Trinity Sunday. We worship one God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This Sunday, this Trinity Sunday, I find I have been priest now for 30 years. Thirty years! That gave me ten years to understand each Person of the Trinity, a decade each to think about, pray about read about each one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three in thirty years. And I have gotten nowhere, I have made no progress, no improvement in my understanding of God. I not only have not made any progress, I have gone backward. And I am glad and grateful. Glad and grateful that I never did, and never could, understand God. I comfort myself with the fact that neither do you, and neither does the Archbishop of Canterbury, and neither does the Pope. If you can figure out God, then he ain’t God. True, I once knew more than I do now. After 30 years of preaching, I can’t remember which anecdotes about my life I have put into sermons. If you’ve heard this one, please forgive me for repeating myself. But then, of course, you yourselves repeat saying “Amen” every Sunday, and seem fine with that. So here goes: Thirty-three years ago, in my first year in Seminary, I wrote a paper on the Trinity. In my first paragraph I outlined what I would cover in the paper--my theology professor always liked that. I declared that I would explore the Trinity and so explain the nature of God. The professor wrote in red: “Oh no you won't!” I got the eerie sense he read no further. So 30 years on, I can say, and mean, I know less and less now. and am glad, because, of course, it simply means that at last, 30 years on, I know more and more about what I do not know and will not know in this life, cannot know until I stand before him and finally fully understand, even as I am fully understood, no longer as in a mirror dimly, as St. Paul promises. Until then, I am perfectly content knowing and admitting that I do not, cannot, understand the Trinity or the nature of God. At all. And that puts me in a quandary this morning. To comment on the Trinity at all, even briefly, seems reckless. But for a preacher never to mention God at least on Trinity Sunday, seems irresponsible, and, somehow unprofessional. And so best, I guess, to stick to repeating again what we all know, which is minute but magnificent - flawed, limited, meager, but enough, sufficient, more than that, it is all we need to know, all we will ever know in this life. And we all already know it, you can't have ever said the Creed and not know it. So perhaps Trinity Sunday, so beloved of Episcopalians, is a time each year just to repeat it all, and offer our praise and thanks and wonder to God - one God, in Trinity of Persons and in Unity of Being. So, listen politely if you will, ignore if you want, but one thing I ask of you--sing those hymns with gusto and conviction. They say as much as we will ever know and say it better than any preacher I have ever heard. Today’s hymns--if you know them, you know everything the Church has ever had to say about the Trinity. The Doctrine of the Trinity is about God, about who God is, how God has expressed himself, how God has revealed himself. It is our most adequate expression in inadequate human language to express the nature of God--that there is one God, and that God is one. One in being - a unity. And that one God exists in a trinity of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, neither mixing up the various persons nor dividing up the basic the unity. In its teaching on the Trinity, the Church, as best it can, accounts for who God is and how all our experiences of God, of the divine, hold together. The One who called forth and provided for those trillion billion stars, all those galaxies, black-holes, super-novas, dark matter, parallel universes--that One is God, and the same God who, on earth, cared about one leper who was ashamed of his disease, who worried about one old widow who's only child had died. The One who fired up the universe, also cares about, and attends to, all the issues of my life. The One who holds all reality together is the very One who cared about sparrows and mustard seeds, and cares about me, and you. The One who created reality itself can slip - silent and unseen - into our lives as a Holy Spirit, inclining us to do our best, and gently guiding us to see what that might be. The galaxies just have to share him, and he insists that they do. The Church's majestic doctrine of God has a sweet and tender side to it - it maintains that the principle, the action, that is sustaining all of this, enabling all of this, and keeping it going, is love. The very same love you think about when you think about love. God is love, three individual Persons all relating in love, expressing a Unity that only love produces and sustains. The Son loving the Father, the Father loving the Son, both loving the Spirit, and the Spirit loving them equally, all of them loving all of them, all loving all of us, and calling forth in us our love for them and for each other. This is doubtless not much to know after 30 years, but in those years I have learned that it is everything worth knowing. God exists in Trinity of Persons, yet in Unity of Being, and that Trinity, that God, is love. That is all we know. And all we need to know. And all we need. Now, let us get back to singing, and let us start with the Creed--which you know.