A few days after celebrating Holy Trinity Sunday in worship, there's a chance that many of us are still scratching our heads about the idea that we worship a God who is three-in-one and one-in-three. It's a bad math problem where 1+1+1=1. I had a friend in high school who told the story of being in kindergarten and trying to learn that 1+1=2. And he struggled with it, because he would take a piece of Play-Doh in one hand, and a piece of Play-Doh in the other hand, and bring them together to add them, and inadvertently smush the two pieces together into one. It certainly appeared to him as if 1+1 equaled 1!

Not one of us are able to explain how three can be one and one can be three...and most historical attempts at an explanation end up veering into one form of ancient heresy or another. Because God isn't just a shape-shifter taking three forms, but at the same time, God's three individual expressions aren't so distinct that we have three Gods. The truth is that the inner details of the trinity are a big, fat mystery.

What we do know, however, is that the trinity is about God-in-community. The trinity gives us a fuller and more fulfilling image of who God is and how God works in the world.

Some people think of God as like a great big parent, a father or mother in the sky, or maybe a fearsome judge who stares down and makes us behave out of fear and guilt. Some other people think of God like a divine clockmaker who made the creation, wound it up, and lets it tick away on its own. Other people think of God as like some distant star, cold, unblinking, shining out there somewhere, but far away from us and our lives. But when we walk the trail called Trinity, we discover that God is not a fearsome judge or a clockmaker or a distant star, but God is rather a community of persons--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a living and dynamic communion of love and self-giving. (From "The Start of the Trail," a sermon by Rev. Dr. Thomas G. Long)

We sometimes want to believe that our relationship with God is a one-on-one thing, a personal thing, a private matter between our own individual souls and God. But...that's not how God works. God works in community. God creates the world in community - "let us create humankind in our image," we read in Genesis. And on the cross, God saves the world in community - Jesus on the cross, crying out to his Father God, the spirit of God transforming the heart of the centurion and tearing the temple curtain in two. Jesus ascends to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, and sends us the Spirit, the Advocate in his absence. God being in community means that we are never far off from God. And it means that faith is a communal effort.

We use lots of words to label what we do around the table in worship - Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, the Meal - but one of the most powerful phrases we use is "holy communion." Guess what? When we are eating the bread and drinking the wine, we are not simply communing with God. We are participating in a meal that is a communion of all of God's saints, past, present, and future. Being in communion with God (in the meal and beyond it!) is a matter of being in communion with all of the faithful.

The author Sara Miles, in her book Take This Bread, describes her first time serving communion in her church:

What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity: you can’t be a Christian by yourself….I wasn’t getting [communion] because I was special. I certainly didn’t get to pick who else was good enough, holy enough, deserving enough, to receive it. It wasn’t a private meal. The bread on that table had to be shared with everyone in order for me to really taste it.

This is what the trinity is all about. Realizing that God can only be God if he exists in community. And that faith is at its truest when it, too, exists in community. And that sharing faith is the only way to truly taste it, and know it, and experience it most fully.