Last September, some friends of mine got me a birthday gift from Franklin Mint.  Now, I had seen the ads before for Franklin Mint, in magazines and even occasionally in the newspaper.  I knew they made and sold collectables, every thing from glass eggs, and model cars, to replicate coins, and statues of bald eagles.  From the ads, you can tell that they sell very expensive collectables.  What always struck me is that they always tell you the price of what they are trying to sell you, in terms of easy payments.  It’s like they don’t want to tell you the full-price, so they break it down for you in three, or four, or five easy payments, so you don’t feel like you’re spending a fortune on their knick-knacks.  It’s like they think we can’t do the math.  Besides, what’s an easy payment?  How does an easy payment differ from a hard payment?  Anyways, so I get my birthday present in the mail, and three days later I get this phone call, welcoming me to the Franklin Mint family.  I thought they were kidding.  I said, “Whoaaaa, wait a minute, I didn’t buy any thing, I just received a birthday present.”  And the man on the phone said, “It doesn’t matter, now you’re in our family of fine collectables.”  I was in the family?  I couldn’t believe it.  I had been adopted by Franklin Mint and I didn’t even know it.  I’m pretty sure that I’m going to un-adopted by Franklin Mint just as soon as they find out how much I make,  and when they find out that their easy payments are still too expensive for me.  So much for being in the Franklin Mint family.

       Today, on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, we celebrate all of our adoption into God’s House, God’s family.  Jesus came into this world and He changed the entire nature of our relationship with God.  This Feast Day reminds us of the extraordinary nature of what has changed.  Further, it was an incredible gift when Jesus gave us permission to use the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  This was an invitation into an intimacy with God that had never been experienced before, not even by the holiest men and women of the Old Testament.  In ancient times, people would never invoke the name of another person unless they were the closest of friends, a closeness that almost demanded kinship back then.  Today we celebrate that God is inviting us into His family, into His union of love.  St. Paul tells us in our second reading that we have received a Spirit of adoption.  To be adopted into “the house of God,” is to be given great privileges, an inheritance that is beyond our wildest imaginations.  The love, the peace, the grace that God has in store for us as His adopted children, we truly can’t begin to fathom.  But membership in God’s family also has a price, a responsibility.  We are given this incredible intimacy, but now we are expected to live as sons and daughters, as children of God.  Think about that!  We are sons and daughters of God!  Isn’t it time that we started behaving that way?  Far too often, even as His Church, we behave much, much more like rebellious slaves than we do sons and daughters.  Our adoption, and even more, God’s great love and our union with Him, is supposed to change us.  We cannot stay the same.  We can’t keep breaking the commandments when we’re the adoptive sons and daughters of God.  It’s time that all of us behaved better.  It’s time that we became more and more, what our adoptions call us to be!   We need to be people of truth.  We need to be moral people.  We need to “go and make disciples”, as the Gospel says, by bringing everyone into the house of God.  And how is the best way “to make disciples”?  It is to preach God’s love, not with our words, but with our whole lives.  People should be flooding into our church to get what God is offering us this weekend, the chance to be His sons and daughters.  And they’re not.  They’re not.  And that much more our fault, than it is God’s fault.  We’re not making disciples. We’re not evangelizing.  We’re not acting like sons and daughter who belong.

       This Feast Day is about way more than just our doctrine of the Trinity.  Today’s Feast is about our relationship with God.  God works in many different ways, and the Holy Trinity expresses this, but even more than how God works, the Trinity tells us who God is and consequently who we are.  We belong to the House of God, and we have permission to tell others all about it.  There are no easy payments.  But what’s also true is that they are not going to keep sending you catalogues in the mail either.  God’s Kingdom makes so much more sense than Franklin Mint.  It’s a family to which we all should want to belong.

        May God bless us on this great Feast of the Trinity,  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…      AMEN !!!

                                       St. Maria Goretti…                                     Pray for us !!!