Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Deacon Bruce Maltzen's Homily for June 19, 2011 - Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity


First of all - I want to say Happy Father's day to all the fathers gathered here. It such a great calling to be a father , and today we acknowledge those who have taken on that calling with great joy. Today, besides being Father’s day – which I will get to just a little later, is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, a Sunday where we recall the most fundamental mystery of the Christian faith – that our one God is a Triune God. There is but One God as Our Lord declared to Moses on Mount Sinai. Yet, in the New Testament we realize the true nature of Our God - He is three persons. For God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are but the same God merely in three different persons. So how do we know that?

The Holy Trinity is first declared in Matthew’s Gospel through the words of Jesus:

"Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:18).

Later when Paul talked to the Corinthians – in our second reading from 2nd Corinthians:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
and the love of God
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you

While the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each God, each has a separate purpose in relation to the salvation of the World. However, all the Divine Persons of the Trinity act in perfect unity, that is they aren’t out doing their own thing, but they work in union with each other, since God is one and has but one will. While all of this is certainly confusing, we can only pray that through the Holy Spirit's inspiration, we can hope to understand the Trinity. In time, through study and discernment, we can understand the Trinity and the nature of Our One God better, but only in Heaven will we truly experience the joy of serving the One God and seeing the mystery of the Holy Trinity face to face
Now, while this is all a mystery we do still have the ability to search into it and understand it better. That is the wonderful part of being Christian – or being Christ-like. We partake of this three personal God and enter into that mystery every time we come to Mass and actually more often than we know. So let’s try to understand this triune nature of God slightly better this time so that we can partake in it even more abundantly.

I intend to use here the explanation of the mystery of the Holy Trinity used by C.S. Lewis in his masterpiece called “Mere Christianity”. Now the name of the book might do it dis-service as it is not indicating that Christianity is simple or as in the dictionary definition of “MERE” as “being nothing more or better than”, but meaning at the basics, at the level of what all Christians believe in, one of the basic denominators of our faith found across all Christian denominations.

Let’s start this study with a simple Geometry lesson. How many here ever studied geometry in school (raise your hands). For those of you who haven’t or have forgotten everything you learned about geometry – this shouldn’t be too hard to follow. Let’s start with the simplest form in geometry - the line, where in one dimension the only figure that can be drawn is a line. Moving up the ladder – so to speak – we come to a place where there are two dimensions and the basic figure that can be drawn is a square or a rectangle, this is where we join two or more lines together to make a figure. Going even further up we come to the 3 dimensional world which we know and experience. Now we can join figures together to form solids – such as 6 squares joined together make a cube, such as we would see in a box or a package. I see that some of you are catching on. In a one dimensional world we can have a line, but many lines in a two dimensional world can make up a figure and many figures in a three dimensional world can make a solid.

In other words, as you advance to more and more complicated dimensions you do not leave the things from the previous dimensions behind, you simply combine them in new ways to make things in the new dimension. You combine them in ways that you could not have thought of if you lived in the simpler dimension.

Now let’s take what we learned from geometry and apply it to our faith. In the Christian account of God, we find a similar principle. The human level, although complicated enough for us to understand is a simple level. One person is one being like one line or one figure, and any two persons are two perhaps similar human beings but definitely different and separate, just as we find that any square in a two dimensional world can exist alongside another square and they remain squares but separate squares.

However, on the Divine level you still find personalities as in the human level and the same as in a three dimensional world you still find squares, but in the Divine level they are combined in new ways that we, who do not live on that level, cannot fathom. In that level, God’s level, so to speak, we find a being who is three persons while remaining one Being, just as the a cube is six squares while remaining a single cube.

Of course this is simply an exercise or example so that we might begin to grasp a piece of the enormity of the mystery of the Triune God. We truly cannot fully conceive of a being like that, as we live in a dimension that has no such thing. However we can gain some sort of faint notion of it as he has given us clues to it.
We see a slight notion of that joining together of persons when we see a marriage that is steeped in faith. We see that the two were separate and God has reached into this dimension and joined them together in a way that they are now more than two, but they are now also just one, somewhat like lines joined together to form a figure. This marriage we see in our Christian faith is a sign of that three person God, such that we can begin to see the glimmer of just what that joining together, that unity of persons is really about.

