All right. Well, here it is, Trinity Sunday again. The only Sunday of the year when we celebrate the theological doctrine that allows us to end prayers with, "O Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever." I was at the diocese this week, and I asked a clergy friend of mine, "What are you doing for Trinity Sunday?" "I have the perfect solution," he said. "What?" I said, anxious to get any help I could. "I’ve asked one of the wardens to preach," he said, "and I’m leaving town."

Well, I’m still here, and the wardens are safe (I know the canons better than my friend), and so I suppose I could undertake to explain to you this doctrine which the church worked out in the fourth century. We could talk about the technical meanings of the debate about the Trinity, how one side spoke Greek and the other Latin, how they consistently mistranslated one another, thereby making agreement almost impossible, and about how they argued for a hundred years over the meaning of terms like prosopon, hypostasis, persona, homoousia, and homoiousia.

The first little pig went to the university library and read all she could on the subject of love; when she had finished, she had learned a great deal about love, but her life was still empty.

The second little pig took another route. He read in the newspaper that a famous pig was coming to town to deliver a series of sermons on the subject of love. He attended all the sermons and was filled with enthusiasm and emotions. The second little pig’s "high" lasted four days, and then his life became pretty much as empty as it had been before.

The third little pig invited two other pigs over to the house one evening, and all three pigs began to share their life stories, continuing until late at night. They found this so interesting that they agreed to meet together regularly to share experiences and life together. In time, they came to care about each other very deeply. One evening, after all the guest pigs had left, the third little pig said to her siblings: "Now I know what love is; I have experienced it."

The Trinity is not really a doctrine about technical meanings of archaic words. It is about an experience of love. The early church, was trying to explain what God’s inner life must be like, what God’s nature must be, for God to be able to be the infinite creator of the universe, unbounded by time and space, and at the same time to be our savior, fully God and fully human. How could the infinite God love and be in relationship with the finite Jesus? And, of course, by implication, how can the infinite God love and be in relationship with us?

They argued over all those technical words: prosopon, hypostasis, persona, homoousia, homoiousia. It makes my head hurt. What they were trying to explain was their experience of Jesus—finite, human, set in time and place, Jesus—as God who is pure, unbounded love. How could the one God have such a loving relationship with Jesus, and how could God continue to have such a loving relationship with them?

And the answer didn’t come from the little pig who went to the library. Studying all those archaic words won’t do it. And the answer didn’t come from the little pig who listened to sermons, even if he had listened to this one! The answer comes from an experience, shared by the community, of God’s love in Christ. The Trinity, before it is anything technical or theological, is about an experience of love. The third little pig got it right, whether she could explain it or not. (St. Augustine said, "Lest you become discouraged, know that when you love, you know more about who God is than you could ever know with your intellect."). What the church and the third little pig discovered was that God’s very nature is to love. That’s easy to say, but it’s actually pretty complicated. You can’t love without something to love. Love can never be a game of solitaire. And so, the church said it this way, "God the Father so loves God the Son, that love itself is as much a part of God as the Father and the Son. Love is at the heart of God’s very being. Within God, there is a lover, a beloved, and a heart that beats love."

The experience of the early church was that the one God, the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Lover, all part of one another and inseparable, that God was the God they experienced through Christ. That was the God who could have such a loving relationship with Jesus, and who could have such a loving relationship with them.

That’s the God we worship; the God whose very being is creativity, and redemption, and love, all together, all at once, all the time. What that means is that God’s very nature makes God yearn for you, yearn to love you, yearn for you to love God. God can’t help it; it’s who God is.

So, that’s what the Trinity is about. Another Trinity Sunday under our belts. Now we can just move on, right? Well, of course we could, but that would be a shame. Because the Trinity doesn’t just tell us about God; it challenges us. Because each of us is made in God’s image, and, as a community, we are to be God’s body in the world. So the Trinity is not just a doctrine about how loving God is, like some candy you can eat forever and never gain weight or get full. It is also a challenge to who we are, we children made in God’s image, we the body of Christ. The Trinity wants to know of us, "Is loving at the very heart of your being? Do you yearn to love?" And you know me well enough by now to know that I don’t let you off easy: "Do you yearn to love your enemies, the people who annoy you, the people who hate you, the people who don’t love you back, the people who have hurt you? Do you yearn to love Timothy McVeigh?" (That’s a hard one, isn’t it? It’s hard for me, too. If anyone stands here and tells you that Christian love is easy, you ask for your money back!)

As a community, do we yearn to love one another? Do people who don’t go to St. John’s look at us and say, "That church just can’t help loving people. The wrong people. The people they get in trouble for loving. They seem to love because they just can’t help it."

Well, that’s really it, isn’t it? To love not to make ourselves feel good, or for recognition, but because we can’t help it, because it’s just who we are.

We very much are people like that, a community like that, and we very much are not people like that, a community like that. That seems to be the nature of human experience—some "yes," some "no." So the Trinity still has work to do in us. As we reflect on the nature of God, the Trinity urges us to respond with such grateful hearts that God’s nature burns within us, and we love simply because loving is who we are.

That’s a lot. That’s a whole lot. And we need to be reminded of it over and over. But we are. We are reminded of it every time we close our prayer by saying something like, "O Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, for ever and ever." And you might notice that we close most prayers with some sort of Trinitarian formula like that. So when you hear it, say to yourself, "O, there’s the Trinity, telling us about who God is, and challenging us about who we are."