Mister Big Stuff!
Homily preached by Monsignor Michael Deering
Sunday, June 12, 2022

My part-time job in High School was working at a grocery store in Chicago.

Ours was a training store so many men would come through to be trained as a  supervisor of the Stock Boys before being assigned to another store in Chicago.

One Supervisor that we had was a short guy named Steve Winkle.

He had a good sense of humor and made working there a fun experience.

Sometimes he would leave notes for us outlining what he wanted done when we came in to work the evening shift.

And many of the notes would be signed MBS.

Well, since those weren’t his initials I asked him why he was signing his notes MBS.

And he looked at me with a straight face and said , that means Mister Big Stuff.

And we both burst out laughing.

Here he was a guy, short in stature, and just a Supervisor, referring to himself as

Mister Big Stuff! (you see, Steve liked Motown music and a popular 70’s song was:

Mister Big Stuff ...who do you think you are? Mister Big Stuff ... you’re never gonna get my love.

It caught on quickly & so all the Stock Boys were calling Steve … Mister Big Stuff.

The Initials that Steve used have stayed with me and they remind me of something very different and profound … something that describes our make-up as a human person.

You see …

each of us is a marvelous, complex unity of 3 things: Mind, Body and Soul.

And so the initials MBS would be the abbreviation of that unity.

                                                                               wisdom        willpower

The Mind would refer to our intellect, our ability to reason and choose.

The Body would refer to our corporal presence, our flesh and bones.

The Soul would refer to the life force that animates us and holds us in existence.

And all of these 3 dimensions come together in each individual Human Being. 

Well, if we acknowledge this mysterious composition of the Human Person,

Then, we should similarly be able to apply that understanding to the nature of God!

And that’s because we bear His image and likeness!

God revealed this to be true in the First Chapter of Genesis.  

So, it makes sense that our 3-fold make-up is sure to be reflected in God, our Creator.

If we see ourselves as a unity of Mind, Body and Soul.

Perhaps we can see God as a unity of Mind, Body and Soul too.

It’s common today to associate                     (the all knowing God)

God the Father with the Mind (the eye of God in triangle on every dollar bill)

God the Son with the Body (Jesus took on our flesh and became man)

God the Holy Spirit with the Soul (God blew into man the breath of life)

God dropped a very subtle hint that He is was more than one dimension ...

when He used plural pronouns to describe himself in the first Book of the Bible.

God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

These plural pronouns point to the truth … that God is more than one person …

 God is a community of Persons … He is One God in Three Divine Persons!

God gave us another hint of his plurality in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs which we proclaimed today in our First Reading ,

“When the Lord established the heavens I was there.

          Then was I beside him as his craftsman.”

God knew that the people would not be able to grasp the mystery of who he was

at that time, so, He patiently waited to reveal Himself later through His Son Jesus.

And even then, Jesus knew that we could only comprehend so much and so He revealed the mystery of God in steps too.

In our Gospel passage today from John, Jesus says to His Disciples,

“I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.”

First, He revealed Himself as the eternally begotten Son of God, and then later, Jesus chose to send His Holy Spirit to guide us in all truth.

Thankfully, we’ve had the Holy Spirit with us for some 2000 years now

and through Him, we continue to appropriate more of the truth of who God is.

This much we know … God is a Triune God …He is one God with 3 Divine Persons.

And these 3 persons are in the most intense love relationship with one another!

God the Father is Love

God the Son is Love

God the Holy Spirit is Love!

Holy Father Emeritus, Pope Benedict XVI, puts it this way, “God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite, and eternal love. He does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of life that is ceaselessly given and communicated.”

What a powerful description: the love of God is ceaselessly given & communicated.

Yes, God is the Lover, Jesus is the Beloved and the Holy Spirit is the Love that flows between them … ceaselessly given and communicated.

So, God in Himself is an intense Love Relationship.

And in His great love … He draws us into that Love Relationship.

And if we freely choose to love and become like Him in love,

then we will merit to share in His Eternal Love …        

a love that is ceaselessly given and communicated

While we’re here on earth, we have access to a foretaste of that love

St. Paul points this out in our Second Reading today from his letter to the Romans when he says, “the love of God has been poured out into our hearts

 through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

The Holy Spirit is Divine Love; He is Love Itself. And the Father has poured out His Holy Spirit into our souls through His Beloved Son Jesus Christ.

Remember, it was through the Paschal Mystery of Jesus’ Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost that we have access to the Love of God!

Do you believe this?       Why would you believe this?

Think for a moment of the times in your life when you desperately wanted someone to believe what you were telling them … that what you were saying was true.

I’ll bet you said something like, “I give you my word.” “It’ll be there by Friday.”

In this way, you were sealing the authenticity of what you said with your word.

Well, God did the same thing 2000 years ago when He sent His Son to redeem us.

He sealed the authenticity of what he said with his Word … literally!

You see, God sent His Son Jesus to us … and Jesus is the Word of God.

So when Jesus came to be with us, God literally gave us His Word!

Recall how the Gospel of John opens, “In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God … and the Word was God.”

Jesus is the Incarnate Word as we reverence in the Angelus saying,

And “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us!”

So, in giving us Jesus, God gave us His Word!

That means that the authenticity of His Self revelation is true and trustworthy.

The fact that God is Trinity is something that we would never know about God just from looking at the Created World. So God revealed it to us by Divine Revelation.

It is only through Divine Revelation that He unveils the mystery of who He is.

In all 3 of our readings today from Holy Scripture,

God reveals that He is a mysterious community of persons.

We reverenced this in our Opening Prayer when we prayed:  Father,

You sent your Word to bring us truth

And your Spirit to make us holy.

Through them we come to know the mystery of your life.

Help us to worship you, one God in three Persons.

How perfect that this feast honoring the Most Holy Trinity falls right between the dates where we honor our Mothers on Mothers Day in mid-May and our Fathers on Fathers Day in mid-June. We humans are family as our God is family.

I know of a non-Catholic Christian man who has attended numerous different Protestant churches. And on visiting the Catholic Church he said that the one big difference is in the way we pray to God.

He noticed that in the Bible churches it’s all about “me and Jesus”,

whereas in the Catholic Church it’s the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit that begins and ends and permeates every prayer!

It’s not just me and Jesus. It’s me and the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit!

Recall the last words that Jesus spoke to His Apostles as He ascended into Heaven. He said, “Go make disciples of all nations,

baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,”

And those are precisely the words that the Priest or Deacon spoke at your Baptism to bring you into God’s family.

It’s through Baptism that we are called to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity,

beginning here on earth, through the eyes of faith and

then continuing after death in God’s eternal light.

As we celebrate the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity,-+

listen closely to the Creed we profess and all the prayers that we pray and recognize how we reverence the mystery of God as Trinity, one God, yet three distinct persons.

God is three in One … He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

And making us in His image and likeness, He made us three in one.

So you see ... we are indeed ...  MBS … we are Mind, Body and Soul.

But then, we are only Creatures … and God is the Creator.

So that means that the other meaning of MBS ... Mister Big Stuff”

applies only to God.

And so, Steve Winkle isn’t Mister Big Stuff … you and I aren’t Mister Big Stuff,

God alone ... is the real Mister Big Stuff!