‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God almighty. Heaven and earth are full of his glory. Hosanna in the Highest’.
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Today
is Trinity Sunday, a day when we celebrate the holiness and essence of God.
We
are not privy to the inner life of God, not least because God is beyond our
understanding.
To
claim to comprehend, ‘what is the breadth and length and height and depth of
God’ (Ephesians 3.18) sounds like the ultimate blasphemy, it is like saying
that you yourself are God.
Except
that, the dimensions of God – wide, long, high and deep - and ‘the love of
Christ that surpasses knowledge’ has been given to us, so that we may be filled
with ‘all the fullness of God’. (Ephesians 3.19)
This
mystery is transmitted to us by God himself, in the Word made Flesh, Jesus
Christ and in the promptings and guidance and power of the Holy Spirit: it is
transmitted so that we come to know the Father, the Holy God.
And
we learn through the Word – Jesus Christ - that the heart of God is love; love
that generates the beauty, goodness, truth and unity of God.
The
US Bishop, Robert Barron, speaking of the Holy Spirit, opens up a beautiful
image of the Trinity:
The
Holy Spirit: the love that connects the Father and the Son. From all eternity
the Father speaks his Word - that’s the Son. The Son is the perfect image of
the Father - they share the same substance, the same essence. The Father and
the Son look at one another and each sees utter perfection and therefore falls
utterly in love. The love they breathe back and forth is the Holy Spirit, the Spiritus Sanctus, the holy breath. Sometimes
the Tradition refers to the Spirit as the vinculum
amoris, the chain of love, for that reason. The chain that connects Father
and Son. This is the power [everyone] that the Father and Son together breathe
out into the life of the Church.
Bishop Robert Barron
https://youtu.be/o_Mem8NxmTw?si=VKH77pvbPnsWWJZo
The
holiness of God is holiness unconstrained; and this holiness spills out from
the Holy Trinity into the world and into human lives.
Places
and moments and people know this well.
In
the Temple of Jerusalem, Isaiah, a priest of the Holy of holies of the Temple,
becomes a prophet as he is called and commissioned by the holiness of God.
Heavenly
bodies, the seraphs, call out to one another:
‘Holy, holy, holy is
the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full
of his glory.’ (Isaiah 6.8)
The
scene continues:
The pivots on the
thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with
smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I
live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord
of hosts!’
The
response to the holiness of God is awe and wonder, a sense of inadequacy.
So,
on this Trinity Sunday, the celebration of the awe and wonder and love of God,
let us briefly see what this holiness begins to look like in our lives, in
worship, in daily life and in being sent.
We
start in worship, where in the presence of the Holy One we take off,
figuratively, the sandals from our feet, like Moses at the Burning Bush, for he
is told he stands on holy ground. (Exodus 3.5)
Cast
off the mundane and turn your heart in worship: the giving of our adoration and
attention to God.
That’s
why worship is not about human bonhomie
or community building.
Rather
we gather as a community seeking to become a holy people to be witness to the
holiness, the love and awesomeness, of God in the world.
Holy
worship is worship offered without our egos and wills and projections getting
in the way.
Holy
worship demands we set aside self and focus solely on God.
Holiness
of life is similar.
A
holy life is a life lived in love and service of others, in purity of body,
mind and spirit.
But
holiness of life means that rather than setting aside our own selves we ask the
Holy Spirit to re-shape, re-direct and re-form our selves and our lives.
How
we relate to other people and loving them for their own sake, not for our sake,
as an instrument of gratification, is at the heart of that.
Using
other people as a plaything is obvious in casual, fleeting and uncommitted
relationships, or in relationships that have no intention of being fruitful and
open to creation: it’s the ultimate in self-indulgence.
Nicodemus
in the gospel is being taught by Jesus that his life needs the renovation we
all need: you are Nicodemus, I am Nicodemus.
He
needs a new birth, from above – from the Holy God.
As
Nicodemus clocked, birth is traumatic: we have to leave the warmth and comfort
of what we know, through the birth pangs, to emerge into an unfamiliar world, but
ultimately the world in which we will grow and flourish and be led into all
truth by the Spirit that blows where it wills. (cf John 16.13 & 3.8).
That
new birth, this being born from above, is baptism and the way that is kept
pristine is through regular confession of our sinfulness, wilful shortcomings
and lack of holiness.
It
is honest confession of sin, to the Holy God, that shapes holy lives.
We
begin worship always by confessing our sins: we do that because we are on the
threshold of the holiness of God: it is, as it were, taking off our sandals in
his presence.
I
cannot commend highly enough the act of personal, sacramental confession: my
goodness it’s tough, but then being born from above is tough and is demanding,
it is saying my life is shaped by God, not by my will.
Holy
lives become instruments of God’s will.
There
is no other test.
That
is why we can look to the fiat of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, her declaration, ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be
to me according to your word.’ (Luke 1:38).
That
is a holy response to the holiness of God; renouncing self, to be filled –
full-filled - by the holiness of God.
And
that is why holiness always sends.
Isaiah’s
encounter with the holiness of God in worship is to say, in response to the
call of holiness, ‘Here I am; send me’ (Isaiah 6.8).
Holiness
does not reside solely in Temples.
In
fact, it resides in the bodies of those who become temples of the Holy Spirit
(1 Corinthians 6.19), bodies sent out in the power of the Holy Spirit to
breathe the Spirit’s love into the world in the name of Jesus to lead all
people to the Father.
In
all I have said you may have spotted that the Eucharist which we celebrate now
takes us through those moves: we have already made a corporate confession; and
then we to come the Sanctus ‘holy, holy, holy; and conclude with dismisaal:
when you hear the words, ‘Go in the peace of Christ’it’s an invitation to
respond ‘here I am, send me’.
And
the music and ceremony of the Liturgy enhances that sense of the holiness of
God; but however beautiful that won’t be enough, because personal holiness has
to be lived out too in real life. As St Benedict says:
Do not aspire to be
called holy before you really are, but first be holy that you may be truly
called so. The
Rule of St Benedict, Chapter IV, 62
And all holiness
emanates from the holiness of the Blessed Trinity: to whom be all might
majesty, dominion and power now and for ever. Amen.
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