Romans 5.1-5; John 16.12-15

Today is Trinity Sunday. Unlike most festival days in the church, Trinity Sunday doesn’t celebrate something that happened; it’s not remembering an event. It’s a day when we remember not what someone has done, not what God has done, but a day when we think about what God is like.

In a few moments I will baptise Hector, in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That is what we mean by the Trinity - the fact that God, though One, is also Three.

It’s a difficult concept to get our heads around, and through the ages, people have come up with many different ideas for explaining what we mean - the shamrock, which has three parts but is one leaf; water which has three different forms - steam, liquid and ice - but they are the same thing; a triangle, which is only a triangle, if it has three corners and sides.

But when it comes down to it, all these illustrations are incomplete. And it’s not really surprising that this is so. The doctrine of the Trinity is less an explanation of God - that’s something we as humans are never really going to be able to do - and more a description of what we know about God that is true.

Think about this: if you were to try and explain your husband or wife, your mother or father or sister or brother or best friend, you would really struggle to do it. You’d be able to describe a bit what they were like, but would never really be able to explain the essence of what makes them the person they are.

The only way someone else can know what our husband, wife, mother, sister etc is like is for them to experience life with them for themselves.

It’s the same with God. We can describe in part what we know about God, but we can’t explain the mystery. We need to learn to be happy with living with mystery. St Paul said in the first letter to the Corinthians, “Now we see in a mirror darkly, then we shall see face to face, now we know in part, then we will know fully.”

In the same way, as we can only really know a person when we have experienced spending time with them, the Trinity and its mystery can only mean something for those who experience God’s life for themselves.

As we devote more of our lives to God, the mystery will seem clearer, and, in a paradoxical way, it will also become more profound.

At the heart of that mystery is God living in community. God calls us to be part of that community. We are drawn in to the centre of the Godhead through our relationship with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We are drawn into that community by the love of God. That love of God that we are acknowledging today in Hector’s baptism.

Of course, he is too young to say for himself that he wants to be a Christian, so what we are acknowledging today is that God accepts him, even now, when he can’t really return that acceptance.

God’s love for us is not determined by our response. However we respond God will keep loving us. Of course, God desires that we come to love him too, but at the heart of baptism is the sense that God’s love is not dependent on our response.

Hector’s parents and godparents are making promises on his behalf that he will, we hope and pray, make for himself when he is older.

But we as a church are also doing something. A few moments ago, we declared that we would welcome Hector into our midst and uphold him in his new life in Christ.

Just as God lives in community, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we too are called to live in community. We are made in God’s image, the Bible tells us. That means that we are called not to live alone, but to live in community. Part of baptism is welcoming Hector into this community.

Through the community of Christians is one important way that Hector will be able to experience life with God for himself. When we welcome him we must ensure that the words we say are not empty words, but that they are carried through in action. We all have a responsibility to help Hector come to know what it is to experience the life of God for himself.

We can do this through our prayers for him, through welcoming him as part of our worshipping community, through supporting his parents Jo and Ali as they bring him up, in helping them to teach him about what it means to be loved by God and to be part of a worshipping community.

And we can support Hector and each other by celebrating together today what it means for each one of us to be loved by God as God’s precious children. That is at the heart of the Gospel message, and that is something truly worth celebrating, for it gives worth and value to each one of us, in this world and in the world to come.