Truth: Proposition and Person

Fourth Sunday after Easter
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Math is not my thing.  Math is good, but it’s not something I focus on or am drawn to in my life.  There were many days in high school that I wondered whether I would ever use what I learned in Algebra I, Geometry, or Algebra II later in life.  But today, at even if just in this homily, it seems like math is once again useful.
    The math that came to mind when reading over the Gospel was the Transitive Property of Equality.  This law states that if A is equal to B, and B is equal to C, then A is equal to C.  What does that have to do with the Gospel?  Well, our Lord states that when the Spirit of truth comes, He will teach us all truth.  But the Christ Himself also says, “‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’”  So the Spirit of truth will lead us to truth, but Christ is truth, so the Spirit will lead us to Christ.
    Pope Francis, may he rest in peace, emphasized this point in his weekly audience in May 2013, when he said:
 

Jesus himself told his disciples: the Holy Spirit “will guide you into all the truth”, since he himself is “the Spirit of Truth”.  We are living in an age in which people are rather sceptical [sic] of truth.  Benedict xvi [sic] has frequently spoken of relativism, that is, of the tendency to consider nothing definitive….And yet Jesus is exactly this: the Truth that, in the fullness of time, “became flesh”, and came to dwell among us so that we might know it.  The truth is not grasped as a thing, the truth is encountered.  It is not a possession, it is an encounter with a Person.

We often think of truths like we think of mathematical laws: propositions that explain reality.  But truth cannot be limited to propositions, but desires to be encountered in the Divine Person of our Lord.
    We can try to limit truth to mere propositions.  We might say: you must believe this fact; or you must live in that way.  But for Catholics, these propositions do not exist simply as Platonic ideas in a far away heaven.  For Catholics, our beliefs and our morality reveal to us who Christ is, which is important because Christ reveals who we can be to us.  Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World from the Second Vatican Council puts it this way: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light….Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.”

    And the Church Fathers from the earliest times recognized this revelation of who God desires us to be so clearly.  At the end of this month, we will celebrate in this church, with our Orthodox brothers and sisters in Genesee County, the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea.  At this first ecumenical council in the life of the Church, the 318 bishops affirmed that Christ is consubstantial with the Father (‘𝜊𝜇𝜊𝜊𝜐𝜎𝜄𝜊𝜍 is the Greek term; we say consubstantialem in Latin), rather than what the heretic Arius taught, which was that Christ was an exalted part of God’s creation, but merely a created being.  But the fathers recognized that if Christ was not co-equal God, then He could not save us.  As St. Athanasius said, “God became man so that man might become God.”     So Christ reveals to us, in this proposition of truth, that we are those saved by God Incarnate.  We encounter the mystery of God-made-man, which allows us to understand that we are worth saving, that God would come to us and take on our human nature so that our human nature could be united to God.  While there are propositions that are true, we can more easily reject cold axioms.  But if Truth is a Person, then our connection to that axiom becomes a relationship with a brother, an opportunity to love and be loved and become the fullest version of ourselves, revealed by the one who created us.
    And Truth in flesh calls us to go deeper than merely the recitation of facts or axioms.  This becomes clearer when you think about your spouse or your best friend.  I could tell you that my best friend has brown hair, is six-foot-something tall, is muscular, works for the State Police, is married with children, likes to joke around and poke fun at me for mediocre homilies.  You might know those facts, but if you haven’t met Anthony, you wouldn’t fully appreciate who he is and how he is.  I could list all the facts in the world, but the encounter with him gives a reality that stating facts never could.  The same is truth for our faith: we could give all the facts about our Lord, but until you encounter Him, you cannot truly love Him, and only in encountering Him can that love blossom so that it gives us the fullness of joy that God desires for us.

    Yes, the Holy Spirit, the gift of the Father and the Son to the Church, leads us to understand propositions and axioms of how God made the world and how we are to live in it to find happiness.  But the Holy Spirit leads us to so much more than that!  The Holy Spirit leads us to encounter the Truth that surpasses propositions, because the Truth is not an “it” but a “He,” a Person that loves us, has shown us how to be truly happy, and that desires our love in return, Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God for ever and ever.  

