15 June 2025

15 June 2025 - Trinity Sunday

Transcript

This weekend is Trinity Sunday. I’m going to be gone for a week of vacation, and the weekend will be preached by our summer mission appeal priest who has been advertised in the bulletin.

Trinity Sunday is an important Sunday, and is a very hard topic to preach on. Mainly because the idea of the Trinity is one of the deepest mysteries of our faith. So my comments for this weekend’s podcast are not going to be on Trinity Sunday.

Instead, I want to focus on the reading from Tuesday’s Mass from the Gospel of Matthew.

Reading:  

Matthew 5:13-16

Write:  

Jesus said to his disciples:
 "You are the salt of the earth.
 But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?
 It is no longer good for anything
 but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
 You are the light of the world.
 A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.
 Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket;
 it is set on a lampstand,
 where it gives light to all in the house.
 Just so, your light must shine before others,
 that they may see your good deeds
 and glorify your heavenly Father."

Reflect:   

Less than one hundred and fifty years before the birth of Christ, there was the third Punic War between Rome and Carthage in North Africa. Rome won. But when they destroyed Carthage, they poured salt over the entire city so that nothing would grow there. The salt was trampled underfoot.

Apply:   

Now, Jesus makes the comment in the gospel that you throw out salt that loses its taste. But I want to take another look at that from a different perspective. And this is about our prayer. Salt on the ground inhibits growth. Prayer inhibits evil. Let that sink in. The salt of our prayers that comes from the good of our spiritual lives is not the same thing as the salt that is worthless that Jesus was talking about. No. We need to lay the salt of a good spiritual prayer life on our world today.

It does not take much looking at the world around us to see the kinds of problems of evil that are in the world. I am not taking any political side here. Cases can be made on either side of almost any issue. But we, as a people of prayer, need to be covering our country – our world – with prayer asking that evil be suppressed. Period.

It takes a lot of work to purify the ground that has been salted for the inhibition of growth. If we as God’s people would cover the world in prayer, and if our prayer were thick enough, we would see evil losing its hold on other people, on world situations, and we would see holiness come back into the lives of God’s people – and the whole world!

Secondly, Jesus calls us the light of the world and that our light must shine before the world. How much light is being generated that dispels the darkness? Are we more heat than light?

These two metaphors that Jesus uses – salt and light – have many implications. Are we doing enough? Or are we standing on the sidelines, wringing our hands because we see the “stuff” of the world that is tearing itself apart with the polarization of ideas that, to my way of thinking, shows the influence of evil on both sides.

I believe it is up to us, as God’s people, to stand in the gap and be salt and light, and to cover the world in the salt of prayer that is the only way to effectively inhibit evil. And to shine the light of truth where darkness reigns.

My vacation this time is not going to be a fishing trip. I have never visited Mount Rushmore. So I’m going to take a drive up through South Dakota. See you next weekend.

+++++