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Homily – June 3

A few years ago two students from a nearby theological school came to see the church. I was showing them the Stations of the Cosmos we have in our garden. These stations offer points of reflection on different stages of the evolution of the universe and the development of human life and culture. One of the young students wasn’t buying it. Obviously he took the biblical account of creation literally. He asked me, “do you believe in evolution?” I told him “no, I believe in mysteries. Evolution is an observable fact.” He looked at me, shook he head and walked away.

Today as a people of faith we acknowledge that the Lord is God in heaven above and on earth below, there is no other. Today we face the mystery of the inner life of God.

As a people of faith we believe in God, the Father Almighty, we believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and the giver of Life. We believe though we don’t really fully understand. Through the scriptures and the teaching of Jesus we know that the inner life of God is a life of relationships. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father and the love that binds them is the love of the Holy Spirit. As St. John tells us, “God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them. God so loved the world God sent His Son to the world to embrace our humanity. The Son so loved us he gave his life for us.” Before the world began God chose all of us to be God’s adopted, God’s chosen and at our Baptism the Holy Spirit was poured into our very being giving us the courage, the boldness to call the effable God, Father. That same Holy Spirit binds people of faith together as a people of God.

As humans we are relational. We began our existence through the loving relationship of our parents. Our lives are lived in a series of relationship, our immediate family, our extended family, our neighbourhoods, our faith community, our school communities, our work and professional communities, our community of friends and through death we join the community of the saints. We cannot live and love in isolation.

We are fully God-like when our relationships image the life-giving and loving relationship of the Trinity. God is love and our life long struggle is to be loving men and women. We all know that is not an easy task especially when we are dealing with people who really don’t care that much about us or people who have wronged us. But this is our life project, to love as we have been loved, to forgive as we have been forgiven.

We know from lived experience and from looking around us, there are relationships that are abusive, exploitive and deadly, relationships that ignore a person’s worth and dignity. They are death dealing. We know too from our lived experience there are so many loving, life giving and healing relationships.

If we are to be God-like then all our relationships, from the casual to the intense have to be life-giving and life-supportive.

Our relational reality reaches beyond the human family. We are one with, and related to, the rest of God’s good creation. We are related to the community of life that enriches planet Earth. We are related to the air we breathe, the waters that sustain us, the soil that feeds us. “We did not weave the web of life; we are a strand in the web and what we do to the web we do to ourselves. The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth and what we do to the earth we do to ourselves.” This one relationship is one we least appreciate, the one that is in great need of healing.

As we continue to celebrate the feast of the Trinity, the basic mystery of our Christian faith, we pray for ourselves and for other that we never fail trying to make all our relationship as loving and life giving as possible. Then we will truly be God-like.

This Homily entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2012.