Remember back at the beginning of this I said that:

While the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each God, each has a separate purpose in relation to the salvation of the World. However, all the Divine Persons of the Trinity act in perfect unity since God is one and has but one will.

Well, one way to experience this is to watch people who kneel down in prayer. Observe them closely and you will see all three persons of God at work here. Those who have knelt down in prayer, do so to get in touch with God. They knelt down in prayer at the bidding of the Spirit who works within us to call us to be in communication with the Father, and then it is the Father to whom this person is praying, either asking for something or giving thanks or being silent before Him as He reveals himself to the one in prayer. But notice whom it is that is standing beside him, helping him talk with the Father. It is Jesus, as He is the bridge to the Father, it is through his sacrifice, it is through his humanity, it is through his relationship with the Father, that we have any access to God the Father at all.

Remember in the scriptures where Jesus, through whom we know these three persons, talks about the Father:

Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you. Until now you have not asked anything in my name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.

and

“If you know me, then you will also know my Father.
From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

and

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own.
The Father who dwells in me is doing his works.
Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me,
or else, believe because of the works themselves.

In our geometry lesson we would say about the previous statement that if you have seen a cube you‘ve also seen the lines that make up the cube.

And of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate he says:

But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.

And of himself:

I came from the Father and have come into the world. Now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.

So it is we have a three personal God, one in being, three in persons who loves us and wishes us to know him. Don’t let the mystery of that statement put you off, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t know anything about him, He gives us hints and clues for us to know Him everywhere in life.

Its Father’s day and I would be remiss if I didn’t say anything about fathers here – so let me go on just a little about fatherhood.

Jesus talked a lot about his Father in heaven and he always used the term Father for his “father”. He didn’t use any other term to describe the relationship with the Father. He didn’t call him “brother” or “mother” or “friend”. He called him Father. In this he brought that relationship to a new height. He relayed to us what relationship we needed to have with our Fathers and what relationship we as fathers need to have with our children. It was a very loving relationship.

Jesus said:

If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you. By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love. "I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.

And

I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another.

It would help if we could remember this on Father’s day, to remember that as the Father loves his Son, so his Son loves us. And all that He and his Father want is for us to love one another.

Your brother in Christ,
Deacon Bruce

Joseph and Christmas

Deacon Bruce Maltzen'sHomily for December 19,2010 4th Sunday in Advent, CYCLE A (readings found here)
Reading I Isaiah 7:10-14
Reading II Romans 1:1-7
Gospel Matthew 1:18-24

When I read this Gospel, I began to wonder about Joseph. Just what did I know about him? What did the scriptures say about him? Other than this paragraph or so in Matthew – we only have the following references to Joseph in the Bible
His lineage traced back to David and to Abraham given in Matthew 1:16 also in Luke Chapter 3 ending in

“Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus who is called the Messiah”

And in Luke 2 where he takes them to Bethlehem

And Joseph too went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David that is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.

And the story of Joseph’s taking Mary and Jesus into Egypt in Matthew 2:13-14

“ When they had departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him." Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed for Egypt

You’d think that they’d give us a little more of a picture, but maybe that’s all they needed to say. And actually that’s quite a lot. It starts by saying he was the direct descendant of David – which fulfilled the messianic prophecy that the Messiah would be called the son of David. But its more than that. Look at what else it says:

Joseph was a righteous man, meaning that he followed the laws of Moses and kept the faith alive in his life. He more than likely had already put into effect in his life the law that Jesus would say later in Matthew what is the greatest of the commandments:

You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Remember also that the penalty for adultery (which Joseph could have exposed Mary to if he had not followed what the Angel had said ) was death by stoning. He rejected that – knowing that doing so would violate the greatest of all commandments, the commandment to reflect God’s love for us by loving each other. Instead he thought he would quietly divorce her, which would free him from this union and would not expose Mary to the penalty of the law.

