American Public Media’s Marketplace Business News Podcast is heard daily on National Public Radio.  Hosted by Kai Ryssdal, the podcast “is the most widely heard program on business and the economy — radio or television, commercial or public broadcasting — in the country” [Podcast webpage claim].  Ryssdal explores every last jot and tittle of the marketplace with anyone who has something to do with the economy, from Fortune 500 CEOs to entrepreneurs embarking on small start-up ventures.  A regular feature, “Let’s Do the Numbers,” is announced by a jaunty little tune while Ryssdall reviews the stock market’s ups and downs for the day.  For business analysts and individuals who pour over stock market reports, Ryssdal’s program is Nirvana. Such careful focus on the numerical minutia of the economy is crucial for investors, for the value of stocks, bonds, investments, and the like can quickly shift day by day and hour by hour.  Scrupulous attention to “the numbers” is a virtue in economic matters, but a fixation on numbers for understanding and explaining the Mystery of the Holy Trinity can be seriously misleading.

This coming Sunday is the Festival of the Holy Trinity. We all have likely been mentally maimed over the years by well-meaning but misleading attempts to explain how the Almighty God can be One in Three yet Three in One.  Among the usual suspects the Church has relied on is the three leaf clover, originally credited to St. Patrick and a convenient shamrock.  Basic and simple, yes, but what have we actually learned about God? More to the point, what have children learned who have patiently (?) listened to an adult asking them to ponder a clover leaf?  Children are primarily concrete thinkers until that wondrous time when abstract thought becomes a part of their reflective abilities.  An interesting internet site, Linked-In® posts a helpful discussion, “Abstract vs Concrete Thinking: What You Need To Know.”  The author notes, “Concrete thinkers take information at face value, analyzing what they can see, hear, smell, or touch, but they don’t typically connect it to other meanings or situations.”  All of this means that a little child probably comes away having heard God mentioned, but wondering what the clover leaf had to do with anything.  Better they go out into the yard and look for a four leaf clover which at least will help them improve eye-hand coordination. 

A more complex attempt is the water-based explanation of the Blessed Trinity.  God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are compared to water as a) ice, b) liquid, and c) vapor, three states of the same water.  Although it does get a bit nearer in theory, the various states of the same water fuzz considerably the connections and differences among the persons of the Trinity.  Even the eavesdropping adults listening to such a water-logged attempt to explain the Trinitarian mystery will be hard-pressed to make any real sense of it.  More recent adult attempts, in part to avoid the demonstrably masculine vocabulary holy Church uses when discussing the Trinity, fall into the problematic theological error called “modalism.”  Instead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the attempt is made to substitute activities often associated with one or another person of the Trinity for their “proper” names. We’re left with Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, highly questionable alternatives when Christian theology insists that the Blessed Trinity of Persons together have been co-creators, co-redeemers, and co-sanctifiers since the beginning if you know the scriptural record well enough. 

This whole mess is simply the result of trying to explain what cannot presently be explained.  Let’s NOT get hung up on doing the numbers!  God is first and last a mystery and will not be comprehended by God’s faithful children until at long last we see the Almighty face to face.  God for us simply IS Three in One and One in Three, but we are not left in the lurch.  As Luther once remarked, when we look upon the Crucified and Risen Lord, we see the love of the Godhead reflected. God sent the incarnate Son so that we incarnate beings finally could fully relate to God. The Spirit of truth was sent as our assurance after Christ’s return to the right hand of the Father.  The Spirit gives constant testimony not about the Spirit’s own self but provides us a secure place of balance while we come to learn the blessed truth about God’s saving, healing, forgiving, sanctifying ways. What the Godhead through the Son by the Spirit’s power readily shares with us is insight and wisdom into the ways God the Trinity relates to us and each other in love.  It is the nature of HOLY RELATIONSHIP – how it begins; is nurtured; and matures – that should be our focus on Trinity Sunday and beyond.

The Offertory Anthem this coming Sunday is based on one of the oldest and most valued texts the Church’s treasury offers, the Didachē, a second-century manual on how Christians “do church.”  Transformed into a song still in our hymnal, ELW 478: Father, We Thank You That You Planted Your Holy Name Within Our Hearts, the piece compares God to a master gardener busily planting the Triune name within our hearts.  The image of God’s planting the power of the divine Name within us is relational, not a set of abstract numbers, Three-in-One / One-in-Three.  In fact, God the good gardener we already discover in the story of creation itself:

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it [Genesis 2:8-15]. 

This time of year, we frequently hear comments by farmers and gardeners who have been busy tilling the soil, planting seed, and starting the long, arduous process of cultivating fields and garden plots [even the sprouting cuttings in the kitchen window count!].  This annual agricultural call and response echoes God’s primal act of preparing Eden for God’s children.  They, with God, share in the cultivation, the gardener’s toil, and the harvest.  Such images are scattered throughout all of Scripture, even into the streets and garden plots of the New Jerusalem in Revelation’s final chapter.  The transplanted garden yields not only daily sustenance for the blessed. God is preparing a sumptuous feast for the Lamb’s high feast, and the Tree of Life’s fruit and leaves shall be “for the healing of the nations.”  This is also an echo of the great banquet of salvation God has long promised to prepare on the holy mountain described in Isaiah 25:6-10.

            The ways of God are caught up in the work and mission of the Trinity’s three persons, each bearing the powerful NAME of the Almighty, a power that has been shared with all of God’s children throughout time.  God’s power is a continuously evolving kaleidoscope of wondrous deeds, power, gifts, and insights that, when shared with us in God’s offer of abiding relationship, fundamentally transform not only us but the world around us.  God is indeed a master gardener, outstanding [out standing…] in God’s field [pun most certainly intended – in fact, it’s based on a childhood joke I once liked].  Moreover, God also sends us out into the fields to stand sentinel over creation’s welfare, to be people who cultivate life so that it prospers under the umbrella of God’s creating, redeeming, and sanctifying work.  The Apostle Paul writes of the fruits to be harvested from God’s planting: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control [Galatians 5:22-23]. So, we see that it really isn’t about “doing the numbers” but cultivating the relationship God so lavishly has planted within our hearts!