Home Catechetical Corner Trinity Sunday: How do we respond to our divine invitation to community?

Trinity Sunday: How do we respond to our divine invitation to community?

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Sunday Scripture reflections, June 4, 2023, Trinity Sunday

Ex 34:4b-6, 8-9  Dn 3:52, 53, 54, 55, 56  2 Cor 13:11-13  Jn 3:16-18

How do we respond to our divine invitation to community?

Our computers and phones are meant to connect us to the community. However, through the daily traffic of communication in emails, texts, and social media posts, the digital culture in which we are immersed can also isolate us. Time spent in front of a screen is time away from family, friends, neighbors, and all those places where human communities flourish around us. Think for a minute of the all-too-familiar scene of a family or group of friends gathered around a table while looking at their phones throughout the meal.

Humans are social creatures who come into this world in a community. First, the community of our immediate family, and then the ever expanding communities of home, school, and work as we grow into adulthood. And even though electronic devices have changed the way we interact socially we cannot escape a basic fact of our human existence. We are created as social beings, meant to flourish together.

This Sunday the church invites us to reflect on the divine community that exists in the very heart and life of God, who we worship and praise as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “Trinity Sunday” is not a distant theological abstraction but a graced opportunity to reflect on the mystery of God as a family of divine persons who invite us into their community of love, grace and peace.

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit directs our gaze to a simple truth about who God is and who we are in relationship to God and one another. We believe in God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — in whose life and love we share through baptism. At our baptism, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we became members of the family of God. At the beginning of every Mass, we are welcomed with this Trinitarian greeting of Saint Paul, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

The goal of the Christian life is to grow each day in loving communion with the triune God. To believe that God is a trinity of divine persons is to receive God’s merciful invitation to daily friendship with the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel we hear that, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”

Jesus is the visible face of the Father, whose eternal love lives in us in gift of the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity is as relevant as the next breath you take, for our life originates in the creating and all-powerful hand of God the Father, is redeemed by Jesus, His Son, and sustained by the power of the Holy Spirit.

On this Trinity Sunday, we recall and draw strength from the grace of our baptism, “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Baptism calls us to nothing less than a share in the life of the Blessed Trinity.

Do we accept that divine invitation to community? As we pray in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit we grow in confidence to say, “speak to me, Lord.”

Question: What does belief in the Holy Trinity mean to you?

Jem Sullivan holds a doctorate in religious education and is an associate professor of Catechetics in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.