But God had other plans for Joseph and Mary so He sent his angel to Joseph to tell him just who exactly Mary was carrying in her womb. You can imagine the surprise that Joseph had. Joseph receives a message directly from an Angel who had received it from God himself that Mary was carrying the long awaited Messiah. Joseph could have determined it was all just something he ate before going to bed, but remember that Joseph was a righteous man and feared God. He would not put aside a visit from an Angel so lightly. He believed that God worked among men in mysterious ways.

He knew that the Messiah was awaited, he knew the scriptures about the Messiah, he knew that all of Israel longed for and felt that the coming was upon them, he knew the stories of the angels and how they had many times in Israel’s history intervened in the life of God’s people. Joseph had to weigh all that and make a decision. Remember also on his mind was that by taking Mary into his home he was declaring the child to be his, which would greatly diminish his standing in the eyes of the community as having broken the vows of the betrothal- which was to be chaste before marriage.

My guess is he also didn’t go around telling people that he was visited by an angel. My guess is he did tell Mary because it confirmed what she had probably told him when it became evident that she was pregnant. She undoubtedly told him of what the Angel had told her and of being overcome by the Holy Spirit and, that she would bear a son and his name would be Jesus and he would be the Savior of his people.
Joseph was not without free will. There is no doctrine about his immaculate conception or sinlessness. Yet he responds with obedience, generosity and faith. He listened to this message from God told to him in a dream. He rose above his fear. He rose above his confusion. He did not know how the story was going to end other than knowing now that this child was going to save his people from their sins. The words -- HE DID AS THE ANGEL OF THE LORD COMMANDED HIM should be inspirational to all of us. And there begins the story of Joseph in Christmas – Joseph takes her into his home, which is the last step of the marriage process.

By taking Mary and the to be born child into his home he was adopting Mary’s child and in that adoption gave to him the lineage of David, all falling into God’s will. Both of them listening to God’s messages from the Angels, both of them hearing not only with their ears but also with their hearts and then placing themselves at the will of God and doing what his Holy Spirit led them to do.
Oh that we could gain that ability back again. Oh that we could become so open to God’s word that we could be called RIGHTEOUS. That we would actually stop and think about the ETERNAL ramifications of what we are doing? How many of you men in the congregation could look to your family and your friends and know that if they wrote about you, as they did about Joseph, that they would call you RIGHTEOUS in the best sense of that word; righteous as in thoughtful, faithful, ardent believer.
How many of us would listen to an Angel in our dreams tell us something that made no sense in the everyday world and THEN GO and do it? How many of us would just chalk it up to a bad night’s sleep?

We could you know. We could gain that attitude, that capability to know when God wants us to do something special, but it would take the courage of a Joseph and Mary, the love for God of a Joseph and Mary. Having a heart for good, having a mind focused on God, being steadfast and knowledgeable in our faith.

When will that Joseph time come for you? When will God’s messenger tap you on the shoulder and say, God has called you to a great endeavor, and he asks that you do something out of the ordinary, something that might seem a little different or not quite right for you in your life and to your friends and family, but is absolutely right and magnificently holy in His sight?

What would you do,… NO – I would like to rephrase that:

What WILL you do – as it WILL happen in your life, matter of fact - it may already have.


Your brother in Christ,
Deacon Bruce

On Being of Heroic Character

Deacon Bruce Maltzen's Homily for September 5, 2010 the 23rd SUNDAY in ORDINARY TIME, CYCLE C
(readings found here)
Reading I Wis 9:13-18b
Reading II Phmn 9-10, 12-17
Gospel Lk 14:25-33

(2)If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.
(3) Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, (love) is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
(4) Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing. For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things.
At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.
(5) So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
In speaking of love, Paul is led by spontaneous association to mention faith and hope as well. They are already a well-known triad, three interrelated features of Christian life, more fundamental than any particular charism. The greatest . . . is love: love is operative even within the other members of the triad, so that it has a certain primacy among them. Or, if the perspective is temporal, love will remain, that is "never fails," even when faith has yielded to sight and hope to possession.
We all have read books that have an heroic character. You know the one that does something spectacular and saves the world, or saves a group of people from tragedy or death. We finish reading the story and we sit back and sigh, what a good book. We really wish that we were like that person, or had that experience.


