Good morning. Most of this week I’ve been up on Whidbey Island on study leave. Once each year, my study group from seminary gets together for three days to dissect one another’s lives, read a book together…and try to sneak in a little totally non-competitive team golf. This year, the dissecting of lives was challenging as always…we read a very good book from Craig Barnes called Searching for Home, …and my team won the non-competitive golf. So all is well!

As Mike has said, today is “Trinity Sunday” on the church calendar, and we’re using just one of the many biblical texts that talk about this mystery called the Trinity. Next week we’ll return to our study of the book of Hebrews for a long stretch.

Let me give you three images:

• A man came to me once and said, “I’ve just found out I have a very serious disease. I think that God is paying me back for something I did wrong a long time ago.”
• A few weeks ago I read you the description from a new age book of a god described as the “generic God, the one in plain white wrapping ready to be dyed and decorated by your own creative world view.”
• A woman once said to a friend, “You need to know right up front that I don’t believe in God.” The friend said, “Tell me what God it is that you don’t believe in.” She proceeded to denounce the idea of a distant God who had to be begged to care about things in human life.

In all cases, I would want to say this: “I don’t believe in that god either!”

But if we are willing to say the kind of God we don’t believe in, we must also be willing to name the God we do believe in, and have a reason for doing so. Perhaps another way of saying that is that it is very, very important that when we say “God,” we are clear about who we are talking about.

It was Gregory of Nazianus, an early church father, who once said,

“When I say God, I mean Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

In the second book of the Lord of the Rings series, J.R.R. Tolkien creates a special creature called an “ent.” Ents are sort of living trees which are older and wiser than most things on the earth. And when the ents speak, they rumble on and on and on. To other folks, it seems like they take forever to say something.

When the hobbits first meet an ent they call Treebeard, he tells them:

“I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate…for one thing it would take a long while. My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language… (In my language) it takes a very long time to say anything…because we do not say anything…unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.”

Gregory says, “When I say God, I mean Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” It’s a bit cumbersome, this whole trinity idea, and it does take quite a bit longer to say. But it is well worth our time.

In Matthew’s gospel, from the very beginning, God is present as Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Mary found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, Jesus, Savior. It fulfills what the Lord has said, “call him Immanuel, which means God with us.”

In the baptism story I just read from Matthew 3, Jesus the Son is baptized. Heaven opens, the Dove of the Holy Spirit descends upon him, and the voice of God from heaven says,

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

As Matthew’s gospel unfolds, this Father, Son and Holy Spirit confluence becomes more and more defined until at the very end, the Resurrected Jesus leaves his final words to his disciples:

“Go now and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

It is the fullest name for God that scripture can give us.

The trinity that Christians believe in, one God in three persons…three ways that the one God is present with us…has some mystery inherent in it. One theologian (Shirley Guthrie), in fact, says the trinity

“is a mystery to be confessed, not a mathematical puzzle to be solved.”

We don’t look up “trinity” in a Bible concordance and check out the verse. It’s not there. The trinity is the church’s best attempt, from the earliest of times, to say the truest word about God, based upon God’s revelation to us, as recorded in the scriptures. All of the scriptures.

A couple months ago on a Saturday we held our quarterly “Exploring Theology” class. The topic was this one, the trinity, and we broke up into groups and looked up at least a couple dozen scriptures, and categorized them. We looked up scriptures that focused on Almighty God, the God that Jesus called Father. We looked at the scriptures that talked about Jesus, as both human and divine. We looked at scriptures that emphasized the role of the Holy Spirit. We looked up scriptures that insisted that there is One God.

We also saw how the three sometimes overlap. For instance, God created the heavens and the earth. But Colossians and Hebrews tell us the Son was present at creation. Then Genesis says the Spirit of God moved over creation.

We looked at the scriptures that talked about the equality amongst this Father, Son and Holy Spirit God. We looked at other scriptures that talked about each of the three being subordinate to the others. We looked at how each pointed towards the other. We looked at the love shared between Jesus and the Father. We looked at the provision of the Holy Spirit permanently after Jesus left the earth. We listened to Jesus say, “The Father and I are one.”

We charted all of these, and drew lines and categorized and sat back and looked at it all of them. Like the early church, we tried to wrestle with the whole testimony of scripture. Augustine called the trinity a holy society. A divine community. There is some mystery here. A mystery that probably should be confessed rather than solved.

What is not a mystery is this: The God of the universe, has chosen to reveal Himself to us. And the way He chose to self-reveal, to tell us his name, his story is this: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God.

• Father: Creator, ruler, protector, God over us.
• Son: Savior, reconciler, liberator, God with/for us.
• Holy Spirit: renewer, transformer, God in/among us

It is important to name the God we follow. There are gods everywhere these days. And so from the earliest times, Christians tried to articulate this confession. The Apostle’s Creed started coming together in second century. It begins:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth…

…and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, conceived by the Holy Ghost…

…I believe in the Holy Ghost.

The Gloria Patri, (which I won’t sing from the pulpit this morning!), also dating back to the second century:

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost...

