The future of God: The Trinity 2024

The future of God:

The Trinity 2024 

May 26, 2024

www.johnpredmoresj.com | predmore.blogspot.com

predmoresj@yahoo.com | 617.510.9673

Deuteronomy 4:32-40; Psalm 33; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28:16-20

 

Moses relays to the people that God, the Creator, the Parent, was brilliant in creating the universe and humanity, and has found delight within us. Paul tells us in Romans that we closely belong to God through the presence and action of the Holy Spirit. The Gospel assures us that Jesus will remain with us until the end of time because he has seen God face to face and knows what God intends. The moral of the story is that the Triune God will find multiple ways to draw us into friendship and keep us close.

 

The day after I wrote my homily, I was at a Mass with a student who stood up in front of others and said, “I’m feeling good today. I was at two Masses last weekend, and I feel really close to God.” He stood there and beamed. His response moved me to realize that the Trinity is about how deeply we feel about God, and how God’s love energy back to us is an expression of the Trinity. The Trinity is the love energy between us and God. It made me wonder how we feel as we are sitting in the pews while attending Mass. Do we as priests make you feel closer to God during your experience?

 

The purpose of the homily is not to teach or preach; its purpose is to move you, to inspire you, to give you hope. It is to take the Gospel and relate it to today’s events, especially when faced with meaninglessness, suffering, and death so that you can feel God is close to you. Do we provide that for you? When you leave, do you get a physical sense that you have been blessed by God? If not, please tell me what we need to do to bring that about.

 

I spoke with a friend on Friday who was asking questions about the Eucharist because he wanted to understand it better. He was on his way to visit his daughter. We related it to her giving him gifts on special occasions, like Father’s Day. He told me, “Whenever I see her, I am very happy. She brings me gifts, which I don’t need, but she wants to give them. When I receive them, she is very happy. I hug her and kiss her and affirm her goodness.” I suggested to him that when that happens, that interaction is love-energy, and that is what the Trinity is, and that is what happens at Mass. 

 

When we offer our gifts to God, that is, our bread and wine, God certainly says thanks, but God is not focused upon the gifts as much as God is focused on the giver of the gifts. God sees us, blesses us, is aware of the gifts we brought, but wants to hug us and kiss us and affirm our goodness in the same way my friend affirmed his daughter. When we leave Mass, we need to feel loved by God, and to have that love energy that helps us affirm others and to see the world the way God does. This brings about communion when we first receive the love of God so that we instinctively want to share it with others. We want others to feel as we are feeling, and knowing that we are all affirmed together, we can feel connected as we know God is doing incredible work with us individually and as a community. 

 

Our attendance at Mass is supposed to be one of praise and worship collectively. We are intended to feel nourished and blessed as we walk out the church doors. We are designed to feel a buzz of that love energy – that we build an exchange with God, through Spirit, in the Spirit – and that this energy is alive and fully charged. Tell me what I need to do to help you feel fully charged. That’s what I want to learn from you.

 

I was going to select an excerpt from Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. poem on God’s Grandeur because it speaks about the oozing, seeping nature of the Trinity’s work in the world. It is short enough for me to end the homily this way. I hope you can feel it. 

 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

 

Original Homily

 

Moses relays to the people that God, the Creator, the Parent, has displayed brilliance in the creation of the universe and humanity, and has found delight within us. Paul tells us in Romans that we closely belong to God through the presence and action of the Holy Spirit. The Gospel assures us that Jesus will remain with us until the end of time because he has seen God face to face and knows what God intends. The moral of the story is that the Triune God will find multiple ways to draw us into friendship and keep us close.

 

Theology is a quest for reasons to hope in the face of the threats of meaninglessness, suffering, and death. It seeks to answer the question: If God is all powerful, and all good, then why is there suffering, especially of the innocent? Religion is the basic confidence that there is an enduring rightness beyond the wrongness of suffering, perishing, moral evil, and death. This rightness is God, which Jesus of Nazareth called us to in the new Kingdom of God. Through God's spirit, a new era of justice and compassion was dawning, a reign of rightness that would have no end.

 

In our faith, we believe God to be creator of all things and to be the imperishable liberator of life from the fate of nothingness. We know that God has entered time to the point of suffering and dying. God does not hide in eternity as an unmoved mover or as an intelligent designer, but as one who accompanies. God remains imperishable, and when our time is over, we want to be with God in that eternal life. We want to jump out of our sense of time to enter God’s time, a life that never ends. We want to enter the mystery of God’s time that has not yet arrived. We believe in God’s promise of a life yet to be realized. 

 

Scripture tells us that God is the liberator whose very Word, Jesus Christ, opens us to a new future in the face of what seems to be dead ends. We trust that God’s promises will be fulfilled, and Jesus of Nazareth experienced his Father to be the one who was generous, just, steadfast, and liberating. This is a God who creates, heals, and offers reasons for hope, and we have to wait for the “not-yet” aspect of God, who is still becoming, just as the universe is still being born. 