No Golden Age

Fifth Sunday of Easter
    We often tend to think of the early Church as perfect, where everything went as the apostles wanted it to go, where it was easy to follow Christ, and there were no struggles.  Today’s first reading should let us know that it was not as easy as we may have imagined.  Yes, the Apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit, and many Jews were joining the Church by becoming baptized.  Even Greeks were seeking baptism and following Christ as His disciples in His new Church.  But the Greek-speaking Jews (St. Luke uses the word Hellenists) started to complain that their widows didn’t seem to get the same care as the Hebrew widows.  It also sounds like the Apostles had their hands full, and perhaps had too many responsibilities, which made their service less than it could have been.
    So, they created a new set of ministers in the Church, deacons, who would receive the Holy Spirit, and would take over the mission of service at table from the Apostles, so that the Apostles could focus on prayer and preaching the Gospel.  They chose seven men, including St. Stephen, to fill this new office in the Church.  We know the rest of the story: Stephen also starts preaching, and ends us getting stoned to death.  More and more persecutions start, and St. James the Greater, the brother of St. John, is martyred.  Antagonism becomes more and more heated between the members of the early Church and the Jewish leaders, who thought that Jesus was a heretic and led people away from God.  So maybe it wasn’t quite as easy and perfect as we so often imagine.
    Why mention this?  Because we ourselves experience difficult times in the Church, but it helps to know that it’s never been easy for the Church.  There are always new challenges and new opportunities for the Church.  There are always periods of growth, and periods of decline, whether from internal or external forces.  Even as we may be convinced that we are not in a golden age of the Church, there truly has never been a golden age: each epoch of history had its own joys and struggles to which the Church had to adjust.

    And while God desires all to be saved, and we know the ordinary path to salvation runs through baptism and daily living the life to which Christ calls us, God has also allowed periods of decline, not only in one parish, or one diocese, but sometimes every across countries.  The example that comes to my mind most often is North Africa.  North Africa, because of its connection to Rome, had been a vibrant area of the Catholic Faith.  Some of the greatest saints and theological writers had come from there, including St. Athanasius, St. Anthony, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Cyprian, and St. Augustine of Hippo.  There were struggles, as many of those saints had to deal with heresies that would spring up from time to time, but the faith was strong.  But then, the barbarians from Europe swept across much of North Africa from the west, and the newly formed Islamic religion came from the east shortly thereafter, and Catholicism was more or less snuffed out entirely in the matter of a hundred years or so.  Why did God allow this?  I couldn’t tell you.  But allow it He did.  Did it mean He loved North Africa any less than the rest of the world?  Certainly not.  But those few who remained had to adjust to a new way of living their faith in the midst of fewer structures and more regular persecution.
    How does the Church survive such struggles?  We stay faithful to Christ and following Him, we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, and we live up to our call to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own,” as St. Peter said in our second reading.  We ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, and follow the Apostles, as the Church did in our first reading.  We do not give in to the temptation to let our hearts be troubled, but have faith in God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–knowing that God’s ways are sometimes mysterious, but are always for our good.
    In our own diminishment as a parish, we can easily fall to the temptation to despair, to not trust in God’s plan.  But, as we prepare to meet this Wednesday, I would invite you to do what the Church has always done during difficult times: pray and trust in the Holy Spirit.  That’s why I invited you last week to pray the novena to the Holy Spirit, asking for His guidance for our parish, whatever the will of God may be.  And, as I also said last week, I don’t know exactly what that will might be; we will discern it together on Wednesday, given the facts that we have, and using the reason that God gave to us to help us to follow His will. 
    But the key is that, whatever you decide to recommend to Bishop Boyea after this Wednesday’s meeting, God calls us to remain faithful to Him and continue to not only say that we are Catholic, but show it by our actions, both in this parish and in the wider community.  People are still hungry to know the love of the Father, and Jesus reveals that to us, and He calls us to reveal Him to others.  No matter how the realities of the structural church change and call for adjustments, if we follow the Holy Spirit and live as disciples of Christ, we can have the confidence that we will one day see the Father, and be enveloped by His love in the kingdom of heaven.  There is not golden age of the Church.  There is simply the streets of gold upon which we hope to walk in heaven, as a result of our fidelity to Christ through all the days of our life on earth.  That is our ultimate goal, and the Holy Spirit will help us to get there.

