In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Do you ever find that you’re a mystery to yourself? I do. I know myself pretty well, and yet there are times when I’m surprised by my reaction to something, when I don’t quite understand why I’m “in a mood.” When I surprise myself I usually try to stop and figure out what’s going on . . . sometimes I’m successful at this . . . but sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I remain a mystery to myself.

And, of course, the people around us can be mysteries as well. Even the people closest to us, the people we love, family and friends, ultimately remain somehow ‘other’ . . . separate from us . . . and sometimes very surprising indeed.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost. On Pentecost we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, and now, on the following Sunday, we celebrate the mystery of the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.

Almost no one has ever plumbed the depths of the Trinity in a short and concise manner, in a “user-friendly” way, we might say. Once you try to get beyond the historic definition of the Trinity as Three in One, One God in Three Persons, the going gets a little rough. To put it mildly, the concept – or at least the explanations of this concept – can get pretty complex.

God, too, can be a mystery to us.

But that’s not the whole story is it? As I said, I know myself pretty well. I have a pretty solid sense of who I am. And I know the people I love . . . sure, they can still surprise me . . . but I KNOW them. You might say that I experience myself, and so I know myself . . . I experience the people around me . . . and so I know them. . . . And I experience God. I know God, too. So do you.

There’s lots of philosophical discussion and dogmatic teaching about the Trinity, but I think that what’s being analyzed and described – at base – is our experience of God.

How do we experience God the creator? Since the earliest of times we humans have had a sense of an unseen strength far beyond our own . . . of a Source for the world . . . a sense of a power beyond our control and perhaps even our understanding. For me, our efforts to understand the universe – the sciences – only enhance my faith in God. Whenever I read about the cosmos, or see the incredible pictures from the Hubble telescope . . . like my ancient ancestors, I sense this animating force of the universe . . . this ground of our being . . . this infinite God . . . the Father, the Creator.

And the second person of the Trinity? With Jesus, of course, we have something else entirely. With Jesus, we encounter one of us. Yes, he is also supremely ‘other’, but through the Gospel there is so much that we CAN understand . . . that we can almost see and hear . . . that we can almost touch. There is so much that is on our human scale. With Jesus we have a guide, a rabbi, and a mirror of sorts . . . an image we can learn from and compare ourselves to . . . an image we can try to follow. Through Jesus, we have our salvation. . . . Here is God the Son, the Redeemer.

And the Holy Spirit? We experience God here and now. That’s the Holy Spirit. Deep within ourselves we can feel the presence of God. And this Spirit of God also dwells within our communities . . . within our world . . . NOW . . . inspiring us . . . empowering us . . . leading us. It is through the power of the Spirit that we enter into the Body of Christ and are reconciled to God. You might say that our ability to sense God the Father . . . our desire to follow Jesus – to become like Christ – is the gift of the Spirit . . . the gift of God dwelling within us . . . God the Sanctifier.

In ways like these, we all have the experience of God . . . we all KNOW God. And as I said, that’s what the language of the Trinity is trying to explain, to describe: our experience of God. The beginnings of Trinitarian language are rooted in the experience of the very earliest Christians, who tried to describe what happened to them when they were baptized. When, through the Spirit, they entered into Christ’s relation to God. As Paul says in his letter to the Galatians: “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6).

But this experience of God – this relational experience, this experience of God in three persons – does NOT mean that God is not ONE. God IS One . . . God is fully in each person of the Trinity, and each person of the Trinity is fully God. God is NOT made up of three different personalities. That’s one of the problems we may start to get into with all this Trinitarian stuff . . . we may start to imagine God as three different people.

One idea that I’ve been playing with to try to explain this to myself is to think about a conversation. I’ll warn you now that this is not a finished, beautifully polished idea . . . it’s a work in progress . . . but I offer it to you in the hope that you might find it useful as you think about the idea of the Trinity.

The kind of conversation I’m thinking about is a very particular kind of conversation . . . it’s the kind of conversation that we have with OURSELVES. When you’re confronted with a problem, for example, what do you do? You try to reason your way to a solution. And how do you do THAT? Well, you formulate the problem into words . . . you tell yourself the situation . . . and you use words to think through various options to reach a solution. You have a kind of conversation with yourself. Now, there’s no question that you’re only ONE person, one human being, right? And yet you’ve had a little chat with yourself.

Remember at the beginning of this sermon I mentioned that in some ways we’re mysteries to ourselves? I said that sometimes I’m surprised by my reaction to something . . . sometimes I don’t know why I’m “in a mood” . . . and then I try to figure out what’s going on. I have a conversation with myself. I challenge myself . . . I present possibilities to myself . . . I try to make myself look at things that I am trying to avoid . . . in other words, I have a relation with myself. There are times when I’m proud of myself . . . and there are times when I’m ashamed of myself. And yet I remain ME . . . ONE person. God, too, is relational in God’s essence

Remember, I said that these are ideas that I’m playing with . . . I’m playing with a little Trinitarian formula, too. Perhaps one way to think of the Trinity is to think of God the Father, the Creator, as the I of the holy conversation . . . as the great “I am” . . . and to think of God the Son, the Redeemer, as the thought . . . the wisdom . . . the WORD of the conversation . . . the word made flesh . . . and to think of the God the Spirit, the Sanctifier, as the energy driving the conversation . . . the desire . . . the power. It’s an idea . . . make use of it if it’s helpful. It’s not a complete description. The Trinity is in its depths a mystery after all. . . .

But don’t use that word ‘mystery’ to simply throw up your hands and say “It’s beyond understanding.” That’s not what ‘mystery’ – in a religious sense – means. A mystery is something that we can sense . . . taste . . . feel . . . even UNDERSTAND . . . but only in part. We can never FULLY grasp a religious mystery because of its richness, but we can, nevertheless, experience it. The theologian Richard Norris writes: “The mysterious is such not because of its absurdity or its incoherence, but because of its depth: not because one cannot see or state truth about it, but because the truth as stated is only a bare intimation of the reality to which it points.”

Mystery . . . experience . . . mystery . . . experience . . . experience helps us to understand mystery . . . mystery helps us to understand experience. I’ve been going back and forth between these two things as I’ve been thinking about the Trinity. Perhaps it’s a healthy thing not to dwell too long in either place. Wrap yourself up in mystery for too long and you may lose your bearings. Limit yourself too much to what you THINK you know from your personal experience and life may begin to seem a little thin . . . a little meager.

Most of us probably tip the scales too far in this direction . . . tightly holding onto what we feel certain of in a concrete way. It can be frightening to loosen our grip . . . to uncurl our fingers just a bit . . . to let go and to open ourselves to the unknown . . . to open our eyes . . . our minds . . . our hearts . . . to mystery. But never fear, as we open ourselves to the mystery of God, as we loosen our grip on our tiny certainties, we will begin to realize that we are held in the loving hands of God.

Today, Trinity Sunday, is a day to remember with awe the profound mystery of God. A mystery that is akin to the mystery of the universe . . . the mystery of other people . . . the mystery of ourselves. And perhaps it’s a day also to be grateful for the love of God, which allows us to taste a bit of Truth. This is a day to be grateful for our loving God, who allows us to experience the mystery of Being.

Amen.

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