God brings us home into the love of the Trinity, through the Son in the Spirit. – Rom 5:1-5; John 16:12-15; Trinity Sunday

A homily I wrote for preaching class based on this year's readings for Trinity Sunday.

Do you ever feel weighed down, pressed upon, under pressure, stressed?  When St. Paul talks about our afflictions in the 2^nd reading, that’s what he’s talking about; in fact, the literal meaning of the Greek word he uses is ‘being squashed and squeezed,’ like a piece of concrete undergoing a stress test.  Squeezing is a technique that civil engineers use to test a piece of concrete before they use it to build something substantial.  If there are any tiny cracks in the concrete that are invisible under normal circumstances but could cause the building to come crashing down, under pressure they become plainly visible to the naked eye.  It’s not safe to build with concrete unless it’s first been afflicted.

Affliction does the same to us.  When the squashing hits us, cracks of saints and sinners become painfully visible.  But, unlike concrete that might be discarded, our master builder will never discard us.  Those cracks exist to be filled with God’s love, the love that Paul tells us “has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Those cracks often consist of taking one true aspect of God and letting that become the whole picture.  Let me give an example: maybe we’re blessed with a keen sense of God as active in our lives, but our crack is to take that too far, making God into a micro-manager or a helicopter parent, so if we feel afflicted we’re left sure that God did this: God made me ill, God take away my job, God isolated me; God afflicted me.  That’s a crack that will be healed. 

God doesn’t afflict us.  Affliction is the death throes of a world passing away, it’s not God’s wrath.  We feel it keenly perhaps because there’s a lot that needs to pass away.  We do feel afflicted, because there are forces impeding us for living that love-based communion of persons here on earth.  Death, disaster, prejudice, exploitation, dehumanization… we could give a litany of the forces that afflict.  They’re passing away. 

Or maybe our crack is to fix on this separation God has from the world of pain and sorrow, maybe we do rest assured of the goodness of God, that God has no truck with evil but we take that to the point of saying that God is so removed from evil that He must be distant from me in my time of affliction: God is absent from this.

That’s a crack that will be healed: God is never absent.  The Spirit is always in our hearts, being poured through us, praying for us with deep sighs, too deep for words.  Jesus is united with us in every affliction, Jesus who knows betrayal, Jesus who knows pain, Jesus who knows abandonment… Jesus who knows exaltation, Jesus who knows glory.  Spirit and Son: these aren’t two redundant modes in which God might be present to us in our suffering, these are two people, the Son and the Spirit, in loving relationship with each other and with the Father, present to us in unique ways and longing to draw us into that loving relationship.

That’s what Jesus is talking to his disciples about in today’s gospel.  God was present in our midst, fully human, and so he died; fully divine, and so he rose and conquered death.  Before the disciples had seen that shocking victory, there was so much he couldn’t teach them.  So we have been given the Spirit, who glorifies the Son by continually making him present to us.  The Spirit comes to us to bear witness to the Son who did not carry out his own will, but his Father’s.

Paul shares the same insight: the Spirit assures us of the access we have to the Father through Christ, sustaining us as we approach that ‘access,’ a word borrowed from the royal court, a glorious procession to the throne, a pilgrimage that Christ has first trod, through affliction, not around it, piercing the stormy waters like an anchor that brings us rest, that brings us hope.  This is the glory of the Trinity that we adore today: our one God has acted and is acting out of love to bring us into that love, acting through the Son in the Spirit.  What wondrous Love is this!