The Scots Confession, 16th century, reads at its very beginning:

We confess and acknowledge one God alone…one in substance and yet distinct in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

A Celtic Prayer:

O Father who sought me,
O Son who bought me,
O Spirit who taught me.

Now, there are all sorts of images people have used to describe the Trinity in an understandable way. An egg (shell, white, yolk), water (liquid, steam, ice). Those are more or less helpful, I guess. But what is more helpful to me is the conversation the church has had through the ages over this idea of trinity.

If we go back to more ancient times, the Western church (Rome) most often emphasized the Oneness of God, and then recognized the distinctiveness of the three persons. One visual image used for this is a triangle. Ideally, it is an equilateral triangle, with the sides labeled “Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” The danger with the picture is that the labels have often been slid to be at the points of the triangle rather than the sides. The upper point is inevitably the Father, the lower ones the Son and Spirit, giving the impression that one is hierarchically above the others.

The Eastern church, that we think of as the Orthodox church, first emphasized the distinctiveness of the three persons, and then moved to affirming the unity of God. In the ancient artwork of the Eastern Orthodox church, the trinity is most often shown as three figures sitting around a table.

A helpful picture here is of a circle. On the circle are three smaller circles, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And then arrows moving in every conceivable direction among those three circles, all trying to show the relationship within God’s being.

One of the words very popular in theological circles today is perichoresis, which attempts to help with this idea of God as trinity. It was coined in the 7th century, by John of Damascus. Perichoresis is a Greek word made up of two words: peri = around and choresis (we get our word choreography) = dance.

Dance around. The dance of God. The point is that within Himself, God is in community, is in relationship. That is the God of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Now, I’m going on and on about this idea of the trinity of God. But what difference does it make?

We are a society of extreme individualism. But the God that we follow is a God of community, a fellowship. And amazingly, he invites us to enter into that dance. The church is not a bunch of individuals who show up at a building at 9 a.m. (or 9:05 or 9:10!), but a people. A family.

We are made in God’s image. And if, within the nature of God there is a loving, caring, mutually supportive community…then we too are wired this way. We need others. We were made to be in relationships.

Now, we have all heard that within each one of us is a God-shaped space because we were made to be in relationship with God. That is very true. Author John Ortberg says it would seem that there is also a people-shaped space because we were made to be in relationship with one another, wired that way. That is the way that we reflect the God who made us!

In Genesis, while everything was still good in the Garden, before any snakes or temptation or sin had crept in, God said time after time that everything that was made—land, animals, sky, human beings—“…was good.”

All good. Except one thing. It was not good for man to be alone. There was a need, a longing. And with the creation of the second human being, it was the beginning of a community that in some way, often a distorted and pale way...reflected the community within God.

Do we see that desire for community in our world? At every turn. It doesn’t matter if it is images of Lake Wobegone, old episodes of “Cheers,” the neighborhood reading group, the bowling team…or the building of seven coffee shops within four blocks of Bethany. What does that reflect? Besides an addiction to caffeine…a desire to be with others.

The unfortunate thing is that, according to a number of studies… we are at an all-time low in terms of the level of community, by almost every possible measure. We drive the car into the garage and skip the conversation with the neighbor. We work long hours. We email instead of call, we call instead of visit. We spend hours on the computer and minutes with people. The most common answer to the question of the day, “How are you?” is this: “Too busy.” I heard it come out of my mouth three or four times this week. “How are you?” “I’m too busy.”

We are a people who, no matter how we try to hide it or cover it up…are wired to be in relationship with others. Of course we are! We are made in the image of a God who has always experienced community: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

And the amazing thing is: We are invited into this community. It has been extended to us, at great cost. And we are called to extend it to others. Ortberg says it like this:

“Every time you forgive someone who hurt you, encourage someone who feels defeated, extend compassion to someone who stands alone, confront someone in love, open your heart to a friend, reconcile with an enemy, devote time to a child, you align yourself with God’s central purpose in this world (and I would say with God’s character).”

Community may be closer than you think, maybe even at home. When the fires in California were raging last year, a journalism teacher named Blake Nelson and his family (wife and two adolescent kids) were forced to flee from their home as their neighborhood began to go up in flames. Each member of the family had to quickly pack up a couple small things they thought were most important, fully expecting that they would lose everything. Nelson had a hard time zeroing in on anything, then just thought of documents, things. They drove away with the flames edging into their neighborhood and went into town.

It was Sunday, and they went to church. Nelson stayed in the car with the family dog, and listened to the updates on the radio. After a short time he says,

Pretty soon my 13-year old daughter came out to the parking lot and sat in the backseat with the dog. “I couldn’t concentrate in there,” she said.

I turned off the radio so it wouldn’t scare her any further. Tears just rolled out of her eyes.

“It’s all replaceable,” I said, trying to comfort her, making eye contact through the review mirror. “If the house goes, we’ll build a bigger one and you’ll have a bigger room.”

She nodded, and smiled through her tears. “I packed the picture of you and me at Disney World.”

I think his daughter had it just right. Each time we choose people over things, relationship over activity, we participate in the way God has designed us to be…in community. We reflect God.

And when I say God (as Gregory said), I mean: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Let’s pray.