Today is Trinity Sunday. I tell you this to prepare you. Before the sermon ends, I intend to dazzle you with the nuances of triune divinity. How can God be both one and three, three in one? And why would anyone care? The answer, I tell you, is downright scintillating.

Sadly, most of us count the subject mentally debilitating. We figure we can live as Christians day by day without a firm grasp of the doctrine of the Trinity. And yet this claim of Christians that God is a Trinity is at the very heart of our faith. So much so that in the early church, the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, who is happily responsible for much of our good thinking on the Trinity, claimed that unless you hold the faith that God is triune, you cannot be saved and will perish eternally. Athanasius was way too hard-boiled on this point. I find it ironic that he is not recognized in my Microsoft Word spell check. When you type in Athanasius, it asks whether you mean “Euthanasia.” Well, he wouldn’t have been for mercy killing, either, but what he and the early church understood, that we often don’t, is just what is at stake in this whole idea of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—one God in three persons, uncreated, inseparable, eternal and equal in being, in power and in glory.

Now one problem with the Christian claim that God is a threefold being of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is that the Bible seems more often to want to drive home the point that God is one than that God is three in one. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. The first Commandment for a reason, don’t you know?! It’s supposed to be the first in your heart. Everything starts there. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One: the fundamental confession of faith of Israelite religion. No hint of threeness there. And even when we get plural pronouns in the Old Testament, like our text from Isaiah today—Who will go for US? Whom shall WE send? or at creation when God says, Let US make humankind in OUR image— even then we are talking only about a way of talking. It is somewhat like the so-called “royal we,” a way of saying that the subject is so lofty, so far above us, and that the office is so majestic, that we should not confine it to a simple singular. God is a mystery. No, check that—God is the Mystery. God is the central mystery of the world and the universe and of all being and of every human being.

This Thursday night at Congregation Shearith Israel, I will join a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim imam in a conversation about how our three faiths connect. We will talk about Moses this month, next month Jesus, and finally, in August, Muhammad. We begin with the assumption that we all worship the same God of Abraham, the God who is one and only one. For all our nicety with one another over how we worship the same God, Jews and Muslims are no surer of that than we are. I mean, when we start talking about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, about the deity of the man Jesus, they are not on board with us about that. It sounds to them like a violation of the basic truth of God’s oneness.

But the Christian teaching about this is that while God is the one God, God is not a lonely God. God alone is God; there are no other gods beside the one God. But God is not a solitary being. God is not alone in the way we think of aloneness, like how it feels to us to be without the company of others, a prisoner of our individuality.

Logic alone won’t explain this, but we can get some help with models of thinking about it. Some are better than others. When I was a kid, I learned about how God is three in one in the way water—H₂O—can be gas, liquid or ice. The problem is that it can be only one form at a time. So when God is in heaven, God cannot be on earth. Which means that Jesus, if he is God on earth, is really praying to himself, not to his Father in heaven. And there’s the egg that is shell, yoke and white. That’s a little better, because it takes all three to be an egg, and each can be itself at the same time. But you can separate them and have, for instance, an egg-white-only omelet, and you are no worse for it, maybe even the better if you have a cholesterol issue. Whereas with God, if you separate the Son from the Father, you no longer have either one, since they are only what they are in relation to each other.

This gets to be fun. Are you having fun yet? Okay, try this one: I am a son and a husband and a father all at the same time. Not bad, but I am still one person thinking and acting, whereas in God, Father and Son and Spirit, each thinks and acts interdependently, as when Jesus is asking for the cup of suffering to pass without him having to drink of it by dying on the cross. He agrees at last, but Father and Son have to work toward agreement. The Spirit is the ombudsman that goes between them, the bond that keeps them together.

This is getting toward the heart of the matter. Understanding God as triune is more about the logic of love than the love of logic. If you love logic, you will always end up with some math that won’t compute. After all, 1+1+1=3. You can say that 1x1x1=1, or that in binary numbers 1+1+1=111, but none of that gets you very far.

Better to look for the logic of love, since the Bible says that love is the very nature of God. The relational and personal must therefore be at the very heart of whatever divinity is. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love they share. So says St. Augustine in one of his better analogies. But even then, the Holy Spirit seems impersonal. Better to see the Spirit as the one that holds the hands of Father and Son, all the while turning the godhead toward us and inviting us into the dance of their love.

