Miracle and Mystery in the Three in One and One in Three

+Every Sunday, as the server brings the bowl over to me and I symbolically wash my hands, I utter a simple prayer: “Gracious God, cleanse me from all iniquity and make me worthy to enter Your mystery.” I use this prayer as a way to ready myself for what will happen at this altar because, truth be told, I have NO IDEA what happens at this altar. But not being able to explain it doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Not fully understanding doesn’t mean nothing is happening. It just means that some things can’t be explained as much as they must be experienced.
A major— I am not sure I can explain it, but I know it is real, I know it means something to me, I just don’t understand it---concept in Christianity is the Trinity: The one in Three and Three in One.
The bottom line is, none of us fully understand it. We may well have some comprehension of it---we believe in One God who is present to us in three distinct, yet linked ways: God as Father/Mother/Creator, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit---but we can’t really understand it because to understand it means that we fully grasp it in all of it’s nuance. We can’t do that. Our comprehension of the Trinity requires a leap of faith, a leap into a mystery, and an acceptance that we won’t know what this really means until the last day. Until then, we’re grasping at straws whenever we try to come up with a hard and fast definition.
So in no way am I going to try and make the Holy and Undivided Trinity understandable to you, Understanding is a personal thing which comes to each of us in different ways and at different times. [a process so well exemplified in Nicodemus, the main character in today’s Gospel. Nicodemus appears several times in John’s Gospel, each time, gaining a bit more understanding, a little more insight into just who this Jesus is and how this Jesus is God. It was, for Nicodemus, a process.
It is for all of us a dynamic process, constantly changing, evolving, moving. As a matter of fact---the dynamic nature of learning, of understanding--is an excellent way to describe the Trinity.  For “dynamic” is a key piece of the interrelatedness between our Creator Father/Mother God our Redeeming Son God and our Sustaining Advocate Holy Spirit God---these three persons of the Trinity are in constant movement toward one another and towards us.
Now let’s get one thing clear, we have one God. Period. When we say, there are three persons in One God, what we mean is that there are three aspects, three distinct ways the Almighty is in relationship with us—the more authoritative, parental God who was and is the Creator of all things, the accessible fully human and fully divine God—the Son who felt all the same things we feel and was capable of all the same things as us and finally, the advocate, the Holy Spirit given to us on Pentecost; that unseen God who acts in and through other people in our lives and is that still small voice deep within us. But these three distinct characteristics of God are just that--- characteristics of a whole—they are not separate. They are “part of.”
Throughout the generations, people have fought over the Doctrine of the Trinity---I’ve mentioned before that St Nicholas was expelled from the Council of Nicea because he became so irate over the efforts to explain, in words, just what we mean by the Holy and Undivided Trinity, one God, that he actually punched another attendee. Others have made valiant efforts to explain the Trinity using visual aids:
St. Patrick used the three leaves of a Shamrock—each leaf is distinct but is not separate from the whole of the clover.
Icons show the Trinity as a swirling dance of interconnected parts—always attached, but each moving in it’s own way. Almost all expository attempts at describing the Trinity fall short because at its heart, the essence of the Trinity is relationship. And describing the essence of a relationship is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree…it just doesn’t work.
Think of your own relationships---the most precious ones you have—how would you describe them? Can you find the words? Could you diagram it? You could get close, but it would still be lacking.  That’s my point---to describe the Holy and Undivided Trinity just doesn’t do it justice, because it’s a relationship and relationships are hard to explain.
God is relationship.
Retired Lutheran Pastor Richard Lischer shared this interpretation of the Trinity he discovered while contemplating a stained glass window depiction of the Trinity: “The fairly typical Trinitarian design of three interconnecting triangles reminded me of an aerial photograph taken of our small farming community. Besides the straight and orderly rows of crops in the fields, another distinct pattern emerged: well-worn paths criss-crossing from one farmhouse to another. These paths, worn into the ground by generations of neighbors visiting and helping out in times of need, linked the town, they knit the community together.” Lischer’s description of the interconnectedness represented in those paths explains my experience of the Trinity.
God grooves paths in our lives, coming to us at different times and in different forms to address a variety of needs.
God, in three persons, Blessed Trinity, reaches out to us as a strong parental type when we feel small and childlike. God in three persons, Blessed Trinity reaches out to us as a forgiving friend in times of loneliness and confusion. God in three persons, Blessed Trinity reaches out to us as a sustaining force of inexplicable peace when we are bereft and lost, angry and bitter, hopeless and helpless. God in three persons, Blessed Trinity, longs to be a palpable presence in our lives, so God, in God’s infinite wisdom, walks a number of paths to reach us.
Although difficult to explain, the formula of the Trinity is simple
God Loves Us.
God Wants to be With Us
Through the miracle and mystery of God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity, God’s Love is always with us.
And that, although almost impossible to explain, is so utterly real.
Amen.