For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. Romans 8:14-17

When I was a parish priest, I was always at a loss on Trinity Sunday. I just could not write an interesting sermon (I am making an assumption here that at least some of my sermons were interesting). The miserable words I was able to put on paper looked dreadfully boring and uninspired, unlike the Blessed Trinity. Perhaps my sermons were an attempt to rationalize something that cannot be rationalized. I have heard many sermons about the Trinity. I realized that I am not alone. The preachers who are generally good preachers find it hard to deliver a good sermon about the Trinity. I have read many books about the rational treatise of this subject. My personal favorite is the one by Boethius. I don’t understand most of it and yet, it makes lot of sense. It sounds like a paradox but we are talking about something that is essentially paradoxical.

Maybe I should avoid writing something about the Trinity for this post. Unfortunately, this is an impossible task. The presence of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is the heart of what we do. I can’t talk about God without mentioning Jesus and I cannot talk intelligibly about Jesus without the Holy Spirit. If we take the blessed Trinity away from our ministry, then we are just an older couple hanging out with children and teens in the streets. We would be very strange to the children and the people around. Yet, we are in the streets everyday and people seemed to understand why we are there. Most importantly, the children and teens do too. It is strange that no one ever asks the question how or why they understand. Perhaps, the most possible answer would be the workings of the Holy Spirit.

Our children, most likely, have never heard of the Nicene Creed. If they did, they wouldn’t be interested in discussing it. However, our children know that Jesus helps them understand the God the Father. They also sense in their hearts that they are God’s children. Whenever they said this, I used to be a little skeptical. I thought that they were just repeating doctrines and teachings they heard in the streets. I made the mistake of not taking them too seriously when they said that God is their Father. However, I have changed now. How and why I have changed? Well again, it is the Holy Spirit. I realized that I am not the Holy Spirit and therefore, the Truth does not flow out of me. It is possible for others to receive and know it apart from me. I also realized that the Holy Spirit is present in the hearts and minds of the children. When God poured out His Spirit, He generously gave Himself to the world and not just to a select few. His Spirit has been with these children and teens since the day they were born. The children talk about God being their Father not as a theory but a reality. Most of them have never had a religious upbringing. Yet, they know in their hearts that God is the only true Father that they have. This is not a metaphor. We have been helping a lot of our teens get their documents recently and almost all of them do not know the names of their fathers. They have no notion what their fathers look like. There are about two or three in the streets that have fathers. Unfortunately, they are not living at home because of their fathers.

Our children are convinced that God never abandoned them. This is quite amazing. They live on the streets of a commercial district. They see people flaunting their wealth all the time. They see people walking with their families. They are completely aware of their lack. Nevertheless, it never occurred to them that God has abandoned them. Some might argue that this is mere blind faith. It could be that or it could be the Truth. A kind of Truth that goes beyond the superficial presentation of reality. Something that only could be revealed by the Holy Spirit. Our children and teens don’t attend or belong to any church. They don’t feel the necessity to adhere to any religious belief. They live their lives through their intuition. They intuitively know that God has never abandoned them because He always sends people to remind them that He is with them.

We have been helping Wellington this week with his documents. In reality, what he needs is not complicated. He could do it himself. However, he has never done anything of this sort on his own before. He is 18 and he has been involved in crime in the past and has been to juvenile detention centers several times. He is street wise and has gained the respect of the other teens. However, now he wants to leave all these things behind. He wants something better but he doesn’t know how to go about it. He came up to us and asked our help. He needed a parent figure to help him. Even though our interactions have always been superficial despite knowing him for almost five years, somehow he sensed that we would walk with him.

After we got his documents, as we walked back together to where the children were staying, Wellington opened up about his family. He said that he was a squatter in an abandoned building with his mother. It was actually the building that collapsed. I wrote about this in my last post. Fortunately, he wasn’t there when it happened. We were surprised to hear that he was with his mother. However, he quickly added that she never cared for him. She was a crack addict and never had time for anything else but crack. He realized this at a very young age. He decided that he needed to look elsewhere for a family. This is why he stayed in the streets. He did not sound bitter or angry when he said this. It was just the way life turned out for him. However, he doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his mother. He wants to be free from everything that is detrimental to his life. However, he is not going to be able to do it alone. He needs a family. He needs the Holy Trinity. He did not say this. He does not have the vocabulary but we do. Maybe this is why the Holy Spirit brought us to the streets; to help them discover a new vocabulary. The word, “Trinity”, was a new word born from the spiritual encounters of the Christian community. Unfortunately, they spent many years caught in arguments dealing with the precise and technical expressions of it and something was lost. Something lively and real was reduced to something dry and irrelevant. The “Trinity” is not a theory or an argument. The Trinity is an expression of God’s love. It is the way we understand God is Love.

If I were to write a sermon about the blessed Trinity today for our children and teens, it would go something like this; The Holy Trinity brought us together. We wouldn’t be in the streets if it wasn’t for Jesus. We wouldn’t be in the streets if the Holy Spirit hadn’t spoken to us. The streets wouldn’t be special if the Father hadn’t brought all of us together. It would be impossible for us to become a loving and caring family in the streets if we did not first encounter the love of the Father through Jesus made alive in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. I noticed that everything negative has been made positive through the workings of the Blessed Trinity. Perhaps, this is the best way to think about the Holy Trinity. The Blessed Trinity takes each ‘No’ to abundant life and transforms it into a ‘Yes’. I think that our children would understand this sermon. Thankfully, I don’t have to preach to them. We just live it every time the Holy Spirit brings us together.