Huh?

 

Do you like mysteries? I do, especially the Scandinavia-crime-noir kind. Here’s a mystery for you:  There’s a mystery that’s not a mystery.

Huh?

This Sunday, I’ll celebrate the Holy Eucharist and preach at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Joplin. I’ll be the guest priest on the Feast of the Trinity, the Sunday when many rectors plan vacation rather than preach to a congregation about the Trinity—one God in three persons.

Yes, huh?

The doctrine of the Trinity expresses the mystery of our human experience of God. In the Holy Scriptures, you won’t find an explicit statement of this central teaching of the Christian church, but you will find an implicit one.

In the first person of the Trinity, we experience God as Father, Creator. We enjoy the gift of life only because God, in his love, willed us out of nothingness and into being as the unique people we are. And God surrounded us with the goodness of creation. Indeed, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in “God’s Grandeur,” that the “world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil….”

In the second person of the Trinity, God became a human being. “The word was made flesh and dwelled among us full of grace and truth,” Jesus says in the Gospel of St. John. And in his Son, God the Father—-once again, in love—comes to save us, to take our brokenness and make us whole as individuals and as a world. Faith in Jesus Christ is the love that saves.

And in the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, Jesus fulfils his promise in the gospel that he will not leave us alone, without comfort and power for living but will give us the gift of his Holy Spirit, God with us always in this world and in the world to come, continuing the work of healing or sanctification.

The mystery is that we believe in one God in three persons. The huh? of the Trinity. But there’s no mystery in God loving us fully, as the Bible shows, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So, that huh? Is really, Aha!