A Cosmic Wedding

 Nativity of the Lord–During the Day/Third Mass (EF)
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]  When it comes to weddings, priests have different opinions.  Some priests are not the biggest fans, especially of late, because all sorts of wedding ideas (most of which are foreign to the Catholic Rite of Marriage) have sprung up which (usually) the bride wants, or, from time to time, the parents (again, usually) of the bride can be very…involved in weddings.  While those things are still true, I find that I love weddings.  I love the joy of a couple coming together to commit themselves to each other and to God, the celebratory nature of a wedding, and the smiles that weddings bring to families and friends.
 

   Today as we celebrate Christmas, we celebrate a cosmic wedding, unlike any other wedding that came before, or any that would come after.  The music for the wedding is heavenly.  And the parents involved are anything but a problem.  As we come together for Christmas, we celebrate the wedding of heaven and earth, and the wedding of time and eternity.  Both are joined so as to never be separated again, and both are reasons for joy, celebration, and smiles.
    In Christ, heaven is forever wedded to earth.  Especially at Christmas, we often focus primarily on the human nature of Jesus, because that was something new that happened at the first Christmas.  At the first Christmas, we learned (eventually) that God and humanity could be joined together, and the God who was wholly clouded in mystery could now be seen face to face on earth.  We think about the shepherds who came to see Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child.  We think about the cave (or manger) where Christ was born, the animals that were gathered round Him, and what was happening on earth.  
    But our readings today also help focus us on the eternal.  The author of the Letter to the Hebrews, traditionally St. Paul, talks about our Lord as the one through whom the entire universe was made, and the refulgence of the glory of God.  St. Paul emphasizes Christ’s divine nature and his superiority even to the angels.  And St. John begins his gospel account with the eternal nature of the Word, the Logos, who was with God in the beginning, and is God Himself.  While what we looked upon at Christmas is a little baby, what we actually saw was both God who is fragile and God who is omnipotent; the tiny child and the Lord of Hosts.

   Both natures, human and divine, are married in Christ, and, like marriage itself, what God has joined cannot be divided.  In the words of St. Athanasius, the great Doctor of the Church from Alexandria, God became man so that man might become God.  God took on our fallen human nature, so that we, in Christ, could be raised to the glory of the divine nature of God, not by substance but by adoption.  The glory of this day is that we have a savior who is going to save us from sin and death, and the darkness of the world is fading, even as the dark days of winter start to grow lighter.
    But in Christ, we also have the wedding of time and eternity.  In the Incarnation, we can see God, and know when He is (in Jesus) in one place, and not another.  He humbles Himself and subjects Himself to time and limits.  But the same God is outside time, seeing all time at once, and remaining the same “yesterday, today, and forever.”  And because of Christ, that connection remains forever, again, never divorced as a union founded in God.
    And that is precisely what is happening in this Mass, as well.  Each Mass is a little Easter, but we might also say that it is a little Christmas, inasmuch as divinity is united to humanity, and eternity is joined to time.  As I say the words of the Eucharistic Prayer, and as the Holy Spirit descends upon the bread and wine and transforms it into the Body and Blood of Christ, heaven comes down to earth, and is united in the Eucharistic species.  Christ, once more, is born for us, and is both fragile in our hands and on our tongues, without losing any of His power and authority.  As we enter into this Mass, we keep one foot in time (because we cannot leave this world and enter the next on our own), but we also put one foot into eternity, because we participate in the eternal offering of Christ at the right hand of the Father in heaven.  
    The beauty and otherworldly-ness of the Mass is on purpose.  We are not supposed to feel like we are at our home on the couch.  The music is not supposed to be of this world.  The smoke of the incense and the sound of the bells, and the unique words and language that are used are all meant to remind us that we stand at the antechamber of heaven, with the veil separating the two pulled back ever so slightly so that both can meet.  What we engage in at this Mass, and every Mass, is the wedding feast of the Lamb of God, where heaven and earth, eternity and time are joined together for the praise of God and for our benefit.  That is what you get to participate in (not merely watch, but actively engage in) when you come to Mass and join in the prayers, whether audibly or silently.  That is what you miss out on when you don’t come to Mass: the biggest wedding of the year, made accessible each day for anyone invited to the wedding.
    This wedding of heaven and earth and time and eternity make it possible for us to love the things of heaven, because we are drawn to them through the things of earth.  Through Christ’s humanity we are able to love His divinity.  Through what we experience with our senses, we encounter a world that is beyond anything we could ever see, hear, smell, touch, or taste.  As we worship with our voices on earth, we are joined by the voices of all the angels and saints in heaven.  That is a wedding worth attending!  That is the truest experience of joy, celebration, and smiles!!  [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]
   

