So, who here fully and completely understands the Trinity?

Anyone?

I know I sure don’t.

It is one of those theological concepts that can be very difficult to grasp.

Non Christians, especially those who are monotheistic—Jewish people and Muslims—will often excuse us of being tri-theistic, believing in three gods.

I can understand their confusion, “God in three persons” sounds an awful lot like three gods.

Also, when we you hear Christians at prayer, it usually sounds like we are praying to one of three gods—dear Heavenly Father, or dear God, or please Holy Spirit.

But we aren’t tri-theistic, we don’t worship three different gods, we are monotheistic, we worship God, the only God.

So how to explain the Trinity.

Well, we have to start with acknowledging that God is holy.

In Greek the word for holy means “separated.”

I think we would all agree that God is definitely separate from us. God is bigger than us.

God is infinite.

Our limited human finite minds cannot possibly grasp God.

God is beyond our reasoning.

God is out there apart from us.

God is other.

God is a mystery to us.

We can only know of God what God reveals to us, and God does reveal Godself to us, but we are incapable of seeing all of God. Even if God chose to reveal all of Godself to us we probably couldn’t understand what we were seeing and experiencing.

But, being created in the image and likeness of God, we do have brains that can reason, and this means that humans have and always will strive to understand God.

We seem to have built into us a desire to know God, even if much of that knowledge is beyond our reach.

I think this desire to know and understand God is really at root a desire to be known by God, to have a relationship with God.

So, we construct ideas or concepts to explain and to understand what God has revealed about Godself to us.

This is what we call theology.

We all do it.

Theology is not just the purview of academics with PhD’s or of ordained people.

Anytime you think about God or try to answer any of the big questions of life, you are doing theology.

The Trinity is one of these theological concepts that was developed by human beings to try to make sense out of the human experience of God’s revelation to us.

The Trinity is one of the ways concepts humans have developed to explain the ways God has related to us.

The word “Trinity” is never once mentioned in the Bible.

But what we do see emerging in the stories of the Bible is that the people of God experienced God in three different ways.

They knew God as father, or parent or creator.

They experienced God in the creation, in being alive.

They experienced God as a child experiences his or her parent. God as father or creator brought the earth, all the creatures on it, and they themselves into being.

God as creator saved them from slavery in Egypt.

God as creator protected and sustained the Jewish people over the centuries.

As people experienced God in this way, the word “father” or “creator” was the best human way that people came up with to describe this experience of God.

Then came Jesus, who was clearly a human being who lived and walked and talked and breathed and ate and laughed and cried and did all the things that humans do.

He was born and he died.

And yet—those who followed him while he walked on this earth, those who learned from him, saw him killed and saw him alive again—experienced him as somehow different from all the other human beings that they had ever known.

Those who knew Jesus and experienced Jesus also felt that they were experiencing God through Jesus.

Now we have all probably experienced God in other people, after all we are made in God’s image, but it was somehow different with Jesus.

For those who knew Jesus and walked with him, God, the divine, was somehow revealed to them in the person of Jesus.

Now, I don’t pretend to understand how a person could be both human and divine, but what I do understand is that somehow, in Jesus, God has revealed some of Godself to us.

In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we limited human beings can come to know God a little better.

And, as we come to know God a little better, we come to be closer to God, we come to a better relationship with God because we come to better understand God’s purposes for us here on earth.

Through the revelation of God through Jesus we come to understand what kind of life, what kinds of ways of living will bring us true peace, true happiness, true relationship with God.

And finally, we have the Holy Spirit.

The Scriptures tell us that when Jesus ascended into heaven and returned to God the Father, Jesus did not leave us alone.

He gave us the Holy Spirit.

Those early Christians and billions of Christians since that very first Pentecost have experienced the Holy Spirit, have experienced God as an untamed, uncontrolled, power working within human beings.

Every time you find yourself with more courage than you thought you had to take risks you didn’t think you could ever take, or reaching out to someone with whom you had no intention of making contact, or allowing yourself to listen to someone with whom you disagree and allowing yourself to hear and be changed by what that person has to say, you can be fairly sure that you are experiencing the Holy Spirit working in you.

And countless Christians over the millennia have experienced God in just this way.

The Holy Spirit is the experience of the power of God, the revelation of God, from within ourselves.

So, I urge you not to worry about or to stress too much about the number three.

Christians begin with faith and then seek further understanding. This is how the concept of the Trinity developed.

The symbolic language for the Trinity was already present in the New Testament, and the experience of those first followers of Jesus.

Yet it remains just that, symbolic language.

God is not limited by our limited language and understanding.

Like all other monotheistic religions, we believe in one, and only one God.

Threeness itself is unimportant, even if unavoidable as we seek to understand our Scriptures and our experience of God as Christians. What is important is that there is one God, who loves and cares for us.

There is one God, who is holy and ultimately beyond our understanding, but who seeks to have a relationship with each and every one of us.

There is one God who is seeking to help you and to help me understand the ways of being that will bring us true life and true peace.

There is one God, who is seeking to reveal Himself to us so that we might be in relationship with our creator, even if our understanding will always be limited to our human capabilities.

May God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit bless and keep you today and always. Amen.