The Most Holy Trinity (A); June 7, 2020
Ex 34:4-9 Dn 3 2 Cor 13:11-13 Jn 3:16-18
Deacon Jim McFadden
Three months into the pandemic with its attendant economic contraction not seen since the Great Depression, we watched in horror as another black person, George Floyd, had his life taken from him in another instance of police brutality towards Afro-Americans. In response to this racially charged homicide, chaos, riots, and societal disintegration are spilling out across our country.
As we reel from this triple-whammy—pandemic, economic contraction, and police brutality—we wonder: can we hold our country together? This lamentation reminds me of W.B. Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming:
“Turning and turning in widening the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
As things are falling apart, we heard the words that are meant to be reassuring that “we’re all in this together.” Are we all in this together? Not if we continue to hold onto the idol of autonomous individualism in which consumer greed and power become the engine of our society. In this world view, morality, the Common Good, trust, cooperation, respect for the dignity of every human being are foolishness in the struggle of all against all. It’s all about competing self-interest and tribal privilege. In this world view, life is nothing more than a fierce and competitive struggle for the goods of the world; that the end game is dominance in which there are “winners and losers and you best not be on the wrong side” to quote Bruce Springsteen (cf. The River).
But, as Christians, as students and disciples of Christ Jesus, we only have to look to the model of the Trinity, which we are celebrating today, to know the center can hold together if we make God that center.
We believe in a Communitarian God, The Most Holy Trinity, which reveals to us who God is. The nature of God offers us the way to regain our equilibrium, to align ourselves with the Ultimate Reality, and to foster just relationships with each other. Since we are made in the image of God, who is a family, the Trinity teaches us what it means to be fully human. It means to live together in solidarity with one another. That’s not an option—one among several. That’s the reality and if we don’t live out of that communual, Trinitarian reality, we will perish. We either live and participate in God’s being, which is Love, or we exile our selves into the chora macra , described in the Prodigal Son parable, as the Big Emptiness, another expression for Hell. That’s our choice. God is Love—that’s not an attribute of God but is God’s very nature, which was revealed to us when the only begotten, beloved Son of God became Flesh in Jesus. What that entails is that the giving and receiving of life is not only how God operates, but is the underlying reality of all Creation; it’s the foundation of all meaningful relationships. The shared life of giving and receiving when played out in the political, economic, and social sectors of our society is worthwhile. Anything short of that which promotes systemic and institutional injustice must be resisted as we strive to bring the Good News to our culture. Hence, we live in this cooperative community of living God’s existence by cooperating with one another, by building a just society, by exorcising the demon of racism from our public consciousness, by simply “getting along with one another” to paraphrase Rodney King. To do that, we have to name our sin, to ask forgiveness for the wrongs that we have done personally and collectively, and to seek reconciliation by promoting the Common Good even at the expense of our factional privilege.
When we live with God as our center, we know in our hearts the Triune God, and we do what God does: we pour ourselves—our life—into others. In so doing, we don’t seek advantage or dominance, but we help build solidarity grounded in the God, who is Love. As Catholics, when we say that “we’re all in this together,” we know what that means because it speaks of God and the nature of the Church. With God as our center, we can strive to guarantee that the American experiment will endure, which Benjamin Franklin reminded us at the end of the Constitutional Congress: “(Today) you have a republican democracy if you want to keep it.”
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