The Hard Way

 Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord–At the Vigil Mass

When I was a freshman in high school I had a science class.  I like science, in general, but I’m not good at science.  One of our final projects in the class was to make a car from a mousetrap and have it travel 3 feet or so.  We could use anything we wanted to, as long it didn’t include a motor.  All we were given were the mousetrap and four plastic wheels.  I had seen someone else use CDs for wheels, and though that was a good idea.  Besides, what else would I do with all those AOL CDs that we got in the mail each month?  Try as I might, I could not get it to go forward.  I was left with simply pulling the arm of the trap back, and quickly releasing, trying to get enough forward momentum from my arm releasing it quickly.  It didn’t work.  When it came time for us to demonstrate what we had done, I watched my classmates and saw their cars.  They used strings or rubber bands attached to the arm of the trap, which were connected to the axels of the wheels, which, when the arm was released, propelled the mousetrap car forward.  It seemed so obvious, and yet it hadn’t occurred to me at all.  I certainly hadn’t found the easiest way to do things.  In fact, I have a special gift for often missing the easiest way, and finding the hardest way to do something.
    It may seem like God also chooses to do things the most difficult way.  St. Paul gives the basics of the Gospel as he is preaching in the synagogue in Antioch in Pisidia, which we heard in our second readings.  God chose a people, is where St. Paul starts.  The story would have been familiar to the Jews.  But in case it’s not as familiar to us, let’s make sure we know that the people God chose were not a strong nation, or the best warriors, or the smartest.  No, God chose a family, Abram and Sarai, who were very old, had no children, and lived in modern-day Iraq, and told them to go to the land of Canaan.  That family, starting with the miracle child, Isaac, slowly grows into a small household, who sell one of the brothers into slavery, and then they have to beg from that brother for food during a famine.  
    The family makes its way to Egypt, lives comfortably there for a while, before Pharaoh gets nervous about their fecundity, and enslaves them.  God sends them Moses to free them from slavery, but this people, this nation now, always seems to think life was better in Egypt as slaves as God tries to give them Canaan and freedom.  God promises them the land and peace as long as they follow Him, but they can’t do it for even one generation.  So they struggle with the surrounding nations, until they beg God for a king, even though God tells them they have a king: Him; they don’t need another.  But they whine some more, and God gives them what they want.  First comes Saul, who is pretty bad at following God, and then David, who is much better at following God, except when he’s murdering to cover-up his adulterous relationship.  Still, David is mostly for God, which is good, because he’s the last king like that.  
    The people, throughout the centuries, wander away from God, get in trouble, cry out to God, and then God saves them, only for the people to get comfortable again, and turn away from God.  Then God sends John the Baptist to prepare the way for the Messiah, Jesus.
    One would think that the Messiah, God’s own co-eternal Son, would have things easier.  Instead, His mother is almost divorced by His foster-father; He has to make numerous trips, first in the womb, then as an infant, then as a young boy.  Jesus’ foster-father, Joseph, dies before Jesus reaches the age of thirty, and then Jesus preaches God’s message, first welcomed with open arms, but eventually rejected by his followers, betrayed by one of his closest friends, and then dies on the cross, abandoned by almost everyone except His mother and few others.
    That’s not the easiest way.  As we celebrate Christmas, we celebrate that God took flesh, and so could feel the jostling in the womb on the road to Bethlehem; was cold as he was delivered in a cave, because no inns had room.  Jesus, the eternal God, could be hungry and thirsty, could stink from soiling his diapers, and could feel the emotional struggle of rejection as He grew up, similar to everyone else in appearance, but clearly very different from his neighborhood friends.  
    God didn’t choose the easiest way to save us; but He chose the best way.  He entered into our forsakenness, our desolation, so that He could change us into His Delight and His Espoused.  It was not clean and easy, but neither was humanity.  Whether it’s building mousetraps or trying to live as disciples of Jesus, we seem to choose the harder, not smarter, way.  But God loves us enough to enter into that messiness so that, by His grace, we can clean up.  
    What we celebrate at Christmas is that God didn’t take the easy way out.  He could have simply willed to save us, but instead He sent His only-begotten Son to become like us in all ways but sin.  He took on our messy history, the saints and the sinners, and made it His own history.  God became man, so that man could become God, to paraphrase St. Athanasius.  
    This Christmas is hard, no doubt about it.  But the Good News is that God is here, and He understands our challenges, our difficulties, probably better than we do ourselves.  But God is still working to save us, no matter how hard, how difficult.  And that love, that dedication to us and to our eternal happiness that humbled itself to become like us in all things but sin, is definitely worth celebrating, and is something that not even COVID-19 can take away.  O come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord!

