Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 14:13 - 21
In the gospels, there are six accounts of Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes.  Mark and Matthew each have two; once for 5000 men and once for 4000.  Luke and John describe one each.  Today’s reading is taken from the fourteenth chapter of Matthew.  The other story is from the sixteenth chapter.  But in the second miracle, the apostles still ask,  “How could we get enough food in this remote place to feed such a crowd?”  Apparently they had short memories.
But if we were to look at each story we would see that the authors bend it a little to serve their own purposes.  And Matthew is no different. 
So a really important question is, “Are you sufficiently amazed at this miracle?  Remember, it was 5000 men, not counting the women and children.  Does that amaze you even more?  Does hearing about this miracle, or one like it, as you’ve heard countless times during the reading of the gospel at Sunday Mass make you feel closer to Christ and more willing to lead a Christian life?”  If you are honest you probably say to yourself, “not really”.  Well, me neither.  Could these miracles have happened?  Of course. God can do anything he wants to.  Did they happen exactly as told in scripture?  Can’t be, unless we are talking about six different feedings, because each story is a little different.  Walter Burgerman, a great preacher and scripture scholar, says that Jesus’ miracles should be approached in the same way as his parables.  What is the miracle telling us?  How are we to respond to what we hear?
So let’s look at the story.  First, Jesus has just heard about the execution of his cousin, John.  The scriptures seem to indicate that Jesus and John were close; in fact, after John baptized Jesus, Jesus began doing the same thing as John -- preaching and baptizing.  And some of John’s followers became followers of Jesus.  And John thought that was a good thing, and Jesus remarked at one time that up until that time there had been no one greater than John.  So Jesus, being fully human, being subject to the same emotions that happen to you and I, naturally withdrew to a secluded place.  Jesus mourned his cousin’s death, and as we learn, he took his ministry north, away from Jerusalem, probably hoping to avoid the same fate.  Nothing wrong with that.  But his period of mourning was interrupted by the crowds who followed him, upon whom he had compassion.
That evening, the apostles ask Jesus to send the crowds away so that they can buy food, and Jesus tells them, “You give them something to eat.”  Not, “I will give them something to eat.” When the apostles pull out their own lunch, they don’t have much, and it sounds a little like they are reluctant to part with the food they have.  But Jesus performs a Eucharistic ceremony, and the resemblance to the Eucharist is deliberate, and gives the blessed food back to the disciples to pass out to the crowd.  They are indeed giving them something to eat.  And after everyone is full, they gather up twelve baskets of leftovers -- one for each apostle.  The apostles have more food than they can consume after giving up their meager lunch at Jesus’ command. 
I wonder if the crowd realized there was a miracle?  I’ve been to events where food was handed out and I didn’t see where it came from.  I did not assume a miracle had taken place, but I didn’t discount it either.  I had no opinion.  But the important witnesses to the miracle were the apostles themselves.  I think they took away several points that would be emphasized in the religion that Jesus founded, that the apostles and their descendants elaborated upon. 
First, the obvious.  If you give something of yours away at the command of Jesus, you will not only see your efforts multiply, but you yourself will be compensated greatly.  Jesus makes that promise over and over again -- the measure with which you measure will be the one which will be used to reward you.  If you even give a cup of water to one of these little ones, you will have your reward.  The miracle of the loaves and fishes is just one of the many, many places God promises your generosity will be rewarded abundantly, if not in this life, then the next.  But it will happen.
The second point is related.  One of the reasons our church is so insistent on the fact that in the Eucharist the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Jesus -- and not just a symbol, is because it is the fulfillment of God’s promise.  We bring the Father bread and wine, things we have taken from the earth and transformed into rather simple food and drink, and he returns to us his son Jesus, to be our food and drink, as Jesus promised, of course.  In the Mass God keeps his promise.  What we offer will be paid back beyond anything we could imagine. 
The third point is a very simple, earthy one.  Jesus doesn’t want anyone to go hungry.  And Jesus expects you and I to give them food.  Do you know of any hungry people?  What are you doing about it?  We can’t feed them all, but we can feed one or two or ten?  How are you carrying out the commandment of Jesus to his Church -- “You give them something to eat!”

