June 7, 2009 Cycle B
Forever is a long time. Ask the couple who promises fidelity for only one lifetime! Or ask the celibate who takes vows for the long haul. Or ask the parents of a child who occupies their concern for the next 18 years and counting.
Forever, if you can believe it, is even longer than that. Forever is longer than your mortgage; longer than your car and student loan payments laid end on end. Forever is longer than any physical pain you may be suffering and deeper than any misery you may have to bare. Think of eternity as a pool of joy that you can never swim the length of. Eternity is well-being and strength, vigor and beauty, love and happiness that cannot die. If you want it to be, that is. If you prepare for everlasting love, you can have it.
The story of salvation history is all about forever. About God’s promises, which like everything else about God, have no boundaries or expiration dates.
Today, on this first Sunday after the great fifty days of Easter and Pentecost, we contemplate the mystery of God who creates and recreates our world and us, out of a love too perfect and complete for us to even begin to understand. When we call God “Father” or “Son” or “Holy Spirit,” these are not three separate nicknames, are they? The reality is that God, just by being God, is more than can possibly be held in one name. The most we can do is identify the reality of God into three separate and distinct persons.
We experience God who created us in our world. We share in the God who lived among us and is one like us. And we hold in our heart the presence of God who animates us with an explicable unconditional love.
God’s love for us transcends the simple love of Creator for His creation. God’s love becomes fully human for us in the person of Jesus who taught us that God loves like a father loves his beloved children. In the Resurrection of Christ, we see that God’s love for us extends beyond this world well into the next. In the gift of the Holy Spirit, we experience the fullness of God’s love in one another.
Today in our first reading, Moses tells the people about a forever lease on the land of promise. St. Paul in his letter writes about an inheritance in Christ that means glory unending. And in the Gospel Jesus gives his word to his still weak and doubtful followers. Even though he is leaving them, Jesus will be present to them always – forever.
Even though season’s ends, Moses disappears, Paul is martyred, and Jesus is sent into Heaven, the eternal things remain true. And the best part, nothing is lost. Goodness has no end because God is good and God has no end.
This weekend we celebrate this annual God feast of the Trinity. Why? Well, God should have one day on the liturgical calendar – don’t you think? Along with all those saints and angels, and Mary days, and Jesus days, one feast cannot begin to honor the God who is time itself and timeless as well. God is honored through all of these other observances every day of the year. But on this one weekend, let us remember that most deliberately, and we are all reminded of the sweetness of a love that keeps us in mind this day and every day --- forever.
Amen. Amen. Msgr. Tom, Pastor, Christ the King