Trinity Sunday. Welcome: Joan Chittister. Opening Hymn: All are Welcome (411) Opening Prayer: Claretian Publications

Transcription

1 May 30, 2015 Trinity Sunday Tony and Veronica Nitko If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community. Richard Rohr Welcome: Joan Chittister Once we empty ourselves of our certainties, we open ourselves to the mystery. We expose ourselves to the God in whom we live and move and have our being. We bare ourselves to the possibility that God is seeking us in places and people and things we thought were outside the pale of the God of our spiritual childhood. Then life changes color, changes tone, changes purpose. We begin to live more fully, not just in touch with earth, but with the eternal sound of the universe as well. Opening Hymn: All are Welcome (411) Opening Prayer: Claretian Publications Loving God, we are limited in our understanding of you, but we know that you care for us and for all creation. Thank you for loving us and remaining with us in our sorrows and joys. Thank you for the life of Jesus whose life shows us the way to life and happiness and trust. Thank you for your Spirit who leads us. Warm our hearts and unite us, that we might open our lives to you to accept all your love and to respond to it by entrusting ourselves to you with all that you have made us and given us. We ask this in the name of Jesus the Christ. Amen.

2 First Reading: Deuteronomy 4:32 34, Moses said to the people: Ask now of the days of old, before your time, ever since God created man upon the earth; ask from one end of the sky to the other: Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live? Or did any god venture to go and take a nation from the midst of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, with strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors, all of which your God, did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? This is why you must now know, and fix in your heart, that God is in the heavens above and on earth below, and that there is no other. A reading from the Word of God. Thanks be to God. Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 33:4 5, 6, 9, 18 19, 20, 22 (12b) Upright is the word of God, and all God s works are trustworthy. God loves justice and right; of the kindness of God the earth is full. By the word of God the heavens were made; by the breath of God s mouth all their host. For God spoke, and it was made; God commanded, and it stood forth. See, the eyes of God are upon those who fear, upon those who hope for kindness, to deliver them from death and preserve them in spite of famine.

3 Our soul waits for God, who is our help and our shield. May your kindness, O God, be upon us who have put our hope in you. Second Reading: slu.edu: Ron Rolheiser: The Richness of the Mystery Of God G. K. Chesterton once said that one of the reasons he believed in Christianity was because of its belief in the trinity. If a human person had made up Christianity, it would not have at its very center a concept that is impossible to grasp or explain: the idea that God exists as one but within in three persons. How do we understand the Trinity? We don t! God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, beyond language. The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God. This is already evident in the history of religion. From the very beginning, humans have always had an experience of God and have worshipped God. However, from the very beginning, too, humans have also had the sense that God is too rich and toobeyond one set of categories to be captured in any human conception. Hence, most ancient peoples were polytheistic... Sometimes they believed in one supreme god who ultimately ruled over lesser gods and goddesses, but they sensed that divine energy was too rich a reality to be contained in a single being.

4 Many of the most powerful myths ever told arose out of the experience of God s overwhelming richness and the ancient peoples incapacity to conceptualize God and God s activity in any singular way. Ancient religious practices and the incredible canon of mythology that these produced speak of how rich, untamed, and beyond simplistic imagination and language is the human experience of God. The ancients believed that their experience pointed to the existence of many deities... And then a massive shift took place: Judaism, soon followed by Christianity and Islam, introduced the strong, clear, doctrinaire idea that there is only one God. Now all divine power and energy was seen as coming from a single source, monotheism, YHWH, the Father of Jesus, Allah. There were no other gods or goddesses. But from the time of Jesus resurrection onwards, Christians began to struggle with simple monotheism. They believed that there is still only one God, but their experience of God demanded that they believe that this God was somehow three. Stated simply, when Jesus rose from the dead Christians immediately began to attribute divinity to him. Jesus was understood to be God, but somehow different from God the Creator. Moreover, inside of their experience, they sensed still a third divine energy, which they couldn t fully identify with either Jesus or God the Creator, which was the Holy Spirit. This experience left them in a curious and sometimes perplexed state: Their experience of grace and God s action in the world was at odds with their simplistic conception of monotheism. How to fit this together? It took Christianity three hundred years to finally arrive at a formula that somehow honored the richness of the Christian experience of God. The Council of Nicea in 325 gave us the creedal formula we profess today: There is one God in three persons; except they wrote

