Homily, June 15, 2025
From The Pastor
Love is a mystery. Love is the most obvious, necessary reality that defines our human nature. It is the darnedest thing. We cannot live without it, we strive and long for it all our lives, and when we experience it, we cannot understand it or easily put it into words. The reason love is so difficult to define is because love is an essence. The essence of a thing or person reveals its truth. Essence is the intrinsic nature and indispensable quality of a thing or a person which defines its character. To lose that quality or nature, the thing or person would cease to be what it is.
If human love is a mystery, then Divine love is mystery in its fullness. Today’s feast of the Holy Trinity is as obvious as it is difficult. When a person is in love it is obvious, if only to the people who are in love. God is the source and origin of all love. God is the essence from which all love flows. Love is truth, God is love, Jesus Christ is God. For those with eyes of faith this is the most obvious, and at the same time, the most indescribable reality.
Consider the Trinity. One reason the Holy Trinity is so difficult to understand is because we perceive it is outside of and beyond ourselves. To understand the Trinity is to accept and experience its reality from within the self. The Trinity is a perfect unity of love that can never be divided. God is expressed and experienced in three ways of being. We express God the Father as the Creator and Giver of all things. We define, understand, and profess the Son to be the Redeemer of all that the Father created. We profess the Holy Spirit to be the unity of love between the Father and the Son, undivided and indivisible. Any one of the Three cannot be what they are without the other two. The Holy Spirit is the union of the Divine Essence in us that makes us holy by nature, despite the human imperfections and woundedness we all suffer.
When Jesus became incarnate, he did not leave or become separated from the Father or the Spirit. Through the Incarnation, God enters time in the person of the Lord Jesus to draw humanity and all creation into union with God through the work of redemption. Too often we perceive Jesus as separated from the Trinity when he took on our human flesh. Jesus entered our humanity inviting us to enter into his Divinity. To the degree that we participate in the life of the Son, we enter more fully into union with the Father as his sons and daughters. Our participation with Christ by imitating the life of Jesus is the work and the evidence of the Holy Spirit. The more we become like the Son by our cooperation with the Holy Spirit, the more fully we are united to the life of the Father. A mystery for sure, but at the same time obvious and felt in the rhythms of our activity of love with and for others.
Jesus uses the image of the vine and the branches. He is the Vine, we are the branches, the Father is the Vine grower. I have never personally done it, but you know the reality of grafting one branch onto another. The two pieces are stemmed together and grow to become a new creation. This is most evident with fruit trees that have been grafted with other types of fruit trees to produce a new type of fruit. How did we get so many kinds of apples, oranges, halos, tangerines? It is the fruit of successful grafting.
This is what happens in the life of the Holy Trinity. The life of the Father is poured into the life of the Son. Through faith and Baptism, we are grafted into Christ and become one with him. The more fully we embrace and participate in the love and example of Jesus, the more fully we will perceive the action and workings of the Holy Spirit in ourselves. To that degree, the mystery of the Trinity is more fully realized, often unaware, in the mystery of yourself as you cooperate with the Holy Spirit. Simple in the reality and truth of love yet hidden and made mysterious due to the woundedness of sin that builds walls of mistrust, a sense of separation from God, and a fear of failure before God that creates an expectation of punishment.
This is the lie of sin because there is no punishment in God. As an essence, God cannot be divided. God cannot be the fullness of love yet seek to punish those who bear the weight of our human sinful nature. That we have a sinful nature cannot be denied. However, our truer and original nature is one with God who created us out of love, and for love. Is this why the deepest longing and endless effort of every human being is to seek love, acceptance, belonging, and a deep sense of oneness with? I deeply believe so.
You belong to God, and God belongs to you in Christ through the Holy Spirit. It takes deep faith and bold courage to accept the unlimited, unconditional, love of God. That is the truth of our faith in the undivided love of the Trinity.
Father John Esper
Recent Sermons
Homily, March 1, 2026
March 01, 2026
Homily, February 22, 2026
February 23, 2026
Homily , February 15, 2026
February 15, 2026