Into the Lenten Desert

First Sunday of Lent

St. Anthony being attacked by demons

    St. Anthony of the Desert, also known as St. Anthony of Egypt, is considered the Father of Monks.  According to St. Athanasius, who wrote his biography, St. Anthony, while twenty years old, heard the Gospel of the rich young man, that, in order to be happy, he had to sell his riches and follow Christ.  So he got rid of most of his possessions and land, gave his sister into the care of some local Christian virgins (no one knows how she took his decision), and eventually went into the wilderness of Egypt, and lived to the ripe old age of 105 (a blessing in addition to having the name Anthony).
    Why does St. Anthony go into the desert?  Why does Jesus go into the desert after His baptism, as heard in the Gospel today?  What’s the big deal with deserts?
    To begin with, it was the opposite of where man was supposed to be.  We heard in Genesis how God put Adam and Eve into a garden in Eden.  The garden had everything they needed for food and sustenance, and apparently it was warm enough where walking around without clothes wasn’t a problem, so certainly, the garden was not in Michigan!  But the point is that gardens are places of life, whereas deserts are places of death.
    For the Israelites, the desert was also the place of great testing after the Exodus from Egypt.  Recall that the desert was where the Israelites wandered for 40 years, after they doubted that God could take care of the giants who were occupying the land of Canaan, where God had promised to settle the Chosen People. 
    Last, but not least, just as the garden was seen as the property of God, the source of life, so the desert was seen as the property of the devil, the source of death.  At the Day of Atonement, the priests would send the goat, who had previously received the sins of the nation on it, into the desert to be handed over to the demon Azazel. 
    So Jesus, and St. Anthony in imitation of Him, goes into the desert, and there He is tempted.  Both Jesus and St. Anthony went there to battle Satan.  St. Matthew writes in his account of the Gospel that Jesus battled Satan verbally (Jesus, of course, won).  St. Athanasius records that St. Anthony was tempted in the desert with all sorts of temptations, and St. Anthony did not give in to those temptations; he won his contest. 
    For us, then, Lent is going into the desert.  The desert isn’t a fun place, but it’s a necessary place for us to grow in our relationship with God.  It’s a place of battle, and that means we have to fight.  But it’s the only way to get back to the garden.  In Lent we fight against our fallen earthly desires in order that our desire for heaven can be strengthened.  In Lent we fight against our temptations to sin, to be disobedient to God and obedient to Satan.  In Lent, we fight against hiding from God because of our shame, and we run to God to ask Him to heal the wounds the sin has created and clothe us with His holiness. 
    Lent is a privileged time to grow in holiness.  Jesus didn’t grow in holiness when He went into the desert, because He is holiness Himself.  But He gave us an example so that we could grow in holiness.  St. Anthony grew in holiness when he went into the desert, and gave us an example of how fasting, extra prayer, and concentrating on our relationship with God transform us by the power of God’s grace into the man or woman that God wants us to be. 
    Entering the desert for us can be more time for silence.  Not only for the young, but especially for the young, silence can feel like death!  To a society so used to having access to the internet all the time on the phone, or music all the time, or some sort of stimulus for our ears and eyes, silence can seem as barren as a sea of sand.  But it’s also a great way to become more accustomed to hearing the Word of God, which often is only audible in silence.
    Entering the desert for us can be making more time for prayer: speaking with and listening to God.  It seems like every year we get more and more things to do, and prayer often gets shoved out of the way, even before we ditch exercise!  And yet, without prayer, we can’t thrive as God wants us to thrive.  Again, it may feel deadly to set aside even another 5 minutes each day to tell God what’s on our hearts, and to listen to hear what God’s heart wants to say to us.  But it’s also a great way to know if we are following God’s will or our own will.
    As we enter this Lenten season, this Lenten desert, let’s follow the example of Jesus, and the example of St. Anthony.  Let’s go into the desert to fight our temptations and to do battle with Satan, a battle that we can assuredly win if we’re connected to Christ, as St. Anthony was.  Don’t be afraid of the dryness of the desert; don’t be afraid that it’s too difficult.  Enter the desert with Christ and St. Anthony, as a way to enter the Garden when we come to Easter.