5 that formula in Greek and the words there state literally that God is one substance in three subsistent relations. That formula isn t meant to give us perfect clarity. No formula can ever capture the reality of God because God is too rich to ever be captured, even half adequately, in imagination, thought, and word. To what does this call us? To humility! We need to be more humble in our language about God. The idea of God needs to stretch, not shrink, the human imagination. Our actual experience of God, just as for ancient polytheism, is forever eating away at all simplistic conceptions of God. Thank God, for the complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Words of Rev. Rolheiser. AMEN Gospel Acclamation: GOSPEL: Matthew 28:16 20 God be with you. And with your Spirit. A reading from the book of Matthew. Glory to you, O God. The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them. When they all saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted. Then Jesus approached and said to them, All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age. Listen to what the Spirit is telling us. Glory and Praise. Silent Reflection/Discussion

6 Intercessions: Let us pray for the needs of God s world and give thanks to God for love so freely given: R. O God, hear our prayer. (sung) Loving God, we thank you for the beauty and wonder of your creation. Help us to love and respect all that you have made; to share your gifts with others in need and to protect and nurture all that is fragile and vulnerable on this earth. R Loving God, thank you for the huge diversity of people who share this world. We pray for a renewed spirit of peace and reconciliation wherever there is conflict, injustice and oppression. Help us to bring peace into our own lives and to seek your ways of peace for the welfare of all your children. R. Loving God, we thank you for the love and fellowship of friends and families. Help us to be generous with our time, with our love and with ourselves to care for all who are lonely and need our support. R. Loving God, we thank you for all who work to improve care and treatment for the physically ill or mentally distressed. We pray that your loving and healing presence will surround all who are suffering today and that your Holy Spirit will comfort and uphold them throughout their troubles. R. Please add your personal intentions here. R. Loving God we offer you our prayers, trusting that in your love you will use them and us for the fulfillment of your purpose for creation. Give us

7 courage to be part of your answer to prayer and when you ask Whom shall I send --free us from fear that we may answer Here am I; send me! AMEN Breaking Bread Prayer: Adapted from: St Matthew s in the City, Aukland, NZ Here today, through bread and wine, we renew our journey with Jesus and his disciples. We renew our unity with one another, and with all those who have gone before us in this community: Nancy, Rosemary, Joe and Marguerite, Cynthia, Amy, Darrell, Ed and Gerry, Bernice and Charles, Trudy, Don, Connie and Jack, Ren, Ann and Trevor. We renew our communion with the earth and our interwovenness with the broken ones of the world. We take bread, symbol of labor, symbol of life. We will break the bread because Christ, the source of life, was broken for the excluded, exploited and downtrodden. We take wine, symbol of blood, spilt in war and conflict; symbol too of new life. We will drink the wine because Christ, the peace of the world, overcomes violence. Now bread and wine are before us, the memory of our meals, our working, our talking; the story that shapes us: the grieving and the pain, the oppressor who lies deep in our own soul, the seeking and the loving. And we give thanks for all that holds us together. Therefore, with the disciples, and with all the faithful we proclaim your great and glorious name, for ever praising you and saying: Eternal Spirit, Lifegiver, Pain-bearer, Love-maker, Source of all that is and that shall be, Father and Mother of us all, Loving God, in whom is heaven: The hallowing of your name echo through the universe! The way of your justice be followed by the peoples

8 of the world! Your heavenly will be done by all created beings! Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth. With the bread we need for today, feed us. In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us. In times of temptation and test, strengthen us. From trials too great to endure, spare us. From the grip of all that is evil, free us. For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever. Amen. Bread-Breaking Hymn: Prayer of St. Francis (508) (Silent Reflection) Closing Prayer: Filled with the Spirit that calls the entire world and us beyond what we ever thought was possible, we leave this table strengthened with food for the journey and a vision of life as it can be; one diverse family, living in justice and peace. Amen. Go now, for the Spirit of God is alive in the land. Amen. We go in the power of love. Closing Hymn: Christ Be Our Light (542) Sharing of the Peace