, the first instance of church in our lives. Far from being merely a collection of individual believers, we the one Body of Christ, made up of many parts. One body seeking to dance with our triune God.

The thing that we celebrate today is that as incomplete and imperfect as our concentric circles of community may be, God chooses to come along in our company because of God’s unimaginable love for us all.

As a parish community, we have been discerning our future together. Let me share with you now what the parish leadership heard you say over the course of our conversations.

We heard a desire to build upon our past, remaining grounded in the principles of our beginning, as etched into our glass walls.

We heard a desire to be welcoming and a desire to be welcomed, whether as an Hispanic, widow, gay, young, disenfranchised, special needs, or ecumenically married person.

We heard a desire to not only continue our fine outreach both socially and ecumenically, but to expand our parish programs with a particular eye toward the care and involvement of our youth.

We heard a general understanding that to do this may well involve increasing our space for gathering, storing, and facilitating communal activities. Yet we want to continue to respect the natural serenity of our grounds, seeking a balance between our need for constructed space and wilderness space.

We recognize a strong hunger for meaningful community experiences that foster the building of relationships, and intentional opportunities to safely share our individual and collective stories – opportunities that establish and nurture connection among us.

We heard a desire to continue to offer liturgies that are relevant, uplifting, challenging, prayerful, and prophetic.

In all of this, we heard not so much a desire to avoid any change – for change is a part of living – but rather a desire to not lose in any changes the essence of who we want to be – a manifestation of God in our times. Together, as a part of the great Body of Christ in the world, we can forge a future animated by these desires, even as together we now grasp little Gabriel, who is probably eating I’d say right now, to the Body of Christ, welcoming him into our journey with God.

May God bring to completion the good work God has begun in us. And as St. Paul prays today, "May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the friendship of the Holy Spirit be with us all."