We, though, seem to be stuck in lives that are never going to be heroic. We are weighed down by the responsibilities of feeding our families, doing our jobs, providing the things expected of us to everyone around us. We have given up the hope of being someone who “means something” in this world. Even if we have ‘made it” in our profession and are respected by others in our profession or by our family and friends we still see ourselves as not having completed or achieved those dreams we had.
This is what the writer of the book of Wisdom was talking about.

"For the deliberations of mortals are timid,
and unsure are our plans.
For the corruptible body burdens the soul
and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns.
And scarce do we guess the things on earth,
and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty;
This is also why Christ says,
Which of you wishing to construct a tower
does not first sit down and calculate the cost
to see if there is enough for its completion?
Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down
and decide whether with ten thousand troops
he can successfully oppose another king
advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?"

But Jesus’ intent her is not to stop us from attempting these things or reaching our dreams or being heroic but to look inward and determine what it is that we will be called on to do.
In other words, You cannot come here Sunday after Sunday and sit in the pew and just listen and then go home and not be changed and still expect to be welcomed at the pearly gates. Understand what Jesus is saying here – you MUST do something to rid yourself of the earthly ways, you must begin to take on the character and way of Jesus. You must put His way first over all others. Thus when he says

“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters,
and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.”

He is saying that to single out only a few people to be reserved for your love is too narrow.
Once again, you cannot assume that by coming to Church on Sundays that you’ll gain heaven. In Mark’s Gospel, it says:

"Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" The disciples were amazed at his words.
So Jesus again said to them in reply, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through (the) eye of (a) needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
They were exceedingly astonished and said among themselves, "Then who can be saved?"
Jesus looked at them and said, "For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God."
Peter began to say to him, "We have given up everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come."

Remember that we believe in a God who is active and engaged in our lives. We believe in a God who loves us so much that he will NOT leave us in the position we currently are in.

God EXPECTS us to be heroic characters in HIS story. He expects us to continue to try to follow his son with all we have until we either succeed in doing his will to the fullest or we die in the attempt. He expects each and every one of us to be saints. If you look at your faith or your salvation with less than that, then you are not hearing what’s being said here Sunday after Sunday.

Yes – God is all loving and all merciful but he doesn’t want us to rely on his mercy for our laziness. He is not so loving as to leave us in the hands of the devil and temptation. He loves us so much that he wants each of us to be like His son Jesus.
I suppose the majority of us follow a lifestyle largely dictated by the surrounding culture and our goals are the goals of that culture and, somewhere on the side, we try to fit in some aspects of Christian living into our lives. In our modern society that lifestyle is for the most part competitive, consumerist and materialistic. We would not want our Christianity to get in the way of that. But it is precisely to people like us that Jesus is speaking.

The Gospel teaches us that the essential condition for true discipleship, demanded by Christ, was, and still is, total dedication, total commitment to Him. There can be no such person as a half-Christian. "He that is not with me is against me," He said on another occasion. We cannot be for Christ on Sunday and against Him for the remainder of the week. To be His true disciples, His true followers, we must live our Christian life every day and all day.

Following Christ means making our way to heaven. It is a life-journey. We have a limited time in which to complete this journey. Therefore, we must travel a certain distance each day. This does not mean that we must spend every day only in prayer and meditation. There are other tasks to be done, but we must Christianize these other tasks. Even the members of religious orders who "leave the world," that is, who are set free from family and financial cares of this world by their vows of chastity and poverty, have to busy themselves with other cares like teaching, nursing, tilling the soil perhaps, house-keeping, writing and many such activities. They cannot and do not spend all their day and every day in prayer and meditation. Nor does Christ demand this of them.