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 13:44 - 52

When I was four years old I did not want to be a fireman; I wanted to be a cowboy.  My parents supported my decision and bought me a little hat, a toy pistol and a bandanna, and I would ride my trusty tricycle and shoot at neighborhood dogs.  But as time went on, I left this dream behind.  I had many other vocational goals; there was a time when I thought it would be neat to be a priest -- I was about seven.  I flirted with being an auto mechanic, an air force officer, a policeman, even a farmer, since the uncle that I looked up to the most was a farmer and seemed to enjoy it.  But as I reached the age where I had to get serious about my future, my reasoning evolved more to deciding what I didn’t want.  In high school I didn’t want anything to do with professional sports, engineering, being a salesman -- and in college I gravitated away from a profession involving precision, like chemistry.  But I still had too many choices, too many interests.  I liked English literature; I enjoyed my theology and philosophy courses; I really liked advanced math and physics.  And I envisioned myself being a college professor, with a corduroy coat with elbow patches and a pipe.  By the time I had to decide what to do when I graduated, I had firmly decided on becoming a psychiatrist, because that seemed to be a profession that combined everything in which I was interested.  Until I actually took a psychiatry rotation in my training.  I could go on but I won’t.  The point is, everyone begins with a countless number of choices ,and somewhere along the line you have to give up everything if you want the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field.  

Every choice we make is also a renunciation.  We all want the right things, but we want other things as well.  If I marry one person, I give up being married to others.  If I live in one part of the country I can’t live in others (unless I’m a snowbird, of course, but even then…).  If I choose one career, I have to turn my back on other ways to make a living, to live my life.  And if you examine yourself when you have made a choice, but also a renunciation, you find that there is pain over the loss of what you might have chosen.  It may be a very small twinge, but it might be something more difficult.  When I got married I discovered that putting my wife first meant putting my birth family second.  When we chose to spend our money on educating our children in catholic institutions rather than enjoying the good things our income could have gotten us, there was a little pain mixed in to the choice we thought was right.  When I had to choose my specialty in medicine, I had to turn away from many specialties which I found very interesting.  Pain always accompanies our choices. 

The point is that we are infinite beings in a finite world, in finite bodies.  We want everything but have to settle for some things.  We have a finite life span and we make bucket lists sometimes or we just drift other times until we find that we’ve run out of time and we come up against the fact that we now are seeing our possibilities become fewer and fewer.  A friend of mine counts it as a good day when he can go out in his yard and water the plants.  

Jesus gives us these two parables and challenges us:  What is your pearl of great price!?  What are you willing to give up to gain it?  Because it’s not until you’ve made that decision that you can begin to grow.  

A person who finally commits to loving one person above all others is someone who can begin to truly embrace the fruits of matrimony.  A person who has a call to the religious life or the priesthood can begin to reap the joy in these vocations when he or she gives up everything else.  A person who is called to single life, and there are many, can begin to grow in a special way when he or she accepts that other states in life are not for him or her.  

The same can be said of all our choices.  When you hold back, when you refuse to commit, you can’t move forward.  I had a friend who was torn between medicine and music, and tried to avoid having to choose.  Although she was extremely talented in both areas, she never realized her potential in either.  

One of the messages of Christianity is that this life is a trial run.  We don’t understand how it works, we don’t really know what we are talking about when we talk about the life after death; but we are assured by Jesus Christ himself that there is a state of existence when every tear will be wiped away, when there is no more pain of renunciation with our choices, when we are finally infinite beings in infinity.  So today let us embrace our choices, never looking back, knowing that in the long run the pain of being human will be taken up into the resurrection of Jesus.

