Many years ago now, right after this church was built, I brought an old friend of mine over to see it. When he came in and looked at the setup of the place, he said, “This is the perfect arrangement for a Catholic church.” When I asked him why, he said, “More seats in the back than the front.”
I don’t mean to put any heat on anyone in the back today, since I see some pillars of the church sitting back there even as I speak, but here is my question: If you had to place yourself on a map in terms of how close a relationship you have with God, a real feeling as if you have a loving relationship in some way resembling the loving relationships you have with the people around you, that kind of a relationship, how close would you say you are to having that with God? I suspect you’d put yourself a little further away from the center, further to the back than up front.
We have a great tendency, maybe especially as Catholics, to think that our faith isn’t something that involves that kind of a relationship. We think of our faith as something that has a lot of things we are supposed to know, and perhaps we feel a little guilty about not knowing the things we feel we should, and maybe we’re right. Or we think of our faith as a code of conduct, rules and traditions and authorities that we learn to follow to get through life successfully, a way of life we want to pass on to our children somehow even if we’re not sure exactly how that passing of the baton is going to happen. But when it comes to this, feeling as if God is here to have an active relationship with us, something that we participate in, a give and take with someone right next to us, we tend to reserve that for people who have attained some sort of spiritual perfection that isn’t very close to where we think we are. We’re distracted people pulled in so many directions, not feeling very confident that we have time enough or are good enough or know enough about God to have a relationship.
Today is Trinity Sunday, but I hope you don’t think I’m going to explain the Trinity. I am sorry to disappoint you. I can’t tell you how it is that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are really one God, not three. I can’t even tell you why it’s three, and not four or five or two, except that four seems like too many to me after all these years. But I can tell you the reason we have to know that God is three persons undivided, and accept it as one of basics of why we’re here. The idea of the Trinity tells us that God is nothing but a relationship. It says that God is not solitary, that God has an inner life that is all relationship. The old scripture passage that says God is love tells us this, God’s nature at its very core is a relationship among Father and Son and Spirit, and that relationship is love so close that they cannot be separated. Maybe the passage in scripture that comes closest to explaining the Trinity isn’t any of the ones we heard today, but the one where St. Paul describes marriage as two people becoming one, even though they remain two. That is what the Trinity is, a relationship of love like that, that close, not a solitary being who doesn’t need anyone but a God that is so rich in love that we have to see God as multiple persons to picture in our imperfect brains how this works.
But the problem with the Trinity comes when we think of it as just some theoretical picture of what’s going on behind closed doors in God’s private life, This is not God’s private life we are talking about, it is our life. Everything about God is all about relationship, relationship with us, not just inside God, and not a distant relationship where he cares for us from a far-off headquarters.
Look at the way Moses talks to God in that first reading: Yes, he bows down on the ground to God, since God just came down in a cloud and therefore who wouldn’t bow down, but then he talks to God this way: If I find favor with you, Lord, do come along in our company, we are a stiff-necked people, but treat us like your own. “Come along in our company” — something you might say to a friend, someone you wanted to see and talk with and interact with every day, not someone that you keep at a distance except for every now and then. Moses knew how to talk with God — he bowed down in worship, but he also asked and demanded and invited, he argued and pushed back, he got mad, he apologized, he worked hard, he sacrificed himself, he was loyal, but he fought back and sometimes got what he wanted. That sounds like a relationship we can understand, like the relationships we have with the people we love most. That’s the relationship God offers us.
Moses was Moses, you might think. But the evidence is plain that the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit do not reserve this kind of relationship for religious superstars, for the pope, for saints, for the exceptional. If God is all love, God is incapable of holding back that way. So if you’re sitting in the back because you like it there, then by all means stay put. But if it is because you do not feel as if God is someone you can be close to, then you don’t have to do it right now, but move closer — much closer.