The story is told of a grumpy man who never went to church on Christmas or on Easter, but was present every year on Trinity Sunday. Finally when a church warden asked him why, the man gave an honest answer: "I come to hear the preacher get all tangled up trying to explain the Holy Trinity." Now that tangle will probably happen again today because the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery, not the kind of mystery that will get solved when we arrange all the clues right, but a mystery that will always be so. A Bishop who visited the Sunday school in my parish one Trinity Sunday learned this when he asked a little boy what he had studied in class that day. "We learned about the Thrinty," said Sean, and the puzzled Bishop asked Sean to repeat himself. Sean tried again, "We learned about the Holy Thrinty," and when the Bishop still didn't understand, Sean explained, "It's a mythery; you're not thupposed to."

Another person who wrestled with the mystery was St. Augustine. The saint was walking along the beach one day pondering how God could be three persons and yet one God, when he came upon a small boy pouring water into a hole in the sand. "What are you doing?" Augustine asked. "I'm pouring the ocean into this hole," was the boy's reply. "You can't do that," scoffed Augustine. And with divine wisdom, the boy responded, "And neither can you, sir, ever comprehend the mystery of God."

But Augustine never did give up trying to understand the Trinity. The best explanation of that mystery he was able to give is that the Trinity is all about a relationship of love: God the Father is the Lover, Christ the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the Love that flows between the Father and the Son. What is important, Augustine said, is the relationship that connects the persons of God.

Another theologian named Meister Eckhart saw the Trinity as a relationship of joy and pleasure. He asked, "Do you want to know what goes on in the core of the Trinity? I will tell you. In the core of the Trinity, the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.

St. Patrick, we are told, used a shamrock to show that God was like three leaves on one stem, three separate but connected persons in one God. I even tried my own hand at a Trinitarian analogy when I was 13. My parents had bought their first window air conditioner, and it had three buttons labeled 'Cool' 'Fan In' and 'Fan Out.' Aha, I thought, plunging unwittingly into the heresy of modalism, God is one being with three functions.

All of us, Augustine, Eckhart, Patrick, and Bill were trying to answer the question of what God is like. And that attempt is where the doctrine of the Trinity comes from. It did not spring full-blown from the pens of theologians or from the meditations of saints. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity evolved slowly from the growing experience and understanding of God's people.

The idea of the Trinity began with the primary experience of someone bigger than we are, a Creator who brought things into being, a power that the Israelites called Yahweh. And from the beginning, Israel claimed that God is made known in history. God made things and called them good; God saved Noah from the great flood; and God called Abraham to leave home and become the father of a great nation. God saved Israel by sending Moses to lead the people through the Red Sea waters. And so God became known not as a god of a particular place, as the god of the Tigris and Euphrates, not as a god of an attribute, as the god of power, but as the God of people named Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In a world of many gods, Israel boldly proclaimed monotheism: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. No more gods of wind and rain, no more tribal deities, Israel had one God and dared to say that theirs was the God of all people and all places and all times.

And then in the fullness of time when the laws of behavior had become more important than the law of love, God acted again and came to dwell among the people in Jesus Christ. And the people saw God made known in the life of a human being, and they came to see that God loved them enough to live with them in a world that is both frightening and full of wonder.

After Jesus died on the cross, the first words spoken were by a Roman soldier. "Surely this man was the son of God," he said. But Jesus' own followers weren't sure what they wanted to say about him. Was he the son of God or was he God? Was he truly divine and only appeared to be human? Was he was the holiest of men, but not God? The greatest sin for Jews was that of idolatry, worshipping false gods. So if Jesus were God, that claim would challenge the monotheism that was their faith and their heritage. But if Jesus were not God, how could he claim to speak God's word as his own? How could he rise from the dead?

It took hundreds of years before the great councils of the Church met to capture the mystery in words. They didn't try to say so much who Jesus is than who Jesus isn't. The councils and the creeds established boundaries that said, "You can think your way around within these lines but not outside of them. You can't believe that there are two Gods, nor can you believe that Jesus was merely a terrific fellow. You can't believe that he was only pretending to be human, because he is both God and man, and it is a mystery how this can be so."

The question about Jesus was not the only question in the air. The disciples knew that they were ordinary men; time and again they had failed to grasp what Jesus told them. They were not brave; they had proved that at the time of Jesus' arrest. But these ordinary people found themselves doing extraordinary things. They found that the healing power of God gave them the power to produce miracles. They found that they could preach news good enough to win thousands of followers. Even though Jesus had died and risen and ascended into heaven, they experienced God within them still. God's spirit, the Holy Spirit, they called it. The Spirit was present and powerful; it could blow through windows and set people on fire. And so the people claimed yet another person of the Trinity, the one who made them holy, the Sanctifier.

That is how the doctrine of the Holy Trinity came to proclaim that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons who have existed from before time and forever as one God. Yet it is not the persons of the Trinity that matter as much as the fact that ours is a God of relationship, a God who is not just Love but a God who loves, who continues to create and heal and make us holy, a dynamic God who promises "to lead us into all truth."

What this means is that if we are made in the image of God, we too are made to be in relationship; that relationships are the core of our life together. This should come as no surprise. Infants, for example, are made to be cared for. If infants are not held, not fed, not dandled on the knee, they die, for their survival, physically and emotionally, depends on their being known and loved. And throughout all our days, life is a shared experience. Our habits and skills are taught to us by others; our sense of self reflects how we see ourselves in the eyes of others. Our worst fears are those of alienation, being separated by death or divorce, having a life so isolated that it doesn't matter to anybody whether or not we get up in the morning. The worst punishment, even for hardened criminals, is solitary confinement. On the other hand, our best moments are when we connect with each other - when we are hugged, when our work is affirmed and we contribute to the common good, when friendship makes us valuable. We exist to be in relationship because our Creator is a God of relationship and the highest virtues are forgiveness and reconciliation and care for each other.

The mystery of the Holy Trinity is more than a dry doctrine. It tells us that the quality of our country's relationship with other nations is more important than our power over them. The mystery of the Holy Trinity tells us that the most important quality of the Church lies in our relationships with one another and with the world, not in the correctness of our doctrine and our theology. "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples," Jesus said, "if you have love for one another." The mystery of the Holy Trinity tells us that how we connect with each other in this and every community is more important than our buildings, our budget, and our programs. It is because relationships matter that the Church takes marriage seriously and condemns promiscuity. It is because we take relationships in the Church seriously that authority is shared and every person valued.

We are not just individuals but, like the Trinity, a community connected at the very heart of our being, and so competition and rivalry, jealousy and rancor, have no place in the Christian heart. In short, the Holy Trinity is a model of who we are and how we are to live, caring for one another, enriching one another, being faithful to one another, loving one another.