One of them had their first Mass of Thanksgiving last night, and two of them will be celebrating theirs today, and all of them will be preaching their own first Mass.

Ironically, three years ago, on this particular weekend, The Most Holy Trinity, I was celebrating my first Mass of Thanksgiving in my home parish.  

And I probably thought, okay in three years when these same readings come back around, we are on a three year cycle you know, I can just use the same homily again at my new parish and nobody will ever know the difference.

Plus, the Trinity is the hardest doctrine to preach on, the hardest to explain, so if you’ve got something good, why not just stick with it!?

But the problem is, even though the readings don’t change, I change, we all change. As disciples of Jesus, we are always changing, or we should be changing, or else we probably aren't doing something right.

Jesus said at the end of this Gospel, “behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” and He meant it, He is still with us. As we Go and make disciples, teaching them to observe all that He commands us, we actually keep growing as disciples ourselves, we keep learning, we keep changing, that goes for me as well.

I was talking to a couple of seminarians the other night and I said something to the effect of, “if we aren’t always a little uncomfortable in our ministries, we probably aren’t doing something right. God will always push us out of our comfort zone for the sake of His Kingdom.”

That discomfort is change, it is growth that we feel. In this Gospel, we also heard, “When they all saw [Jesus], they worshiped, but they doubted.”

What did they doubt?  Probably if they could really carry out this call, if they could really change their own ways of life, if they could really go on and live this life that Jesus was asking them to live.

But Jesus is with us.  God the Father has adopted us and given us the power to do these things as adopted sons and daughters.

In the first reading we heard of God “speaking from the midst of fire” and it says,

“did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war,
with strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors,
all of which the LORD, your God, did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?”

A lot of this is kind of scary stuff… How could these people see this and not be afraid of God?  

At one level that is okay to be afraid of God. After all, “fear of the Lord” is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit! He is all powerful and He can do these kinds of things, but fear is not a good motivating force. We can fear God because we recognize his great power, but we also recognize that God is all good and all loving. 

That’s why “fear of the Lord” is often rebranded as “wonder and awe.” What is really helpful, actually, is to know that we are loved, is to know that we are loved by God, and that is why we move forward, growing as disciples, changing our lives, to live as He asks. 

This is why we do what we do, we are loved as Sons and Daughters which is exactly what this second reading was talking about.  “For those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a Spirit of adoption, through whom we cry, “Abba, Father!””

“Abba, Father” is like saying, Daddy, God, it’s like a child saying to its father, “Daddy, I love you, help me, I know you love me, help me.”  We have to know this love of God, all the time, we have to be so sure of it that we can do anything, that He is with us.  

If He is asking us to do something, then we should not have any fear, that we should not be afraid of what is happening in the world, or what He is calling us to do in the world, or where He is calling us to go, because He is with us, He is showing us His love, and He is with us “always until the end of the age.”

We need to take great confidence in that.  But where we go and how we go about it will always change, just as we grow from children to teens to young adults to a little bit older adults, our spiritual lives grow too.  

As disciples, Jesus always pushes us a little to the edges of where we want to go, we should never be totally comfortable in our faith, but God is always with us, and that is enough, to know that He loves us and is with us and will be there for us at every moment.

God is leading us like a good father who leads His children. Amen.