Homilies for Trinity Sunday

Feast of the Most Holy Trinity – 1965 – St. Bartholomew’s

Today we celebrate a feast in honor of the most Blessed Trinity. Other days we honor the Son and his work or the gift of the Spirit, but today’s feast is our thanks and praise for the total work of our salvation, initiated by the Father, carried through by his Son made man, and communicated in their Spirit in our hearts.

We all have, I think, a certain tendency to ignore the Trinity in our everyday Christian experience.

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Six Pentecost Homilies

Pentecost Sunday–May 29, 1977–CNR

The whole movement of the liturgical year reaches its climax in the feast of Pentecost that we are celebrating today. Christmas we celebrate not as an end in itself, but as the beginning of God’s self-revelation and self-gift. The dimensions of that revelation are unfolded in the days of the year as we hear of the words and deeds of Jesus in which God again and again speaks to us and touches our hearts and bodies and communities and lifts them up healed. The word and deed of God combine in the death and resurrection of Christ, when a man’s self-gift in death is God’s own demonstration of his love and when God’s gift of life overpowers for us all that last great enemy, death itself. And all of this great good story is completed when the Spirit who had driven Jesus to his ministry and raised up his crucified body becomes the gift we–Christ’s brothers and sisters–now share with him. It is the moment for which Jesus lived and died and was raised, and it is the moment in which we ourselves are given a foretaste of the life for which God called us into being and blessed us with his own Son.

It is not easy to speak about this Holy Spirit of our God.

West Nyack Fire Siren, 1943-1945

From October 1943 to September 1945, my father, Joseph B. Komonchak, edited a monthly newsletter for members of the West Nyack Fire Department and other citizens of the hamlet who were serving in the military to keep them informed about doings in the Fire Department and elsewhere in West Nyack and indeed in Rockland County, N.Y. In addition to sending such news out to the men and women in the service, my father also included letters received back from them. The issues of the newsletter , the “West Nyack Fire Siren,” provide a series of snapshots of local history during the Second World War and may be one of the few places where letters from the front can be found. I have copied and scanned the issues, which may be consulted below.

Nanuet Fire Siren 1953-1954

During the last year of the Korean War (1953-1954), my father, Joseph B. Komonchak, edited a newsletter for members of the Nanuet Fire Department and other citizens of the hamlet who were serving in the military to keep them informed about doings in the Fire Department and elsewhere in Nanuet and indeed in Rockland County, N.Y. I have copied and scanned the issues of the newsletter, which provide a series of snapshots of local history in the early 1950’s. Most of them are easily legible, but some issues were mimeographed on colored paper and are more difficult to read.

Presence

Seventh Sunday in Eastertide – May 16, 2010 – St. John’s, Goshen

The seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel is entirely devoted to what is called the “high-priestly prayer of Christ.” Although presented as the great prayer that Jesus prayed at the Last Supper, it reads just as much as the prayer that he, the great priest of the heavenly liturgy, continues to pray for his disciples, that is, for us and for all others who gather in his name. It is a fitting reading for this Sunday which falls between Christ’s departure from this earth in his Ascension and the climax of the Easter Season in next Sunday’s Pentecost liturgy when he sends his Spirit to empower and inspire the disciples for their mission in the world.

The excerpt from this prayer that we have heard should be of immense comfort to us, and of challenge as well.

What Jesus is praying

SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER – MAY 24, 1998 – BLESSED SACRAMENT

The Fourth Gospel ends its account of the ministry of Jesus with a lengthy discourse that covers no fewer than four chapters. It begins with his washing of the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper and ends with the long prayer whose final verses we have heard this morning. Although it is often called his “farewell discourse,” it really is more about his continued presence with his disciples after his death and resurrection, particularly his presence through the Holy Spirit whom he will send to them, in the lovely words of Cardinal Newman, not to supply for his absence but to assure his presence. The Spirit is the living and powerful presence of the truth and grace of Christ.

With the words we have heard this morning, the prayer of Jesus turns to us.