I would like to make a remark preliminary to today's sermon. I think that it is useful (at least it was very useful to me when I discovered this) to observe that the notion of God as Trinitarian, as triune, is not present in the earliest strata of the Christian faith. Many mainstream biblical scholars believe that the Trinitarian doctrine is not explicitly present in the New Testament. And, historically, we know that this doctrine was not clarified until the occurrence of a council a few centuries later. This is a useful footnote for the Trinity feast in that, to hark back to the passage from the Gospel of John, it helps us to understand that we cannot know everything in the present because we only learn about life gradually. This holds true even in the most central issues of faith. (Therefore, we can also assume that this process is still continuing.)

I would like to suggest an oblique approach to Trinity Sunday. We talk about the Trinity as the central mystery of our faith, but I do not know what we do with the category of mystery. Or, more accurately, how much this understanding engages us. We can symbolise the Trinity in terms of shamrocks or three candles that share a single flame, but I do not think that these modes of representation are religiously significant. Moreover, I hope, by making some suggestions to myself and to you about the concept of mystery, that we can begin to locate a little more helpfully what we believe to be the central mystery of our faith.

Where do we find mystery? I would like to make three suggestions with respect to the location of mystery. Aristotle said that "philosophy begins in wonder". Perhaps you have had this kind of experience, when you wake up early in the morning and realise that the very fact that anything exists is astonishing. This radically transcends our normal consciousness in which reality, as the "given," as data, is simply taken for granted. However, I do not think that Aristotle was totally alone in this understanding of reality because if we look at various forms of literature - - poetry, fiction, and autobiography - - we find that this experience is replicated in the lives of many people. Again, we are so bound up in the quotidian, that is, the demands of our agendas, calendars, E-mail that it is almost inconceivable. But, all you need do is make even a slight chink in the solid wall of our list of "things to do" and begin to look around and be amazed. This human experience is what one might call a "metaphysical experience of mystery": "Why should anything be?".

The second location of mystery that may be useful is another experience: that is the experience of art, particularly music. For example, with respect to today's Communion, I am going to play a piece of orchestral music without any words because we are primarily trying to come to the understanding that mystery is beyond articulation and so a piece of worldless music might provide an entree. To be fair, music is certainly an art form that I understand very well. However, I know of few music lovers who do not find themselves reduced to absolute silence by the splendour of one of Oscar Peterson's jazz riffs or one of Bach's air on the G-string. In these instances, something exists that shuts one down, something breaks all of the regular categories, the standard ways that we make sense of things. A whole new dimension, a greater form of reality becomes available. We’ve celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Those of us who watched Kennedy's funeral service at St. Patrick's Cathedral heard from the organ loft of the cathedral, Leonard Bernstein and the strings of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra playing Adagietto from Mahler’s 5^th Symphony. Did this music touch us simply because of the situation? Or was it because that the music is so stunning and overwhelming, that when it ended it left us breathless and aware that the music had served too point us to something quite as real as the toast you had for breakfast that morning or the shoes you put on that day - - something richer than the normal range of reality, what we say is real. This comforting form of reality reminds me of that great line from the W. H. Auden poem that I read from time to time: "The kitchen table is real because I scrub it". However, Auden and his poem open up all kinds of other possibilities, and all the works of art do that: the Arts leave us both filled and hungry. And one might ask, "Is this experience real or imaginary?". I believe that it is real and that the hunger is for this "other," this larger form of reality.

Finally, a more difficult topic, at least one that I had a difficult time finding the appropriate examples for: Saints. In my sixty-two years of life I have been extraordinarily privileged to know three people whom I consider to be genuine Saints. I started thinking about Medard, and Mary Margared and Paul and I have tried to discern why they illuminate and are mysteries to me when I with them, and, every time that I meet them anew (I use my relationship with these Saint-like individuals because our relations with people and our own personal realities are analogous to a Trinitarian God, and, in making this analogy, we can better understand the notion of mystery that I have been discussing). In my relationship with these three Saints I have experienced an extraordinary sense of being totally at-home. There is nothing that I could not say to them, and yet at the same time there is an uncanniness about them that puzzles me, an aspect of their being that is beyond me. These people, however, are not weird; they do not walk two feet above the earth. In fact, they are the most pedestrian, normal people that I know. But there is this truly uncanny reality of their presence: that I am altogether at home with them, and yet something further.

For me, Trinity Sunday is the most worrisome and terrifying feast in the entire year and I constantly struggle over what we can we say about God as Trinitarian. As I have said, my solution to understanding a Trinitarian God is to look at this business of "mystery". The category within which a Trinitarian God is supposed to be understood. Mystery is a Greek derivative and means "something hidden". In the religious sense, however, this "something" is hidden in the same way that Isaiah said that God is hidden: "Truly you are a hidden god, O God of Israel!". This statement illustrates the great Jewish notion that nobody can see the face of God and live. Why? The answer is that this experience would be too much for us. God is not a deficit of meaning, but a surfeit of meaning. In God, there is not an absence of reality, but a greater reality that we cannot comprehend, a reality that transcends our normal understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live. And so, in an utterly unromantic and unsentimental fashion, I hope that I have provided, for myself and obviously for you, some kind of anchorage to this notion of "mystery" which can inform and shape our praying and our seeking after of this hidden face of God.