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 13:24 - 43

Our country is going through difficult times now. When you are old like me, you have some perspective. I remember the Vietnam war and the turmoil in society that was going on then. People were marching in the streets; radicals were burning things and demanding justice and an end to the war. Soldiers home from the fighting were being spit on; some people were taking refuge in Canada to avoid the draft.

Another time there was turmoil; it was during the days of the Moral Majority. It wasn’t as violent, but it was another attempt at revolution. Jerry Falwell and people like him wanted to purge the country of things not Christian. Laws were being enacted, politicians were pandering, and Pat Robertson had made the 700 Club one of the most popular programs on television -- thinly disguised political commentary under a banner of religion.

And if I had lived even longer, I could probably point to other times in our history when there was huge upheaval and the feeling that maybe this time all the evil would be uprooted and we would finally have a perfect society.

Now I believe that in this country there is such a thing as white privilege. I remember hearing a story about an African American woman who went out on a first date with the man who would eventually become her husband -- also African American. He was a young engineer who made a good living and had a fairly expensive car. She noticed that there was a stuffed bear in the back seat along with a coloring book and a number of tissues on the floor. “You told me you weren’t married!” she exclaimed. “You said you didn’t have a family!” The young man reassured her that he wasn’t married and didn’t have a family. But when he had purchased his car, he kept getting pulled over by the police who wanted to see his proof of ownership -- because they wanted to make sure he hadn’t stolen it. He was told by a friend that if the back seat looked like it had held a kid, it would give off a different perspective and he wouldn’t be bothered so much. And it worked. Now I don’t have to put a teddy bear in the back seat of my car; that’s white privilege.

I think all of us would like to see a world where no one was judged by the color of their skin. Martin Luther King certainly hoped that day would come, and indeed, that’s kind of at the basis of the demonstrations and demands that are making the news. And Black lives matter, and if you say, “All lives matter” the Black Lives Matter people will scream in frustration -- “You are missing the point!” But here’s the thing. Jesus tells us in this parable of the wheat and the weeds that we are missing the point.

It’s a natural tendency to believe that we can tear out the weeds and be left with just the wheat. That’s what Karl Marx believed. And everywhere his theories have been tried, human misery of an unprecedented degree followed. We have the same problem in our church. There are people who believe that if we just get rid of everything that changed after Vatican II, we will see a revitalization of Catholicism. Jesus is reminding us that there is no such thing as a perfect society, because there is no such thing as a perfect person -- Him and his mother excepted ,of course.

A second point of the parable is that.the farmer allows the wheat and weeds to grow together until the harvest. That means both are sharing the soil and the sunlight and rain necessary to grow. The wheat could refuse to grow if it had to share things with the weeds, but that would be very foolish. And like it or not, we all have got to seek reasonable compromise with those with whom we disagree.

The third point Jesus makes is that the one responsible for the weeds is the devil. When we see the kind of things that are going on today – destroying statues, occupying sections of cities, turning our big cities into target ranges – , even if they seem to be about righting ancient wrongs or finally achieving justice, if it doesn’t proceed from compromise, it just means changing one center of power for another. We know the devil, whose very name comes from the word that means “divide” has an interest in causing violence and trouble between races, classes, religions, countries. He wants us to try to rip out the weeds and destroy the wheat in the process.

And there is one more point here. In the old translations the enemy was said to have sewn darnel, not weeds. Darnel was a plant that looked a lot like wheat, and was hard to distinguish until it had matured. I believe Jesus wants us to have enough humility to know that we can’t tell who is a weed and who is a stalk of wheat with any degree of certainty. What we can do, and what the darnel couldn’t, is to become wheat, the best wheat we can be, and pray that those around us will have the grace to do so as well.

When you are old like me, you can remember a time when race relations where much worse than they are today. Though they aren’t perfect now, and probably never will be, real progress comes from following the teachings of Jesus, who in the end told me to follow a very simple rule – to love my neighbor as myself.

Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 13:1 - 23

We’ve just heard one of the two parables where Jesus tells his disciples what the parable means. Most of the time we don’t have a record of whether he explained a parable or not. And I wonder if there’s a reason for that. Now I’ve been fortunate in knowing some very holy people, and I think a sign of holiness is a real sense of humor. Jesus’ life story, as much as we know of it, was recorded by four people who probably were connected to the apostles in some way, but they themselves were probably not the apostles. After all, Matthew, Mark and John do not have an author’s name attached to them, and we think Luke, not an apostle, by the way, wrote Luke and Acts because there is a place in the Acts of the Apostles where Luke joins Paul on his missionary endeavors and begins to write in the first person instead of the third. And since the writers of the gospels were writing theology and believed Jesus was divine as well as human, they did not emphasize his humor. But you can see hints of it. He nicknames Peter “the Rock” and that’s kind of irony because Peter will deny Jesus after insisting that he won’t. He calls James and John “sons of thunder” when they ask whether they should call down fire on a Samaritan village. A great moment is when Jesus brings the little girl back from the dead and when the parents are standing there with their mouths hanging open, he turns to them and says, “give her something to eat!”. And you can find many more hints if you are listening carefully, because holy people have light hearts and a sense of humor -- just read an honest biography of a modern saint.

So with the parable we just heard, and with Jesus’ explanation of what it means, I am not going to try to explain the parable, or the explanation. But I think we can look at this parable as another example of Jesus’ sense of humor. And it may open things up a bit for us.

If you were a first century Palestinian farmer you would be very careful of your seed. You would keep it dry and bug - free until it was time to sew your crop. Before you threw any seed down you would till the soil, and if you could, you would wait until a little rain had fallen. If you lived near a stream, you might haul some buckets of water up and pour them over your small plot. And then having made the ground as welcoming as you could, you would carefully put the seed in the best ground. After that you would be guarding it from animals that ate seeds and the shoots of the plants that you were counting on to provide you with your livelihood -- and seed for the next year. It was a big deal to put down seed, and a real farmer would never dance around tossing handfuls of seed onto rocky ground, into thorn bushes, onto a road. So the picture Jesus paints must have seemed very strange to the apostles. And Jesus goes on to point out the obvious; the seed that fell on the road, the thorn bushes, and the rocky ground didn’t do so well; only that which fell on good soil.

Maybe the apostles have missed the main point. aFter all if the sewer is God, it’s like Jesus says in many other places, God is extravagant; he is always pouring out his blessings on the deserving and undeserving; He makes not distinction about whether you are a sinner or a saint, he’s raining grace upon you, even if he knows you are going to reject it, even if he knows that you would rather spend eternity alone rather than at his extravagant banquet.

So the apostles ask, “Explain this parable!” And Jesus goes on to explain it -- with an explanation that a four year old could understand, and I know because I can remember when I was four years old. And the explanation does nothing except show you and I how we can distance ourselves from the main message. Jesus never forces us, always gives us a way to depersonalize his message to us. Because I can nod with the apostles and agree that there are people who just don’t get what Jesus is talking about, and then there is me, who will bear good fruit someday. Maybe. When I get time. After I get through this next crisis in my life.

Maybe the parable means that if God is extravagant and limitless, and I am created in his image and likeness, and if Jesus tells me that I can only save my life if I lose it, and if he says that the measure with which I measure out will be the measure used to reward me, I better imitate God; imitate Jesus, who gave everything; imitate the saints, who gave all that they could; imitate holy married couples who bring new souls into the world and live to pass on their faith to their children; imitate holy priests who get up in the middle of the night to bring the sacrament to someone who is dying. Because that’s the point.

So listen once again to Jesus, who over and over again tells us that we will only find true happiness if we give ourselves away, if we empty ourselves out, if we sell everything so that we can have the pearl of great price. And the wonderful thing is, Jesus promises to make up for our lack of generosity -- he will give himself away. But you and I have to at least have some skin in the game.

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 11:25 - 30

When I went into my specialty training, my boss was a recognized leader in the field of cancer medicine, which at that time was just beginning to be a thing. He had published numerous papers, was co-author of the bible of Medical Oncology, and had developed the first successful treatment for acute leukemia. He always had something interesting to say, whether it was about medicine or politics or whatever else we were talking about. I think you could say he was a genius. He was wise and learned.

