On the church calendar, today -- the first Sunday after Pentecost -- is traditionally called “Trinity Sunday.” It is the day on which we remember and celebrate the doctrine of the trinity – the Christian belief that God has revealed Godself as three in one: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Trinity Sunday has often been called a “preacher’s nightmare” because those of us vested with the responsibility of writing the sermon must find a way to talk about this abstract and intellectually difficult concept without using so much theological jargon that you all fall asleep.

So before I go any further, let me assure you that I am not going to treat the next fifteen minutes as a kind of mini-Systematic Theology class. But I would like to share with you how this three- dimensional view of God has been a struggle throughout the history of the Christian Church to try to describe who God is, what God does, and how God works in the world.

First, it is important to understand that the word trinity is not a biblical term; it is merely descriptive, coming from the Latin tri-unitos, meaning three in the unity of one. But although the word trinity cannot be found in the Bible, the concept is biblical.

In this morning’s lesson from Genesis, we hear about “the wind of God which swept across the land” – in other words, the Holy Spirit. And in our Gospel lesson from Matthew, known as the Great Commission, Jesus commands his disciples to baptize in the name of “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” which has endured throughout the history of the church as the baptismal formula for Christians.

Unlike all the other great festival days on the Christian calendar, Trinity Sunday is not linked to an historical event of some kind. While Christmas celebrates Jesus’ birth, Epiphany the visit of the Magi, and Easter the resurrection, Trinity Sunday is the one Sunday of the year that we focus on God’s being rather God’s doing; on who God is rather than on what God has done.

The concept of the trinity came about in the first centuries of the church, when the early Christians grappled with how to express the three ways they had come to know God.

One experience of God was as Creator, as we heard in the familiar words of this morning’s Old Testament reading. The term “Father” was attributed to this Creator God, and this analogy from human experience compares the connection between God and humanity to the intimate relationship between parents and their children

For the early church community, another understanding of God came through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God entered the world in the form of frail human flesh to participate in earthly human life – to share our “common lot.” Through the incarnation, the faith community came to understand that God was not just out there, but lived as one of us, sharing life’s pains as well as its joys. The designation “Son” was given to Jesus to underscore his close relationship to God, the “Father.”

And the third way the early Church understood God was as the Holy Spirit. As promised by Jesus, the gift of the Spirit came on Pentecost, which we celebrated last Sunday, and the Holy Spirit is the presence of God working in our hearts and in our lives.

The early Christians realized that, to depict God, they had to somehow come up with a way of describing all three of these ways that God had been revealed to them. Describing God as just the Creator would limit them to thinking of God as ruling the world from a safe distance, far removed from human problems and dangers.

And describing God as just the Son would limit them to thinking of God in human terms solely. And if they described God as just Spirit, they would need to think of God as an abstract life force of some sort.

Now, the earliest Christians were Jews, who were uncompromisingly monotheistic; the first and most sacrosanct of all their beliefs was the oneness of God, expressed in Deuteronomy [6:4] – “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” How could they described their three experiences of God while remaining true to the unity of one God?

For their solution, they came up with a concept from human experience, noting that it is possible for one person to have three different relationships. For instance, I am a daughter, a mother, and a wife; all three are different relationships, yet each is connected to me as the same person.

Another human analogy is that we are made up of body, mind, spirit; we are all three, but only one person. Remove any one of the three and we would cease to be; yet, each is so unique that we think of it as a distinct entity.

Another analogy for understanding the trinity comes from science: di-hydrogen oxide, or H2O, can be in the form of ice, or water, or steam; one substance, but three forms.

These analogies help us to understand the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – three dimensions, three faces, of one Lord, the three modes of the one Divine Being experienced by Christians.

Ultimately, however, the trinity is an attempt to explain something that is too great for humans to comprehend. And despite the efforts of believers throughout the centuries to describe God, mere words turn out to be too frail to capture God’s glory and greatness. Thus, we continue to resort to metaphors.

One that has recently gained popularity is God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer; however, this formula reduces God to functional roles.

Other metaphors have tried to capture the essence of the three experiences of God: God as fire, light and heat; God as composer, singer, and song; God as speaker, word, and breath.

I think that such metaphors are wonderful for expanding our concept of the triune God, but ultimately, they are just metaphors – descriptions of the reality but not the reality itself.

What is the truth we are trying so hard to describe? How do we not just describe but actually name our experience of God?

The truth behind the trinity, I believe, lies in the simple but powerful scriptural verse from First John [4:8, 16]: God is love. The key, I believe, is to look past our metaphors of God and experience the Love who lives at the heart of it all.

The revelation that God is love is found in numerous verses of scripture throughout the Old and New Testaments. In the book of Jeremiah [31:3], God tells the people of Israel, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” John 3:16 states, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” and Paul [Romans 8:39] assures us that nothing “Will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The trinity is infinite Love seeking expression. And in the end, all avenues of expression – language, music, art, even the human mind – fall short of comprehending the majesty and mystery of God.

But we need not try to explain; all we need do is to experience the Love who created our world and fashioned us with such care; the Love who passionately desired to become one of us and for a little while pitched his tent among us; the Love who could not ultimately leave us but remains with us to inhabit every moment of our existence.

This is the essence of the Trinity; this is our triune God – the One who loves us unconditionally, infinitely, and eternally. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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