A Great Deal

Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord

Shel Silverstein

One of my favorite poems from Shel Silverstein is called “Smart.”  It reads:

My dad gave me one dollar bill

‘Cause I’m his smartest son,

And I swapped it for two shiny quarters

‘Cause two is more than one!

And then I took the quarters

And traded them to Lou

For three dimes — I guess he don’t know

That three is more than two!

Just then, along came old blind Bates

And just ‘cause he can’t see

He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,

And four is more than three!

And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs

Down at the seed-feed store,

And the fool gave me five pennies for them,

And five is more than four!

And then I went and showed my dad,

And he got red in the cheeks

And closed his eyes and shook his head—

Too proud of me to speak!

Obviously the kid in this poem thinks he’s making a good deal, because he trades one for two, two for three, three for four, and four for five, when in fact he’s making a bad deal, because everything he trades for has less value than what he had before.  

What we celebrate today in Christmas is a great deal for humanity, and maybe makes God seem like the boy in Shel Silverstein’s poem, but is really God showing His love for us.  It is what St. Augustine, the saint depicted in the icon to the far right, described as admirabile commercium, or the admirable or great exchange.  And the exchange is that God take flesh in Jesus so that we can become one with God in Jesus.  St. Athanasius, the saint depicted in the icon to the left of the tabernacle, said it this way in his work on the Incarnation: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”

This theme is taken up in the Prayer over the Offerings at the Christmas Mass at Night: “May the oblation of this day’s feast be pleasing to you, O Lord, we pray, that through this most holy exchange we may be found in the likeness of Christ, in whom our nature is united to you.  Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.”  And that same theme is re-echoed in our preface, the prayer that begins our Eucharistic Prayer: “For through him the holy exchange that restores our life has shone forth today in splendor: when our frailty is assumed by your Word not only does human mortality receive unending honor but by this wondrous union we, too, are made eternal.”  And, as the Collect, or Opening Prayer of the Christmas Mass during the Day says, “we may share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

This is kind of a bum deal for God.  He’s definitely trading down.  God who is not limited in any way, in the Person of Jesus can be located in one place at one time, and is limited in His human nature by external forces, like gravity and the material world.  God, who cannot suffer, can, in the Person of Jesus, get a splinter and stub His toe, and be nailed to a cross, bleed, and die.  God, who knows all things and sees all things, must learn how to talk and has eyes that cannot see everything at once.  This is not to say that Jesus is not God, or that Jesus loses His divinity, but that Jesus, who is infinite, assumes our humanity, which is finite.  He humbles Himself, and, as St. Paul says, takes the form of a slave.  

We, on the other hand, are joined to God in Christ.  By the power of the Holy Spirit we are united to divinity and are placed on a trajectory towards eternal happiness even though we start in this world as in a vale of tears.  We gain the opportunity of becoming, in heaven, impassable, that is to say, we cannot suffer, and not being limited by time and space, and being enveloped by perfect love, joy, and light.  That’s a great deal for us.

But God does not begrudgingly enter into this admirable exchange.  He is not forced into in by any way by any person.  God sees us in our weakness and fallen state, and rushes down to strengthen and save us, raising us up to realms of light and glory in heaven.

The deal is not automatic.  We don’t automatically get the deal just by being born.  We don’t even automatically get the deal just by being baptized.  We have to say yes to the deal, to give God our lives, and to accept His life as our own.  Each day, each hour, each minute we have to make that conscious choice of whether or not we are going to participate in the best deal ever offered.  

Every time I celebrate Mass, I mix a drop of water into the wine, and say the prayer, “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”  Our challenge, this Christmas season and always, is to live out what happens under those signs of water and wine, to unite ourselves to Christ by what we do and what we say.  That is how we show God how grateful we are for the great exchange.  Today we recall that the Son of God became man for us.  May we respond to the great deal of salvation, so that we might become God.

