Grace to you and peace from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and from the Spirit who binds us in community. Amen.

You may have noticed that this is Holy Trinity Sunday.

The name of God celebrated by Christians is a name different from any other name because it speaks of God, and because it speaks of a God unique among the various gods claimed by different religions.

For Christians, the name of God is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We address our God most formally by this phrase-name, and we bless one another by virtue of this phrase-name. It is a name unique among names, for in this trinitarian name for a triune God we sense that God is more. More than we can conceive. More than a mere being like us. More than aloneness. Within the Godhead there is mystery, there is magnificence, there is community.

At the beginning of each worship service, our hearts are drawn by the resonant and stirring complexities of the organ prelude and our voices begin through hymn to bring us back from the fading forgetfulness that a week of days can yield, and to give new breath to our spirits. And then, we are reminded of the cause and nature of worship in the words of the greeting:

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you.

This is a God who cannot be named simply. This is a God with a distinctive character that cannot be fathomed as one does a creature. This is a God who transcends whatever conceptions we might create, whatever names we might give, whatever categories or boxes we may make for the harnessing of divinity. This is both unity and diversity merged. Oneness and variety combined. Singularity and community blended.

The name of God is the one in which "the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit" are so different that they are named successively, yet bound together.

When we want to emphasize the oneness of the divine mystery we usually use the term "trinity;" when we want to emphasize their difference, we use "triunity." Regardless of the terminology we use, we hold that God is no single Lord in Heaven who rules everything, as a temporal ruler would. Nor do we mean some sort of cold power of providence who determines all and cannot be affected by anything. The triune God is a social God, rich in internal and external relationships. (adapted from Juergen Moltmann)

It is only from the perspective of the trinitarian God that we can claim that "God is Love," because love is never alone. It brings together those who are separate while maintaining their distinct characters. It makes an "us" out of many "I"s.

Perhaps you have been caught up short when reading the first few chapters of scripture. Genesis tells of the creation of the world, culminating in the creation of human beings with these surprising words:

Then God said, "Let us make humankind, in our image, according to our likeness..." (1:26)

God speaks of God's self in terms of "us" and "our". Even at the beginning, internal fellowship is a characteristic of the divine. Trinitarian theology affirms that the communal elements of such passages describe more than a heavenly court. They point to the deepest nature of God as an us, not an isolated I.

The reading from Proverbs this morning affirms this, and provides clues to its meaning:

[Wisdom speaks] When God established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above,...then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight...(Proverbs 8: 27-28,30)

Wisdom, you see, is an English word that translates the Hebrew. What we can't see in English is the feminine form of the word for wisdom, which clarifies the imprecise nature of our particular form for naming God. In Greek, an associated word is Logos, which we find, finally, in the gospel of John, where a part of the mystery is solved:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being...And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. (1:1-3,14)

God, from the beginning, was more than we imagine as a single being. Even at the start, God was a unity composed of an internal fellowship, including the Father, as well as the Word—the Son, though even that identification is done for the sake of simplicity, for the biblical tradition is far more complex.

The final aspect of God is noted in today's gospel:

When the Spirit of truth comes, [that Spirit] will guide you into all the truth.

There it is—the full complement of, if simplified, the manifestations of God, each with its own particular history of activity. Suffice it to say at the moment that the Spirit too can be traced back into the Hebrew Scriptures.

What intrigues me on this year's Holy Trinity Sunday is the fellowship, the community, the partnership, implied both within God and in the church that is created by the work of God.

Juergen Moltmann puts this into some thick language, but it says what I want to communicate today:

If it is a characteristic of the divine Spirit not merely to communicate this or that particular thing, but actually to enter into fellowship with believing men and women—if indeed the Spirit becomes their fellowship—then "fellowship" cannot merely be a "gift" of the Spirit. It must be the eternal, essential nature of the Spirit himself. Whereas Christ, the Son of God is called the source of grace, and God the Father is called the source of love, "fellowship" (or communion) is designated as the nature of the Spirit... The Spirit does not merely bring about fellowship with himself. He himself issues from his fellowship with the Father and the Son, and the fellowship into which he enters with believers corresponds to his fellowship with the Father and the Son, and is therefore a trinitarian fellowship.

Simply put, the doctrine of the Trinity offers a clue to the experience of living community in our churches today. God embodies the very nature of reality as relational, communal—a matter of fellowship.

What is most important about belief in a triune God is not that we see God in three ways, but that we understand God as dynamic community. Within God there is a special energy that expresses the love of God experienced in Jesus Christ.

All of us who have fallen in love know something of this reality. A friendship between two persons may "exist" for days or for years; the relationship is there, but it is static. Then, suddenly it changes, and the interpersonal situation comes alive with intense emotion and empathy. Lover and loved are one. Individuals shine and actually discover themselves in the love of the other. Their caring is so deep and full that it spills over into the lives of family and friends, and we cannot be in their presence without being touched by that love.

To believe in a God as Trinity is to suggest that there is an inner relational energy within God that spills over into the Christian life.

John of Damascus, an eighth-century theologian, describes this way of understanding God by proposing that there is an exchange of energy between the persons of the Trinity by virtue of their eternal love. The unity of the Trinity is not static; it exists as open and loving community. John of Damascus uses the Greek word "perichoresis" to describe what is going on within God. "Perichoresis" comes from the same root as the word "choreography." It suggests that there is an active, circulatory character within the eternal divine life.

When we worship a triune God, we celebrate the love that flows in God's eternal dance of togetherness—a dance we know through Jesus Christ, the Lord of the dance. A true doctrine of the Trinity contains the vision of a community of women and men in church and society without privilege or distinction. The doctrine of the Trinity asserts that relationship is fundamental to God and that community is the foundation of God's interaction with the world.

Understood in this way, the doctrine of the Trinity itself calls us to care for one another. Even the very nature of God represents an ethic of justice and caring. Like the various expressions of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Creator, Reconciler, and Advocate—we and every member of the community should be treated as of equal worth. Despite differences in power, privilege, or gift, things should be fair. Everyone should be responded to and included. No one should be left alone or hurt. The standards of fellowship in the Holy Spirit are nurture, responsibility, and care.

In one sense, the community of God is the church—those of us called out of the world to be about God's work in the world. In another sense, the community of God is the Trinity—a uniquely Christian way of confessing our faith about the nature of God and what that means for our discipleship.

All that from what many see as a confusing and outdated church doctrine! Not bad at all.

May this God, who is more than we can imagine—whose being itself calls us into just and peaceable fellowship with one another, bless us and keep us in this holy communion.   —   Amen.