Mass readings for the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity:
Deuteronomy 4.32-34, 39-40 Psalm 33.4-6, 9, 18-20, 22 Romans 8.14-17 Matthew 28.16-20
The revelation of God as Trinity, central to Christian faith, tells us that community is integral to God. Scripture indicates this going all the way back to Genesis and the story of humanity’s creation: in speaking about Adam, that first undifferentiated, sexless human creature, God says it’s not good for him to be alone. What is of God is good; companionship is good, it is of God. So, humanity is divided into male and female, not just so the human creature is not alone, but also that “human being” resembles “divine being”. Remember, we are made in the image and likeness of God – in the community of man and woman, we resemble God. And as the Holy Spirit, the giver of life proceeds from the Father and the Son; in humanity, children proceed from the partnership of men and women, whether directly as parents or as the broader community of care and nurture – life comes from this relationship between male and female living and working cooperatively.
Recently, at the Feast of the Ascension, we saw that Jesus Christ’s return to God involved the incorporation of his acquired humanity into the godhead.
God reciprocates: at Pentecost the Holy Spirit comes, makes the Church, men and women, his home.
God, scripture tells us, is spirit. The divine realm is a purely spiritual place; and yet God has brought the flesh of humanity from the material world into it. And here in the physical world, the Spirit of God finds a place in us.
Here are two communities that were once apart: a spiritual one and a material one, that have now integrated into each other. We speak of a coming together of heaven and earth at some point in the future; at the second coming, on the day of judgement, the heavenly Jerusalem will descend, and God will dwell among us such that we have no more need of temples and churches; integrated into each others lives such that the reconciliation of heaven and earth, of flesh and spirit is accomplished eternally. But that’s not just something that lies in the future, it’s already happening. Trinity as divine community, and humanity as material community that ideally reflects the divine, their drawing together has been set in motion. So, on Satan’s part, there is growing fear and desperation – his long-held plans, his designs upon us are threatened. So, there is ever greater urgency to his demonic labours. The clock’s been ticking for him for these past two thousand years – a long time for us, but for the devil, there aren’t enough centuries and we see him now panicked in his work – look at those in power who wish to impose their vision of humanity as a highly-regulated, thoroughly-controlled mass of weak and dependent creatures.
Everything is put to us an emergency to justify this, even as they have been the creators of the crises. They’re rushing to cement in place their designs such that they cannot be reversed. The dynamism of inspired humanity is to be restrained for its own good. But this vision does not resemble in any way the Trinity: the benevolence of the Father who allows us free will; the Son who teaches and guides, not by clever manipulation of emotion and appetite (our fears, our earthly desires), by withholding information, or silencing his opponents, but rather by speaking the truth, and the exercise of reason; the Holy Spirit which is liberty itself, it goes where it will, and brings life where it goes.
It’s for us to work to preserve humanity’s authentic community modeled on the Trinity, one that includes God. Human community is then to manifest the love, justice and truth of God that is exists perfectly in the Holy Trinity. Our efforts to do so will succeed or fail insofar as we rely upon God’s grace and ensure that he is always central to our lives as individuals and as communities.
But where is God in our communities? Where is he in our civilization? Where is he in our homes, those personal domains which, well up til now were held inviolate according to our God-given rights? Without God, who will honour the dictum that every person’s home is their castle? What kind of castles do we now build” So many lack a chapel, a shrine, somewhere a cross, a candle, a Bible, a place for quiet prayer, soulful study, personal examination in light of the gospel.
At the heart of the human settlements of antiquity, those of the era of Christendom, right up to the modern era, we could see the principle of God-centred community built in stone, bricks and mortar. Even among the ancient pagans, at the city centres were the temples; later the Cathedral Church of a bishop built at the heart of a community made that place a “city” a civitas – without a cathedral, the place was just a “town”. Villages, and towns, had at their hearts the church on the square, where the market would set up and business transacted in sight of the bell tower, where the town hall would be constructed, and if there were a ruling family, a ducal palace would be built; all in relation to the sacred, to the acknowledgment of the divine.
Where are we at today? Well, Mississauga, incorporated well within the modern era, in 1973, really in historical terms, yesterday, I think is pretty emblematic of the spiritual state of Canada – what is at the heart of one of this country’s newest urban communities? In proximity to what did they build the city hall? A freakin’ shopping mall: Square One. It was built first and all else relative to it because this was seen at the time to be the beating heart of the modern community: a place of consumer activity, shopping (but not a market), seeing movies at the multiplex (passive audiences sitting in the dark), the wasting of hours in the video game arcade (not engaged in athletic play outside under blue skies), eating at one of the chain restaurants with their standardized menu and service (upscaled junk fast food, not the product of true culinary art).
Well, that plan is in crisis, if not already collapsed, thanks to the internet – we can all get fat and stupid sitting at home, shopping online, playing video games on the couch, and watching the mediocre offerings of streaming services while we fold the laundry.
Except we did that recently, for a couple of years (we were forced to) – and thank God, most of us came to hate it.
You know the Holy Spirit came to us, and it was not a spirit of fear, not one of slavery, but of hope and freedom. And that was an inspiration to remake the world as a community in the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity. Now, I don’t think there will be any plan in the near future to knock down Square One, and the rest of Mississauga’s concrete, utterly inorganic downtown, good idea that it might be. That might happen anyway as we see any number of cities, especially in North America, becoming inhospitable and so, abandoned and in sore need of redevelopment, frankly, of rebirth.
Oh, that we might convert the shopping malls into baptistries! And return to being communities that work, study, trade, feast, dance and sing, pray, beneath the bell towers, under the shelter of the spires of the houses of God, because we have made a home for him among us, in our hearts and own houses. Such is the work we have set before us in these days of challenge. And we see encouragement that others are picking up the spiritual tools and setting to rebuilding. A record number of Christians attended the pilgrimage in Chartres, France this year; and that comes after a record number of baptisms in that nation of revolution that so recently appeared on the cusp of dissolution under its feckless leaders. We see people, even in Canada, secularized and programmed by our educational and cultural institutions to a smug, self-satisfied secular nationalism beginning to ask of our leaders tougher questions as to what exactly is going on. Canadian nationalism is pretty thin stuff, it can no more feed fascism than it can woke progressivism. It has never really been sufficient to hold us together as a national community – what we have now is what’s left of a drained legacy of previous generations’ sacrifices made in faith. We here know that the new life will come of our sacrifices: the work of evangelization like ALPHA, the service we do that we see with our Knights, the CWL, our Vincentians; the outreach of our Compassionate Care ministry; and yes, in our tithing to keep this beautiful place open, to shelter us, and many more.
So, the cross is there for us to take up. Christ promises to be with us in this necessary work of redemption, the saving of ourselves, but also of our collective future as a community – to be brought at last into a final and complete unity with God: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and us.
Amen.