There is nothing wrong with being wise and learned. God gave us brains and the capacity to explore the universe, and I think he expects us to do so. So why does Jesus praise the Father for hiding things from the wise and learned and revealing them to little children?

I’ve known a lot of people who are wise and learned. Unfortunately, they are like the rest of us; some are pretty stuck-up, as we used to say; they think they know everything. When you think you know everything, you cease being able to learn anything new. But people like that also tend to think they don’t need other people. I don’t mean that they think they don’t need other people to get along in the world -- they need medical care, they need policemen, they need grocery store workers -- but they need other people in the sense that they fulfill needs, not in the sense that they are equals, who deserve respect because they are children of God; not because they recognize that without true friends life isn’t what it could be. Being wise and learned for them has covered over the child that is in all of us.

I think Jesus is telling us that we won’t learn the secrets of life, we won’t appreciate the truths of his revelation, until we allow that child to flourish. There are a lot of things about little children that are not particularly inviting; they are smelly and messy and noisy and demand a lot of attention. They also ask some pretty strange questions. My son used to ask me over and over again which animal would win if a tyrannosaurus fought with a shark. I would tell him how improbable that would be, but it didn’t help. If I said I didn’t know, he would persist until finally I would choose a side. Then he would argue against my position. This type of inquiry went on a lot. But there are wonderful things about children that we all can see and perhaps long for in ourselves.

They trust. They have no doubt that they will be fed and sheltered and clothed and cared for. They know that they are loved unconditionally, and it’s ok to let out your frustrations on Mom or Dad, they won’t stop loving you. We adults lose this wonderful trust -- perhaps because we have been betrayed too often, but mostly because we have become wise and learned, and depend on our own strength to see us through.

Children live in the present. If you’ve ever gone on a walk with a three year old, you know how their attention is on the present moment -- they see a dog, they want to pet him; they see a flower, they want to smell it. It’s a wonderful thing to live in the present. But we wise and learned forget this; we live with a foot in the past, where we remember moments of pain or pleasure; and a foot in the future where we think about where we are going and what we will have when we arrive there.

Children also forgive. I have seen so often two kids having a terrible fight and a half-hour later they are playing happily together. And I have been forgiven many times by my own children for things I said in anger or for not giving them the attention they needed at a particular moment, or choosing work over playing with them. And we wise and learned often fail to forgive, at least with the degree that a child forgives.

And why is all this important? I think Jesus gives us a hint in this gospel today. He says, “come to me all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” He says, “take my yoke upon you … and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light”. Jesus is saying something that’s very hard for the wise and learned to grasp -- true happiness, real joy, depends on surrendering everything to Jesus, to trust him completely, to quit trying to carry our burdens alone, and take him up on his offer to help us bear our burdens, to yoke ourselves to him. And we who are wise and learned have a hard time in really trusting Jesus, in really living in the present, which is the only place we can find God; and really forgiving, which frees us up to see our neighbor through Jesus’ eyes, Jesus who told us that we are to forgive seventy times seven; Jesus who told the story of the father who shows us what true forgiveness is really like.

So is it wrong to be wise and learned? Not at all. What is wrong is to lose the child in us. And that brings us back to my boss in my fellowship; he never did. He died a few years ago. The last time I saw him he was in his early nineties, and had undergone surgery for an aneurism. He had to take antibiotics and was hooked up to an intravenous pump. After my introduction he gave a brilliant lecture about his current field of research, and you could see that he had never lost his childlike fascination with the world of medicine; and when you compared notes afterward and reminisced about the good old days, you might have noted that he only spoke good things about the people in his life, even those who had hurt him. And Jesus is telling us that little children have no problem reaching out their hands to someone that can help them, and that’s what he wants from us -- just a hand that he can take to hold us up and help us get where he wants us to go.