Icons of the Trinity

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

I invite you to look at the two icons to my right and my left for a second.  The icon to my right and your left is an icon of the four evangelists.  The icon to my left and your right is an icon of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  Icons are a beautiful way of praying, because they are like a window into heaven.  We do not worship these images, but we honor them as guides to help us pray.  The gold leaf shows how precious they are in the eyes of God and that they are in the heavenly Jerusalem.  Their peaceful, otherworldly faces show the peace and joy that come from being in the presence of God.  They are meant to remind us that, as we gather in this church, we are not at an earthly gathering like a meeting or a social.  We are in a place which straddles heaven and earth and gives us a taste of heaven in the eternal worship of God with angels and saints singing “Holy, holy, holy,” and the prayers of the just rising before God like burning incense.

As we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity today, we may wonder why we celebrate a teaching.  The belief that God is triune, One God and Three Divine Persons, can seem very academic, and removed from the day-to-day cares and concerns of life.  The mysterion, the mystery of the Trinity is not meant to be something only we think about, but something we live.  Mystery in this case does not mean a puzzle to be figured out, but a reality which is unseen and yet fully real.  Our lives, as believers in the Trinity, are meant to be icons of the life of the Trinity, since we are all created in the image and likeness of our Triune God.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we are called to have a multiple personality disorder.  We are radically different from God because He–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–is the Creator while we are creatures.  But while we are different, there is some similarity between us and God, and we are called to become more and more similar to God each day through His grace until we pray that He finishes making us like Him for eternity in Heaven.  In Church language we call this process divinization: to become like God by the power of God.  Our daily prayer life, our sufferings, our worthy reception of the sacraments, and our works of charity are meant to help us accept God’s grace to become more like Him.  St. Athanasius, one of the great Fathers of the Church, who died in the late fourth century, said it this way, in the light of the Incarnation: “God became man so that man might become God.”  

If we are to become like God, then we should know something about him.  We know that God is merciful, like a loving father who runs out to meet his wasteful son; we know that God heals and brings wholeness to His children; we know that God is just and will reward those who follow Him and punish those who reject Him; we know that God has a special love for the outcast and the abandoned; we know that God is Truth; we know that God is Almighty and eternal.  We know that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as reveled to us by the Son.  The list could go on and on.  We learned some of these things from our readings today.  We especially learned from our first reading and Gospel that God is not far away from us, but is near to us for all time.

If then we are to be icons, we have to match those images that we have received from the Deposit of Faith: the Scriptures and the teachings of the Apostles.  To be like God, to be divinized, means to be merciful, even to the point of foolishness; to heal and bring wholeness to the extent that we can by our words and deeds; to stand up for justice; to proclaim and defend truth; to have a special love for the outcast and the abandoned.  How do we receive the strength to do this?  Through the ongoing use of the sacramental grace that we have received; through the worship of our one God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–at Mass; through letting the Holy Spirit empower us to preach the Gospel.  Otherwise, we, as icons, will not look serene, peaceful, and heavenly, but agitated, anxious, and earthly.  Those earthly icons do not lead us to God, but keep us bound up on earth.  They are not windows to heaven, but mirrors reflecting the fallen state of our world.

Marriage is especially meant to be an icon of the Trinity.  Marriage, the union of a man and woman for life, open to new life, is meant to show us God the Father, who pours out all of who He is to the Son, who pours out all of who He is to the Father, and in that sharing of perfect and full love, a new Divine Person is breathed forth: the Holy Spirit.  The Church spends so much time with marriage and the family because married couples and families are meant to remind us of the love of God.  

But for all of us, married or not, by our baptism we were called to be an icon of the Trinity.  One way in particular we can do that is by witnessing the love of God in truth.  We are a narcissistic culture.  We are first and foremost concerned with ourselves.  God’s love, on the other hand, is always open to being shared and creating new life, as we see from the very creation of the world.  God the Father had perfect love in Himself with the Son and the Holy Spirit; He lacked nothing; He needed nothing.  And yet, out of love, God decided to create the world to have new ways to share His love.  Let us be icons of the Trinity; not self-centered, but selfless, and so help others to see the God who love us: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  

God Sees His Son

Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

            Have you ever noticed how everyone seems to soften in the presence of a baby?  It makes sense that mothers are very soft and tender in the presence of a child because of their motherly instincts.  But it even happens with the gruffest, toughest men.  In the presence of a baby even the sternest face can be softened by a smile, and the epitome of a man’s man starts talking gibberish, trying to communicate with the child and get it to smile back.

