This much beloved Sunday, many people's favorites, and certainly one of mine - a fondness we all share with St Thomas Beckett - who adored, literally, this Feast we celebrate today. So we are in good company in our shared devotion, from the 12th century to the 21st. I love today, but I am not sure I love this very moment--and certainly doubt you do, or could! A priest, with a miscellaneous intellect, and that no longer what it once was, meager as it may have been back then - opining on the greatest, most complicated teaching in the church - the well-nigh incomprehensible doctrine of the Trinity - God in three persons, and in one single Unity of Being--one God, one. Yet three persons in that Godhead--but not, not never, three gods. One. In Three. I admitted to you in some sermon or other on one Trinity here in the past of my chastening moment in Seminary. A much-more confident, far too-confident, 24 year-old Bill Rhodes took a theology course from the renowned Dr Richard Norris. He insisted (worn-out by wordy seminarians--like me then, and still!) that all students in his theology class specify in one opening sentence what their paper was all about, what it would cover. For my final exam paper on the Doctrine of the Trinity I did so: "In this paper on the Trinity, I shall define and describe the Nature of God." A single comment was scrawled in red when the corrected exam paper came back--"Oh no you won't, young man!" I guess I learned one thing back then--I have not thought I could since. Not even on Trinity Sunday, lovely and appropriate as that would be. But again, like our love for Trinity Sunday, my belated modesty also puts in good company, the best. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest mind the Church has ever seen, the finest thinker, the most profound theologian, the most brilliant writer the Church has ever been grace with in 2,000 years, on his deathbed, recalled all his work, magnificent and still prevailing today as the official theology of the Church worldwide, this man thought upon his lifetime of work writing about the nature of God and sighed, "Straw. All Straw." And died. I refuse to be that silly seminarian, and I surely refuse to be one of those ridiculous priests who once a year, today, try to do better than Thomas Aquinas. This is a modesty we should, must all share. There is no explaining God, or describing him, or even understanding him. All we can do, should do, and it is what we must do--describe, explain, understand our experience of God, not his nature, or his reality, or his ways. Simply, and wonderfully and importantly, we can, must, do, as the church has since 321 AD, describe how we experience God, how we encounter him as he moves in and through our lives. Those heroic and saintly Nicene Bishops gathered from all over Christendom at Nicaea in 321, did this and they knew it was what they were doing when they produced the Creed, and set for the Doctrine of the Trinity--describing not how God is, but how the church, how Christians experience him. One God - no waffling on that allowed--ever! But yes, Christians knew a Creator, a Redeemer, a Sanctifier--a God beyond all history and one who walked the hills of Galilee for 33 years, a God eternal, from before time and forever, but killed one Friday afternoon. And then risen and then ascended, and then still here, with us daily. That is how they and we, and all Christians have experienced him. The Doctrine of the Trinity summarizes this - and sets it forth for all to accept and believe and treasure - but not understand, not comprehend - they are clear on this - he is and was, and always will be incomprehensible, we will never understand, ought, rightly, never to question or wonder of hope to describe. Just experience, and so love and honor and cherish, and worship and obey and adore. Without ever understanding. Even trying, trying to do that, in any way is, well ... straw. All straw. In the Name of the Triune God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.