Corpus Christi 2020

John 6:51 - 59

There are many pleasures in life -- a day at the beach, a game of golf with friends, an evening in front of the fireplace on a cold winter’s day, and of course being with the person you pledged to spend your life with -- we can all think of our favorite things. But except for a few psychologically disturbed individuals, a pleasure that is common to every human being is the act eating. Some people make a big thing about it, spending hours in the kitchen and then having a long drawn out supper savoring the food and wine. Some people on the other hand, are mostly interested in eating something to turn off the hunger pangs. But in either extreme, there is pleasure. The pleasure of eating can still be seen in people who have dementia.

We know why God associates pleasure with human activities; it’s because he wants to have us pursue those actions. And the pleasure of eating and drinking are directly connected to the quality of our lives. You and I Long for those moments in life when we can lean back and say, “It doesn’t get any better than this!” Without exception, we say that when we feel that we are physically and emotionally fulfilled.

Today we hear one of the most controversial passages in the New Testament, Jesus not only tells us that we are to eat his flesh and drink his blood, but if we don’t we can’t have eternal life. And this is from the Gospel of John; the other three Gospels describe the last supper when Jesus held up bread and said that it was his body and they were to eat it, and the wine in the cup was his blood and they were to drink it. Very early in Christianity many fathers of the Church took Jesus at his word, and the doctrine of the real presence began to develop. Roman Catholics along with Eastern Orthodox Christians pretty much stick to that same idea -- the real presence of Jesus in what appears to be bread and wine. Most protestant denominations don’t go that far, but still see something special in their celebrations of the Eucharist. Many Christians don’t believe the bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but many Catholics don’t either, if you believe the polls. And many Catholics who claim to believe this don’t act as if they do. I think most of us could get behind the idea that Jesus is really present in the Eucharist, but why does he insist that we eat his flesh (or as the Greek text says, “Gnaw on his flesh”) and drink his blood? Some of our Protestant brothers say that what Jesus means is that we are to become one with him, and consuming the sacrament, which for them is only a symbol, is a way of acting out our intention to do so. I think we could agree with that. But I think the real significance of eating His flesh and drinking his blood, and we do both whenever we partake of the Eucharist, even if what we eat appears to be bread, or if what we drink appears to be wine) is that Jesus wants us to remember that He is interested in all of us, not just our souls. His flesh and blood become our flesh and blood, or as Saint Augustine put it, in the case of the Eucharist we become what we eat. And ultimately the miracle of the Eucharist is not beyond the powers of the one through whom all things were made.

If you look at any human being, rich, poor, sick, healthy, male, female, and I could go on, you find that we all have a spiritual hunger. Spiritual goes beyond our souls, and maybe we need a new word. But the point is, as the Buddha recognized 600 years before Christ, human beings are hurting because we are all bundles of desire that never gets totally satisfied. We desire material things, we desire comfort, we desire our youth when we are old a frail; we desire love when we are lonely -- and most of the rest of our time as well. We want more respect than we get; and even if we get exactly what we think we want, before the dust settles we want something else. We seek power, profit, pleasure and prestige, and it seems as though we can never get enough. And that makes us miserable. The Buddha's solution was to rid yourself of all desire, even the desire to continue to exist, and when you reached that state, you would dissolve into nothingness and finally escape from the pain of existing. But if you died with even a little desire left, you would soon be back existing, maybe as a bug or a king, it didn't matter; you would go through the same process over and over again, possibly forever.. The Buddha admitted that very few people could hope to achieve this and initially he did not think women could free themselves from desire at all -- they would have to wait until they reincarnated as a man.

I think the Eucharist is Jesus’ answer to that human dilemma. If he gives us himself to become part of our bodies, souls and minds, to literally become part of us, he is offering us participation in God himself and all desires are filled. And that is not dissolving into nothingness, that is eternal life. You may not feel anything when you partake of the Eucharist, but put your faith in the promise of Jesus: you have eaten his flesh and drunk his blood, and you have eternal life.