            Today we rejoice in the fact that, in the fullness of time, right when God wanted it, when all the conditions were as God knew in His Divine Wisdom they needed to be, the invisible God who could not be seen, the Word through whom all things were made, and without whom nothing came to be, became visible in the flesh.  God was made known to the world as a baby.  While we have grown used to this fact over 2,000 years of Christian activity, this was unthinkable, truly awesome, and even somewhat scandalous to Jews and Gentiles alike.

            In the past, as we heard in the second reading, “God spoke in partial and various ways to our ancestors through the prophets.”  From the very beginning, when God created Adam and Eve in His own likeness and walked among them in the Garden of Eden, God had wanted to be close to the crown of His creation.  He wanted to be with us in all things.  And even when, through Adam, sin entered the world, He continued to reveal Himself partially to the Chosen People: to Abram, telling him to leave Ur of Chaldea and go to the land of Canaan, where he would become Abraham, the father of many nations, and in the form of three visitors to announce the conception of Isaac, the son of the promise; to Moses in the Burning Bush and on Mount Sinai; to all the Chosen People in the form of a pillar of cloud and fire, leading them through the desert; through the prophets, those chosen by God to speak for Him to a people who constantly preferred to wander away from God, rather than be close, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Ezekiel, and others. 

But this was always a partial revelation of God.  In Bethlehem, when Jesus was born, we had the chance to see that God had fulfilled the prophecies that a Virgin would bear a Son and would name Him Emmanuel, God-with-us.  In the Nativity of Jesus according to the flesh a marvelous exchange took place, what the Church Fathers called admirabile commercium.  In this great exchange, God took our sinful nature to Himself, though He was free from sin, and united it fully to His divinity, so that we could live forever in heaven united to the Son.  In the words of St. Athanasius: God became man so that man could become God.

This is what St. John is speaking of when, in the Gospel passage we heard today, he writes, “But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision by of God.”  In Baptism we were made members of the Mystical Body of Christ, and our nature was joined to Christ, just as Christ joined His nature to ours at the Annunciation, which we celebrated 9 months ago. 

The Gospel, the Good News that this truly is should astound us!  Because if we have been baptized and united to the Mystical Body of Christ, then when God looks down on us, he no longer sees a child born of natural generation, but His only-begotten, beloved Son, just as when Mary and Joseph looked down at the Christ child, they did not just see a baby, but the eternal God in flesh.  In baptism, where we are born again by water and the Spirit, we become a son or a daughter in Christ the Son. 

This participation in the Sonship of Christ is no small thing!  “To which of the angels did God ever say: You are my son; this day I have begotten you?  Or again: I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me?”  Because Jesus joined our nature to His, humbling Himself to take on all that it means to be human: hunger, thirst, pain, temptation, we have a higher dignity than the angels of God.  You are a higher creation than an angel, because Christ was not an angel, nor did He become one of them.  He chose to join our nature to His, and so we join in the dignity of Christ who is “as far superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.”

Do not cheapen, then, the great gift you have been given this Christmas, the gift of knowing that we can be united to Christ.  Do not count as worthless the great gift of being a part of His Body, the Church, with all the great gifts and duties that come along with membership in the People God has claimed for His own.  As Pope St. Leo the Great wrote in his Christmas sermon:

Acknowledge, O Christian, the dignity that is yours!  Being made a partaker in the divine nature, do not by an unworthy manner of living fall back into your former abjectness of life.  Be mindful of Whose Head, and of Whose Body, you are a member.  Remember, that wrested from the powers of darkness, you are now translated into the Light and the Kingdom of God.  By the sacrament of baptism you have become the temple of the Holy Spirit.  Do not, by evil deeds, drive out from you such a One dwelling with you, and submit yourself again to the bondage of the devil.  Because your price was the Blood of Christ; because in strictness He shall judge you Who in mercy has redeemed you, Who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, world without end.  Amen.