This is was my homily for this weekend, which by a quirk of the liturgical calendar and secular calendar is both Trinity Sunday and Fathers’ Day. One of my parishioners asked that I post this online, so here you go…

Lord…Father…Abba: You are the alpha and the omega. You have eternally been, you are I AM, and you will always be. You merely spoke the words, “Let there be light,” and by your divine word, all of creation came to be. You are the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, yet you are intimately close, among us, and within us. You always loved us with the divine love of the perfect Father. You direct our steps, you beckon us toward you—you who are our fulfillment and our peace.

Having prepared the world for your ultimate revelation of yourself, you sent your divine Son into our nature. He is your eternal Son, to whom you are the Eternal Father. Your love for one another is perfect and complete. You are not the Son, and the Son is not you, though you share the same substance, the same will, the same love. He is your Word—the perfect expression of all that you are, spoken for all eternity, through whom creation knows You, through whom the angels and saints praise You. Your love for one another is so divinely powerful that your love itself is a divine Person in Himself—also sharing in your divine substance, your will, your love. You are the Trinity—One God, one substance, one perfection, in three divine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Your son came to us to speak your love to us in our words, to be and to show your love for us, as best as your perfect love can fit into our little hearts and minds. In response, we killed him in our pride, in our arrogance, in our sin. Yet, you love us enough to allow this, knowing what our response would be. You raised him, as was always your plan—to suffer and to die, and to rise again from the dead. Through our sin, you killed our sin. You freed us from the death of our nature, and granted us your divine life in exchange. You set us captives free, to raise us from death again and again. Your forgiveness is without limit.

When your divine son returned to you, divinity clothed in our mortality, our nature was united into your divine substance. He gives us His immortal body and blood for our divine food—that we might come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity. You sent among us and into us the fire of your love, your Holy Spirit, making us your tabernacles—your dwelling place—on earth. You speak to us in the depths of our hearts, always urging us to seek the good, and shun evil. The Spirit of divine love which superabundantly poured out of you to form all of Creation, to give it life, to make it beautiful, now dwells in each of us, stirring us to love one another as you have always loved us. The divisions of sin and evil are overcome by the Spirit of unity and love.

Holy Father, we pray to you—through the intercession of St. Joseph, the patron saint of Fathers, and protector of the Holy Family, your divine son Incarnate, and the Blessed Virgin Mary—to guard and protect the fathers among us: our fathers, our spiritual fathers, step-fathers, godfathers, grandfathers, foster fathers. Help them to love you more deeply and purely, to love themselves as vessels of your authority, wisdom, and love, to lead us, their families, with courage, with gentleness, and with firmness. Help them to forgive themselves for the mistakes they make and have made. Help us to lift them up, to support them, and to be obedient to them. Help us to forgive them when they make mistakes, and to have the humility to ask them to forgive us when we offend the love and respect due to them as icons of the love and respect due to you. Be with us and console those of us whose fathers are no longer with us, and those whose fathers are estranged from them because of sin, addiction, and separation.

Lord…Father…Abba…Happy Fathers’ Day.