Our Psalm today couldn’t have been more true: “O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth.” Not only is God’s name wonderful, but God himself is wonderful! God is so good and I am truly grateful to God, not only for my vocation, but also for putting all of you into my life and helping me get to this blessed Altar today, as a priest of Jesus Christ.  

    Now, one could appropriately ask: “why do we have a day set aside for the Holy Trinity when all of our worship is always directed toward the Holy Trinity?”  When ever we pray, both in private and in community, both through sacramentals and the Sacraments, we are directing our worship to almighty God, who is the Blessed Trinity.  If our prayer and worship is directed to anyone or any thing else, other than God, then it is false worship and probably something very bad that will only cause you harm.  So, why do we celebrate the Trinity on this Sunday?  

    The Church is offering us all a chance to stop and reflect on the Blessed Trinity in a special way today, because the Trinity has a lot to teach us, not only about who God is, but also about ourselves.  St. Augustine’s famous explanation on the Trinity is God the Father loving God the Son, God the Son loving God the Father, and the love between them is the Holy Spirit.  This seemingly simple and beautiful explanation of St. Augustine teaches us two things: that God is love and that God is manifested in relationships of love.  

    God is Love.  Whenever you experience and encounter love you are experiencing and encountering God.  Because God is Love, God can never be separated from Love.  Many of you here know that my favorite musical is Les Miserables, and not just because I was in it a long time ago, but because it’s a beautiful story of God searching for man.  My favorite lyric from the show comes at the very end: “to love another person is to see the face of God.”  That couldn’t be more right.  Whenever we love, we are participating in God, we are participating in the Blessed Trinity.  Which brings us to the second point, that God is manifested in relationships of love.

    St. Pope John Paul II, and now Pope Francis, love talking about families, and both have written extensively on how families interact with the life of the Church and how families build up the Body of Christ.  Both have written that the married couple mirror the Trinity in a special way.  Just as St. Augustine explained the Trinity so too we can explain the Sacrament of Marriage.  The husband loves his wife, the wife loves her husband, and love between them unites them in a special union that makes them one flesh.  Just as the Trinity is three persons in one God, the married couple is two persons in one flesh.  But, the Trinity is also manifested in other relationships beside the marriage bond: any relationship of Love is participating in God, who is Love.  

    Now lets bring this to a more local level.  All of you have been participating in the Blessed Trinity in all your relationships of love with your spouses, children, friends, family, parents, neighbors, and so on.  On a more personal level, when I say I am grateful to the Blessed Trinity for my vocation, all of you are included there - it’s because of my relationship with each of you that has gotten me here today.  All of your support, love, prayers, well wishes, lessons, sometimes your anger and sarcasm, and most especially being who God made you to be has helped to form me into the priest I am today.  Whether you prayed for me from afar, went to school with me, lived near my house, went to seminary, were a parishioner I ministered to, whether you were or currently are a close friend, teacher, classmate, priest, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent, or parent, you have all played a significant role in my formation and vocation.  I would not be here today if it were not for every single one of you.  You have all been showing God to me since we met because of your love for me.  

    The line from Les Miserables is true: “to love another person is to see the face of God.”  I see God in all of you, because of your love for me and my love for you.  Please continue to pray for me so that the people I minister to will see God in me as I see God in you.  Believe you me, I am the worse sinner in this church today; but God doesn’t call the qualified; rather, he qualifies those he has called, and God still has a lot of work to do on me.  

    Thank you for your love. Thank you for helping me see the face of God.  Thank you for walking with me to this holy altar today and every day these past 26 years.  Let us now think of those who show us the face of God and thank the Most Blessed Trinity for putting them in our lives.