Trinity And Family Series

Trinity Sunday 2024

The words of Moses as recorded in Deuteronomy echo loudly today: “Therefore you shall keep [the Lord’s] statutes and his commandments, which I command you this day, that it may go well with you, and with your children after you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which the LORD your God gives you for ever." God’s plan for humans has been obvious from the start: God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. His first command given in Genesis 1 completed the scheme: ““Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it. . .” God is a family, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and God is fruitful. His love is so great it overflows into all of creation.

So we are called to be the family on earth, ruling, stewarding creation. And the first way we do that is by covenanting marriage, one man to one woman, and procreating our own families, training them to be husbands and wives and parents in their turn. This, in God’s time, fills the earth, a filling and fulfillment that God manages. We know the earth is filled when God blows the final whistle (or trumpet) and commences the last act in creation–the general resurrection from the dead. That will be the pleroma, to use St. Paul’s word. And a new earth will be filled primarily with the Spirit of the Lord, in a resurrected race of justified, glorified humans.

Human beings have for several generations tried to get in the way of God’s plan, or maybe “improve upon it.” We just finished the annual memorial of the European holocaust, when madmen tried to perfect human nature by eliminating whole classes, whole ethnicities, especially the Jews. Evil, pure evil. It shows up again today and gave us the sorry spectacle of mass murder in October, 2023, in the Holy Land.

And, yes, in the name of stewardship of the earth, we have seen recently the scientifically dubious claim that human activity is overheating the earth. So the environmentally critical compound CO2 is claimed to be a pollutant, injurious to the whole world, even though in earth’s history there is no real evidence for that statement. And since humans exhale that compound with every breath, we are encouraged to stop having children. Of course the one-child policy has led to China’s current troubles, and our own low fertility rate and the push for children to be “regendered” figures to make us follow in their footsteps.

Going in entirely the other direction, couples, including so-called “same-sex” couples, now have access to in-vitro fertilization and implantation, which involves a whole host of evils, both grave and less serious, starting out with the unnatural production of sperm, and culminating in the destruction of tiny human beings, or the corruption of yet another human through surrogacy.

So part of our mission to go out to all the world and turn them toward Christ and the Church must begin with our own families. Those of you who are young–look and find a spouse-to-be, engage with the Church’s marriage preparation and wed and have lots of children. If you already have a family, teach them that the world’s ways are not God’s, and help them in forming their own families. If you are past the child-rearing stage, make certain your grandchildren understand their own responsibilities, and the joys that come with actively participating in God’s plan for humanity, so that it will go well with them, and God may prolong their days toward a happy eternity.