Last Sunday was Pentecost Sunday, the day, according to the scriptures, that the Holy Spirit ascended upon men and women gathered together coming to them through a great wind and tongues of fire causing those to be present to speak in languages that were not their own.

Today is Trinity Sunday and we are asked once again to dig deeply into the mystery at the center of the Christian faith--the Trinity--and what that means about God and us. The doctrine of the Trinity itself cannot be found explicitly in scripture. Yet, it is scriptural to its core. It is the result of the church's some 250 years of reflecting on scripture and on its experience of God's self-revelation, as those encounters are recorded in scripture and the church's continuing experience of God over us, of God with us, and of God in us.  Throughout the centuries, theologians have sought to define just how it is that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit dwell together and with all of creation.

In their commentary on Trinity Sunday, the authors of Handbook of the Christian Year counsel us that rather than approaching this day with an emphasis on “the Trinity as an abstract concept, idea, or doctrine,” and seeking to explain or define it, it rather “seems more in keeping with the character of worship and of the Christian Year to treat Trinity Sunday as a day in which we praise and adore the infinitely complex and unfathomable mystery of God’s being to which we point when we speak of the Holy Trinity.” They go on to write,

“Because our celebration of the Easter cycle is based upon the mighty acts of the triune God, and because we are entering upon the Sunday-to-Sunday half of the year when the emphasis is wholeheartedly upon each Sunday as the Lord’s Day, whose celebration is also based upon the mighty acts of the triune God, it is appropriate that we pause on this transitional Sunday to give ourselves over to the adoration and praise of the being—as distinct from the acts—of the triune God.”

It is sometimes difficult, of course, to separate the doing of the Trinity from the being of the Trinity, for it is part of the nature of the Trinity to be in action, to work in relationship within itself and in cooperation with creation. The Trinity or the fullness of God is about relationship with each other.  Each of the Trinity is an aspect of God.

God is a whole lot bigger than anything we can say or imagine and our experience of God is a marvelous and mysterious experience.

We know the God of Isaiah - the God who is high and lifted up in his temple, the God who speaks and brings forth all of creation, the God who is judge, lord, ruler, king -  the God who is in light inaccessible hidden from our eyes..

This God is strange to us, this God is beyond us, this God we dare not touch even though we know this God and this God knows us, even though we see this God's signs all around us in the earth, the wind, the air, and the fire.

And then we have the God who is in Christ, the God who is Christ - the God who is lowly, and humble, the God who reaches out and touches others, the God who serves others, the God who walks the earth with us, and cries and laughs with us; the God who calls God Abba, Father, Daddy, the God who is tempted with us, the God who hungers and thirsts with us, the God who embraces us and encourages us, the God who surrenders himself to death having only the promise and the hope of being raised again.

And we have and know God the Spirit - God the bringer of visions and of dreams, God the source of strength and of hope, God the supplier of healing words and of comfort filling prayer, God the wind, the breath, the air we breathe, God the transformer, the one who gives new birth, new life, God the presence within us and the presence all around us, God calling to us - calling for us - calling through us, calling in us.

We are the children of God, says Paul, when we cry Abba -, Father, it is the Spirit of God bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.

As a Christian I realize there is so much to know about  God - God is always greater than my knowledge but I have the experience of what God has shown me – that is that I know God in three different ways, that I experience God in three ways and that I love God in three ways.

CS Lewis - in his book Mere Christianity tries to describe part of this experience - this three-fold knowing - this three-fold loving - in his description of a Christian at prayer.

"What I mean is this." he writes, "An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers.  He is trying to get into touch with God.  But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God so to speak, inside him.  And he also knows that all real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him.  You see what is happening.  God is the spirit inside of him - pushing him on - the motive power.  God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to offer his prayer to God.  The whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary act of prayer."

If we have learned anything of God it is that the Trinity, the fullness of God is about relationship with each other.  The Native understanding of ‘all our relations” includes Mother Earth and the creatures of the earth along with each other.  This relationship is to be built from a place of love for each other, the earth and the creatures of the earth.

The God I have come to know, the Trinity of God is love and relationships of love are what God is all about. It is no wonder that the one new commandment that Jesus gives us is the commandment to love one another; which is the commandment to imitate Jesus and his life.

It is through this command, seen in the light of our notion of God as the Trinity that we can begin to see what God really wants from us and what God really wants for us. God’s will for us, God’s desire for us, is, first of all and most of all, is that we choose to share God’s life -- that we become more and more deeply a part of that conversation of love, that constant, respectful, and joyful relationship that is the very core of who God is.

After all, we are created in God’s image -- in the image of the Trinity. So, the more our lives are shaped and formed by the life of love we see in the person of Christ and in the life of God, the closer we get to our best and truest selves.

This business of the Trinity is not just abstract theology; it is very immediate, and very personal. In some very important ways, it is about us -- about us here and now; and about us forever.

The heart of creation is love, and we are both created and invited to enter that love, and to share that love. That is good news. It is good news about why we exist; and it is good news about our destiny.

This is the mystery of God we celebrate today: God over and above us, God for and with us, God in and among us, One God, the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ, the God who in the waters of baptism makes us his own, the God who meets us at table to give us the bread of life and the cup of blessing, the God who is in us and among us, using us to share the good news of a love that never ends and a purpose for us all.  And that is worth paying attention to.