You can know some things only from the inside out. You can only get to some truths first through experience. Paul says that our ability to call God Father, or even more intimately, Abba—Daddy—is only because God as the Spirit is giving us the confidence that we are part of the divine family, and that we share in the love that the Father has for the Son, and that therefore we are also in the will. Whatever inheritance Jesus can expect from the Father, we will share in it with him.

There is nothing like someone assuring you that you are part of the family. The sense of belonging you feel gives you security and joy. And to learn that you are in the will, even if you have been adopted—as we all are—into the life of God, is a blessing beyond words. Which is why, by the way, you are in my will. And I hope that many of you will do the same—show that the church is part of your family after all.

C. S. Lewis uses prayer to illustrate how God is above us as God the Father, listening to our prayers; beside us as the God the Son, carrying our requests to God the Father; and within us as God the Spirit, prompting us to pray according to the will of the Father. So God is involved in every aspect of our relationship to God—above us, beside us and within us. We share in the circle of God’s divine life and love. Just as the Father gives life and love to the Son and Spirit, and just as they receive it and return it, we ourselves are caught up into that dance of the Trinity and changed by it.

The new animated movie, Cars, came out this past Friday. Delightful. Clever. And a good story to boot. The essence of the tale leads us to consider how we find our lives only in committed loving relationship to others, which is the very essential truth of God as trinity. Lightning McQueen stars as the young racecar that wants to win the Piston Cup. He is cocky and classless. He doesn’t think he needs anyone, even a pit crew chief, in order to achieve glory. But along the road he gets lost in more than one way. He ends up getting kicked around instead of getting his kicks on Route 66. He pulls into Radiator Springs, the town that time forgot. The interstate had been built just outside town, and the world had no reason to stop there anymore. But there Lightning finds cars that care about him, and he finds himself caring for them. So much so that by the predictable end of the movie, it is clear that nothing he achieves will be without their help, and he wills to achieve nothing apart from his friendship with them. The transformation is complete by story’s end, as Lightning finds out what it really means to be a winner. Take the kids. Take somebody else’s kids.

This is the point of the doctrine of God as three in one. At the very heart of reality, we find not so much the mystery of God as one in the sense of God as solitary being; we find instead the mystery of God as oneness, as wholeness, as unity—or better, as a perfect community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is only God in relationship, never apart from it. And the joy we find in our experience is that the divine love overflows. It is poured out onto us. It invites us in. It wants us to know that we can find our lives only by losing our lives for the sake of those we love. And we will gain our lives by receiving them from others, too.

Tony Campolo tells the story of a deacon who wondered how he could do something that mattered for God. The deacon concluded that there was one thing he could do. He could take the youth group at his church to the old folks’ home. Once a month they went and put on a little church service for the people there. The first time he went, he stood in the back of the room. The young people were performing, and this old man in a wheelchair rolled his chair over to where this deacon was standing, took his hand and held it all during the service. That was repeated the next month and the next month and the next month and the next month and the next month. Then they went one Sunday afternoon and the man wasn’t there. The deacon asked the nurse in charge, What happened to that man? “Oh,” she said, “He’s near death. He’s just down the hall, the third room. Maybe you should go in and visit him. He’s unconscious, though.”

The deacon walked down and went into the room. There were tubes. You know how people are when they are just about gone, and lying there was quite an ugly scene. The deacon went over and took hold of the hand of the gentleman in the bed. He said a prayer. Just instinctively led by the Spirit, he said a prayer. And when he said Amen, the old fellow squeezed his hand. He was so moved by that squeeze of the hand that he began to weep. He shook a little. He tried to get out of the room, and as he was leaving the room, he bumped into this woman who was coming into the room. She said, “He’s been waiting for you. He said he did not want to die until Jesus came and held his hand, and I tried to tell him that after death he would have a chance to meet Jesus and talk to Jesus and hold Jesus’ hand. But he said, No. Once a month Jesus comes and holds my hand and I don’t want to leave until I have a chance to hold the hand of Jesus once more.” [“Being Upbeat in a Downbeat World,” http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/campolo_4519.htm.]

When you begin to find your life in the company of others by giving them your love and receiving it back, you actually find yourself in the highest company possible—the company of God. They say, “Two’s company but three’s a crowd.” But when you find yourself in the company of God, you are not really company at all—you are family. And don’t be surprised if once in a while you aren’t confused for your brother Jesus.