 

In this God, we hope for the “more.” We, and the cosmos, are still waking up to that which is to come under God. This is exciting news. We are an unfinished story that is part of a larger cosmic drama that continues to unfold in the “not-yet” of time. We are still evolving and the whole future lies open to us. God creates the world freely out of goodness and allows for its transformation in due time. We will find God in an inexhaustible future that is still coming to be and is not yet fully present. God is the absolute future, and it shows us that the life that is to come will be better than our present reality. 

 

Scripture for Daily Mass

Monday: (1 Peter 1) Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you who by the power of God are safeguarded through faith, to a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the final time.

 

Tuesday: (1 Peter 1) Concerning the salvation of your souls the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and investigated it investigating the time and circumstances that the Spirit of Christ within them indicated
when it testified in advance to the sufferings destined for Christ and the glories to follow them.

 

Wednesday: (1 Peter 1) Realize that you were ransomed from your futile conduct, handed on by your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold but with the precious Blood of Christ as of a spotless unblemished Lamb. He was known before the foundation of the world but revealed in the final time for you.

 

Thursday: (1 Peter 2) Like newborn infants, long for pure spiritual milk so that through it you may grow into salvation, for you have tasted that the Lord is good. Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God.

 

Friday (Zephaniah 3) Shout for joy, O daughter Zion! Sing joyfully, O Israel! Be glad and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! The LORD has removed the judgment against you, he has turned away your enemies.

 

Saturday (Jude 17) Beloved, remember the words spoken beforehand by the Apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. Build yourselves up in your most holy faith; pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in the love of God and wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

 

 

Gospel: 

Monday: (Mark 10) "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answered him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments:  "You are lacking in one thing.”

 

Tuesday: (Mark 10) "We have given up everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age.”

 

Wednesday (Mark 10) he disciples were on the way, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus went ahead of them. They were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. Taking the Twelve aside again, he began to tell them what was going to happen to him.

 

Thursday (Mark 10) As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd,
Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging. On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.”

 

Friday (Luke 1) Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb.

 

Saturday (Mark 11) Jesus and his disciples returned once more to Jerusalem. As he was walking in the temple area, the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders approached him and said to him, "By what authority are you doing these things?

 

Saints of the Week

 

May 26: Philip Neri, priest (1515-1595), is known as the "Apostle of Rome." A Florentine who was educated by the Dominicans, he re-evangelized Roe by establishing confraternities of laymen to minister to pilgrims and the sick in hospitals. He founded the Oratorians when he gathered a sufficient following because of his spiritual wisdom. 

 

May 27: Augustine of Canterbury, bishop (d. 604) was sent to England with 40 monks from St. Andrew's monastery to evangelize the pagans. They were well-received. Augustine was made bishop, established a hierarchy, and changed many pagans feasts to religious ones. Wales did not accept the mission; Scotland took St. Andrew's cross as their national symbol. Augustine began a Benedictine monastery at Canterbury and was Canterbury's first archbishop.

 

May 31: Visitation of the Virgin Mary commemorates the visit of Mary in her early pregnancy to Mary, who is reported to be her elder cousin. Luke writes about the shared rejoicing of the two women - Mary's conception by the Holy Spirit and Elizabeth's surprising pregnancy in her advanced years. Elizabeth calls Mary blessed and Mary sings her song of praise to God, the Magnificat.

 

June 1: Justin, martyr (100-165), was a Samaritan philosopher who converted to Christianity and explained doctrine through philosophical treatises. His debating opponent reported him to the Roman authorities who tried him and when he refused to sacrifice to the gods, was condemned to death. 

 

This Week in Jesuit History

 

• May 26, 1673. Ching Wei‑San (Emmanuel de Sigueira) dies, the first Chinese Jesuit priest. 
• May 27, 1555. The Viceroy of India sent an embassy to Claudius, Emperor of Ethiopia, hoping to win him and his subjects over to Catholic unity. Nothing came of this venture, but Fr. Goncalvo de Silveira, who would become the Society's first martyr on the Africa soil, remained in the country. 
• May 28, 1962. The death of Bernard Hubbard famous Alaskan missionary. He was the author of the book Mush, You Malemutes! and wrote a number of articles on the Alaska mission. 
• May 29,1991. Pope John Paul II announces that Paulo Dezza, SJ is to become a Cardinal, as well as Jan Korec, in Slovakia. 
• May 30, 1849. Vincent Gioberti's book Il Gesuita Moderno was put on the Index. Gioberti had applied to be admitted into the Society, and on being refused became its bitter enemy and calumniator. 
• May 31, 1900. The new novitiate of the Buffalo Mission, St Stanislaus, in South Brooklyn, Ohio, near Cleveland, is blessed. 
• June 1, 1527. Ignatius was thrown into prison after having been accused of having advised two noblewomen to undertake a pilgrimage, on foot, to Compostella.