Therefore He demands less of this from the ninety-nine percent of His followers who have to take on financial and family cares. It is by fulfilling these worldly duties in a Christian way that we are dedicating ourselves to His service. This is our total commitment to Christ. The married man or woman who is loyal to his or her life-partner and to the family, if there is one, and who provides diligently and honestly for his own and the family's spiritual and temporal welfare, and who always does this with the intention of pleasing God, is following Christ and is moving steadily day by day towards heaven.

Obviously our Lord was just not at all interested in numbers, in keeping the crowds around Him by accommodating His views to theirs. But He is interested, desperately interested, in each human soul before Him, in seeing that person transformed into His genuine disciple, transformed, then, into His likeness by following Him. It was as if our Lord were saying to those there with Him in today’s Gospel,
“You are following me, but you do not know where I am going. Yes, I am on my way to Jerusalem, the Holy City, but not to sit in the seat of power. I go there not to climb the stairs of the palace but the hill of Calvary. I make my way to Jerusalem not to claim anything for myself, but to renounce myself, to renounce myself and give myself to God the Father, to renounce myself so utterly and fully that it can only be accomplished by offering up my life, by pouring out my own life. Do you go with me now? Have you counted the cost?”

In order to express loving someone over another, the Jews generally said they would “love” one and “hate” whoever was second or below. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus said the same truth in a perhaps clearer way, “Whoever loves Father and mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Mt. 10:37). Jesus was saying that there could only be one absolute in our life. Only one love could have primacy. Only one thing could have man’s ultimate obedience and affection. That is God.

This teaching of Jesus is therefore very concrete and leads to an examination of conscience. Do we love Jesus more than everyone else? Do we prefer Him to parents, to spouses, to children, to our own lives? Do we love Him with “all our mind, heart, soul, and strength,” or does something else get our mind, heart, soul, and strength? Jesus cannot be merely a part of our life. He cannot be just an important “ingredient” in our life, occupying an important “niche” in our personal portfolio. He must be God.

What Jesus keeps saying in His word is this: He is offering unimaginable riches and glory, a life that surpasses the highest desires of man, a freedom beyond compare, a joy that never ceases and immortality combined with all the perfections of His divinity. If you want to take up His offer, you must understand that everything has a price. A cheap reward is offered for a mediocre effort, but the reward that He offers can only be attained through a life in spent following His word. Those who reject His word will have continual disappointment.

The wise man is prepared to make sacrifices in order to obtain the good things of life; discipline is required in combination with perseverance. The fool is always complaining of his bad fortune but he does not make any efforts to succeed.

The greatest attachment of man is to his own self, his own opinion and his own image. He adorns his life with material possessions, and with all the evils of his self-love. Unless you are prepared to leave everything behind, you may not enter heaven. You see, He has opened the door but you can’t enter easily, you must die first, therefore you won’t be able to carry any material possessions in, as Fr. Carlson said a couple of weeks ago, he had a professor that told him that he had never seen a U-haul behind a hearse, you will have to get rid of all your personal attachments and loves and your love must be centered in God only.

Jesus has given us father and mother, brothers and sisters, and other people to be our friends, those who will love us and those that we will love. He has given us lots of material things to help us in our journey but nothing or no one of this world should receive more love than our creator. Therefore He asks us to be happy and enjoy the things of creation, to enjoy the love of our family and friends but He also asks us to remember His commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul and with all your strength. We are not to adulterate this love by loving ourself, others or things more than Him; He must be our greatest love.

We are not to despise His cross because that was His throne on earth, where together with His crown of sufferings He endured incomparable pains as the price of OUR salvation. He gives everyone a share of suffering, a little splinter of His cross so that we may be purified through suffering of our pride and disobedience.

So now you know the price that must be paid for Heaven, its been told you time after time from up here, and now you know something about the great rewards that await you. Now you must be wise and persevere in the work he gives us, the adventure he lays before us to be that heroic figure in his story. He is showing us the way, we need to just follow him.


Your brother in Christ,Deacon Bruce