The HOLY TRINITY Family Mass homily 2022 June 12TH
We clergy who preach are always looking for some examples for The Holy Trinity. How can three also be one—For God? Well, it’s Holy Trinity Sunday, so we’ll try to figure it out.
My grandparents were Irish and they explained the Holy Trinity to me by a little three leaf plant that grows a lot back in that country across the Atlantic ocean. That little green plant is called the _____ (anyone know it—St. Patrick used it?) –‘tis the shamrock. My Barry grandparents used it for a Three-in-One explanation of God. The plant is a three-in-one thing. Three leaves on one stem, three equal heart-shaped leaves for one plant.
Here is another example for you, especially if you don’t know or have not seen the tiny green shamrock plant. The Trinity is like an egg. Just as ONE egg has THREE different parts – the shell, the white, the yoke – ONE God has THREE different Persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Can our young people understand that—of the three parts, one egg? The shell, the white part inside (called the egg white) and the yellow part—called the yolk. Some people who hard-boiled eggs would be real familiar with the three parts. At Easter, the egg is popular, and some people paint the outer egg shell with colors and call it an Easter egg! Maybe your family tried that!
Can it be that simple? Yes, and no. Yes, in that God made us to be able to grasp His existence. ( Grasp it in our thinking, not hands.) So it can be that simple.
2/ But, is God only simple? No. God is God, Who is mighty, infinite, wondrous, always existing and abounding in love, uhh—God is too BIG to clearly describe. We will spend a lot of time ahead in Heaven getting to know more of God, and of being loved by God, and we’ll never be finished—forever and ever it will go on, and be ever new.
Our opening song for Mass just sang about it and God’s love— on and on and on and on it goes
Your Love O Lord.
St. John wrote a sentence in His Good News. Eternal life is this: to know God. Good enough! And simple enough for us now. The Holy Trinity is God—The Holy Trinity is a major belief of all true Christians. As Catholics, we start and end our prayers “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” This Mass begins and ends that way.
God has us know now what we need to know about The Holy Trinity.
But we understand how we all are just like a little child and will need to mature in the future of what we know. For example, I know that as a kid I did not have to learn everything about a car or other mobile vehicles, just some basics. It’s a car. You get inside of it and it takes us places we’d like to go. It is not a toy, so to be handled with respect. It can go real fast, so we put on our seatbelts inside of it. Somebody older drives it who is mature and able to do it. The wheels turn and moves it, whether it’s a car, truck or bus: the wheels in the bus go round and round, round and round! That is what a little child needs to know of it.
God leaves us big easy clues of Him as The Holy Trinity. As like in the egg example of three in one. Here’s another to think of….
The Holy Trinity can be compared to an apple. Any middle school boy or girl can know that one apple has three different parts – the skin, the flesh, and the seed. The skin, the flesh and the seed. Three, but one. That is just another explanation of a three-in-one thing—God has them all over the planet.
As like in the family model that God started for us, God leaves an example that there is a father-man and a mother-woman and then they love one another as one, which then a child can result from their love. One, Two and now three— a family. 1 plus 1 equals 3? Well, something like that. Love of the dad and mom together make it become a child sometimes– #3.
The Holy Trinity is like the first model of a family. God made us in Their likeness. The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit. One two three. That’s a start in a Trinity lesson.
There are moments in the stories of the Bible where you notice all three persons of One God involved —for example, in the Baptism of Jesus, with John the Baptist as witness. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are there at this Jordan River event. The Heavens open up and there is a voice, it’s the Father, who says: This is My Son (in Jesus right there in the water), upon Him does my favor rest. We are united. Then the Gospel account says that the Spirit came upon Jesus like a Dove figure, in giving an anointing, in sharing power—the Spirit and the Son are united, and with the Father. The Person in the Baptism was Jesus—and He was doing there (getting baptized) it so that a time would follow, like for so many here, when we would get baptized in the same Father, Son and Holy Spirit—by water of new birth, of becoming a child of God.
When the people asked Jesus to teach about God, he quoted the things that He had said down to Moses. He quoted the Old Testament Bible: “The Lord our God is one. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.” So right there—Jesus saying still The Lord is One, means One God, even if in three persons. There is One God—but three Persons. He, Jesus, claimed to be the eternal Son, but come into humanity. He also said the Other Advocate, the Holy Spirit existed. He said there is the Father Almighty, too.
So we welcome God doing things as the Holy Trinity—and right at the start of our Catholic life, one is baptized, “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” As Jesus said we had to do it that way—get baptized in the Holy Trinity.
That’s the homily. I hope it works.
Going back to my parents and our family car, when I was a pre-K little boy, I did not know how cars worked, especially of what the big stick did—that was near the driver’s seat. I learned the hard way about it, as me and my foster brother were playing in the car, as we were not supposed to be doing, and I moved the stick, this arm of the car, which was heavy but it moved from P to N. P was for park. I moved the stick to N—standing for Not Good. (No, standing for Neutral, actually!) But it was not good because our driveway was on a small hill and the car rolled back down into the street, Old Farm Road, and it rolled to a stop in the middle of the street. It was a short car trip but a major lesson to me that I did not know cars or how they worked—and I’d better stay out of them, except to ride with mom and dad. A happy ending: They went to the store and bought me a kid’s little red fire engine to ride down the sidewalk or back patio. That was safer and much easy to work, as just to peddle and steer it and to make fire truck noises with my mouth. HAPPY HOLY TRINITY SUNDAY!