Grace and peace to you from our Lord and Savoir Jesus Christ.

Today is Trinity Sunday; normally festivals of the church are based on a Biblical event such as Pentecost last week. This festival is different we celebrate a doctrine of Christianity.

The Trinity is a hard concept for humans to get our arms around. We can't describe it adequately in human terms or really understand it in human terms.

This week a disaster at work helped put a new spin on the trinity for me. My small team has been building an application for months. For reasons unknown as yet the file structure on the server where we were building this application was corrupted. Not to worry the server is backed up every night.

We quickly learned that the backups were useless. No one in the team responsible for the backups ever took the time to verify the backups were valid. Fortunately when we started to notice unusual events occurring we exported our code repository the piece that was the most valuable part of our efforts. Even with that bit of luck we still spent three days around the clock rebuilding on new servers.

The interesting thing was that I was able to see the human equivalent of the trinity. People with authority would shift characteristics. At one moment they could very supportive, at another very demanding of a resolution time, and at other times totally out of touch with the enormity of the task to recover from the system failure. The same person could manifest all of the characteristics many times. Of course I know that these manifestations were just reactions to pressure from higher up the food chain. And I may have exaggerated the manifestations just a tad. But sometimes I have to stop and wonder whether this is the same person I was talking to moments before.

Think about how hard it is to resolve how the three Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all one yet also three. Throughout scripture we have all three mentioned many times yet there are no specifics about the relationship.

People will tell you the word trinity doesn't appear in scripture so it was a concept of man's making. The word may be of man but the truth is throughout scripture.

The Trinity became a unifying doctrine of Christianity at the First Council of Nicaea. Prior to that there were competing views of the nature of Jesus. The most popular views were he was a man or maybe a higher heavenly being than man but not divine, He was God in some other form than His heavenly presence, and He was both man and God at the same time.

In the Eastern Church the differing views led to civil unrest. The Roman Emperor Constantine, out of political necessity and genuine interest called the First Council of Nicaea in, 325 AD, to settle the differences and unify the Church.

As you might expect the proceedings were less than civil at times but in the end the deacon of Alexandria, Athanasius, championed the doctrine we know today. Jesus was both man and God. After all if Jesus was God in some other form and he died who raised him from the dead? And if Jesus were man or some heavenly being can his death be enough of a ransom to purchase the world from the grips of death? The doctrine of the Trinity is really a statement about our salvation through the death of Jesus Christ.

This is where the Holy Spirit and faith step in; we believe it even when we can't explain it. Scripturally the only difference between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the parts they play in our salvation. God the Father sends the Son, God the Son willingly obeys, dies, and is resurrected. God the Father and God the Son pour out the Holy Spirit upon the world to heal the broken relationship between God and man by enabling our faith in Jesus the Son.

The very concept of the three in one appears in the very beginning of the bible. We have a reference to God in a plural sense and a reference to the Holy Spirit.

Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew word used for God is Elohim, which is plural.

Gen 1:2…. . and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

We find this in the first verses of Genesis and there are many other references to God in a plural sense throughout the Old Testament.

The full revelation of the Trinity comes to us in the New Testament with the glorification of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Peter's speech to the people of Jerusalem bares witness to this fact. We find the Spirit at work in the bold words of Peter, Jesus in the message Peter proclaims, and the Father who raised Jesus and made Him Lord and Christ.

It's a real struggle to deal with the Trinity in an intellectual way, but then the intellectual way is human, not of God. There are many things about this mystery that are hard to rationalize not just three in one.

What about one of the three coming to earth in human form and being the final sacrifice so that we can be with God for eternity?

What about eternal life itself?

Many reject that there is an eternal life. Life here in this world is so terrible why even consider a life beyond this one. Or life here is so busy accumulating things why consider anything other life.

That way of thinking is a misunderstanding of what eternal life truly is. Eternal life isn't an extension of this life it's a new life. A new life without sickness, death, sorrow or sin, to concern us. The love of our Lord surrounding us for eternity is all we will know. That is what people really need and want. Of course everyone wants it on their own terms not God's terms.

Sometimes we have doubts about the reality of eternal life. I want to draw your attention to Matthew 28:17. The disciples are on a mountain in Galilee because they followed the instructions given to the women at the tomb by Jesus. "When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted." Some doubted that's an incredible statement. After everything they experienced they doubted? Perhaps the statement reflects that doubt is natural and can be a constructive form of evaluating the truth. They may have doubted but they were obedient to His instructions.

When we believe in Jesus as He instructed and let the Spirit work in us our lives improve. We make better choices. We realize the things of this world are really just little distractions.

You know what is really troubling though. Some of these same people that reject eternal life have been blessed with so much in the way of worldly treasures. They think they don't need anything. These people live all around us. What can we do about this dilemma? What should we be doing about this dilemma? Jesus said, go and baptize all nations, in other words share our joy in the gift of knowledge given to us through the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is a gift to us yet we don't look at it that way. I think we look at this gift as a child looks at opening a present to find a piece of clothing. Okay we got a gift and we move on. The gift of the Spirit is something to be excited about. If we didn't have the Spirit we couldn't know Jesus. We couldn't even begin to grasp the idea of the Trinity.

On this Sunday in particular we try to focus our thoughts on this mystery of our triune God. Although we know we should be focused on Him at all times, the evidence clearly demonstrates otherwise.

It's comforting to know that even if we have difficulty keeping Him in our thoughts at all times and that we have doubts; we are always in His thoughts. He is so focused on us that even the very hairs of our heads are all numbered. No matter how often we look away He welcomes us back every time without fail.

Perhaps we need to look at scripture from the beginning to appreciate the gift of the Spirit. Every day of creation in Genesis is followed by, "And God saw that it was good. "And look at the sequence of creation. It tells us God had a plan. It wasn't some haphazard sequence of events, it was planned. The coming of the Messiah was planned. The coming of the Spirit was planned. God loves His people so much that he has a plan for each one of us.

Part of the plan is for us to share and understand the Gospel in human terms. To be able to do so and connect with the power and salvation of Jesus Christ we need the Holy Spirit. From the beginning God had an answer for sin, a plan to defeat death, a plan to gather His people to Him.

In our baptism we died to sin. All who are baptized into Christ Jesus are baptized into his death. And we are also baptized into His resurrection. We have indeed been given a glorious gift. Something to get excited about, a Father who loves us, Jesus who purchased us, and the Spirit to recognize this miraculous plan.

Ask yourself, do I really believe in Jesus? Am I excited about His love for me? Shouldn't everyone have an opportunity to feel that excitement? Am I open to what the Spirit has in store for me? Am I going to share that excitement?

In the name our Risen Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.