Trinity Sunday 2020

John 3:16 - 18
Today we celebrate the Trinity.  It’s a teaching common to most Christian bodies.  The Council of Constantinople codified the belief near the end of the fourth century, although we see evidence that eve at the end of the first century christian authors were writing about it.  And formulas like that of Paul, “The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you” suggest that New Testament writers had some idea of the Trinity.  And yet we Christians insist that God is One.  And every time Trinity Sunday rolls around preachers have a choice to make:  Shall I try to explain the Trinity once again?  Or should I ignore the whole thing and hope no one notices?  And what’s the big deal anyway?  After all, I can go all week long without thinking of the Trinity. 
But we should think about the Trinity.  After all, human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and our faith tells us that God is somehow three persons in one God.  Thomas Aquinas made a wonderful argument about how if God is infinite, all powerful, all wise, all loving, etc, God has to be a Trinity.  But not everybody wants to hear about speculative theology on Trinity Sunday.  Richard Rohr, the Franciscan author and mystic, suggested we contemplate the Trinity by starting with the Three and seeing how they are One.  If we do that, we get an insight into how we humans should look.
We will see that God is dynamic. Saint Hilary invented the idea of perichoresis -- that the Trinity is kind of like a dance, where the three persons move in and out and around each other, but always moving.  Nothing contains God, certainly not our minds.  And God is fluid, constantly spilling over, constantly sweeping everything into himself.  Why does this matter?  Because we humans have a tendency to be rigid, to become fixed in our ways, to limit our thinking.  And the more we do this, the further we are from that God-image.
We will see that God is diverse; if God is three persons, each person in his own way embodies those attributes of God, truth, beauty, goodness, one-ness.  When we witness the racial tension in our society, it is because we fear what is different.  That’s not my fault or yours; it’s evolution; it took millions of years to get that way.  But if God can comfortably be diverse and one at the same time, that is how we humans should look as well.
We see that God is a commune.  The persons of the Trinity never act alone.  Another old theological idea is summed up in the latin word circumincession -- that means that each person contains the other two.  Jesus said “I am in the Father and the Father is in me”.  When Jesus is baptized, the Father speaks from the heavens and the Spirit descends like a dove.  When Jesus promised he would be with us to the end of the world he also sent the Holy Spirit.  Why is this important?  Because we humans like to go it alone, if we can do something without help, we do.  And yet we know deep in our hearts how much better things can be when we work together.  Even though the second person of the Trinity uniquely becomes human, suffers, dies, and rises again, the Father and the Spirit are part of this mystery as well. 
We see that God is hospitable.  In the beginning God created humans and probably everything else because being alone is not God-like.  And he fed the Israelitese in the desert; and Jesus clearly enjoyed company; and the Holy Spirit is all about gathering in the nations through the Church Jesus established.  Hospitality is an attribute of God and we should reflect that.
Finally, we see that God is self-sacrificing love.  Theologians talk about the Father begetting the Son -- The Father pours himself out holding back nothing in that begetting.  The Son, the begotten one, pours himself out in turn; in response to the Father’s love.  Saint John says everything was created through him.  And of course we see that self-emptying love displayed most graphically in the crucifixion.  And the Father and Son breathe forth the Holy Spirit, again, holding nothing back, emptying themselves out.  And the Spirit is emptying himself out in the form of gifts given to his church and indeed to all mankind.  And we are to look like that, we are to embody self-sacrificing love. 
The Gospel passage we hear today may be the most famous one; even if you never open a bible you probably know about John 3:16.  And we confront that troublesome word, “believe”.  For us it means that we agree with some statement of fact; but in the original languages, in biblical Hebrew and first century Greek, it meant much more.  It had overtones of complete trust, of acting on the word of someone else, of allowing someone else to take over your thinking.  And when we believe in the Son the result should be that the image and likeness of God in you and I should be more apparent to everyone.  And God is Trinity, God is dynamic, diverse, communal, hospitable, and self sacrificing love.