The God Who Sends
Why God Is Not a Math Problem
The Trap of Explaining God
Trinity Sunday has a reputation among preachers.
It is the Sunday when many of us feel pressure to explain the Trinity; to make sense of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through diagrams, formulas, and analogies. Throughout Christian history, believers have tried to compare the Trinity to water, ice, and steam, or to a shamrock with three leaves. Yet every analogy eventually breaks down.
Perhaps that is because the Trinity was never meant to be a math problem waiting to be solved.
The early Church did not begin with doctrine. It began with experience.
The first Christians encountered God as Creator. They encountered God in Jesus Christ. They encountered God through the Holy Spirit moving among them. They were convinced these were not three separate gods, yet they experienced God in three distinct ways.
The doctrine of the Trinity emerged not as an attempt to explain God completely, but as an attempt to protect a mystery that was too profound to ignore.
Maybe we often approach Trinity Sunday backward. We start with explanations. The early Church started with encounter.
And that difference matters more than we think.
Looking Up Before Speaking
When I was in college, some friends and I became convinced that we might be able to prove the existence of God mathematically.
We built arguments. We tested logic. We refined our theories. Like many young people, we believed that if we thought hard enough, we could eventually make everything fit together.
But over time we discovered something important.
Every proof invites a counterproof. Every argument generates another question. Even if we could prove God like a theorem, someone else could always challenge the conclusion.
What remained was not certainty.
It was humility.
Psalm 8 begins from that place.
"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established..."
The psalmist does not begin with explanation. He begins by looking up.
With awe.
With wonder.
With the recognition that we are both small and deeply loved.
Psalm 8 holds together truths we often separate:
We are small, but not insignificant.
We are finite, but not forgotten.
We are created, yet crowned with dignity.
Faith begins not when we master God, but when we learn to stand in wonder before God.
Worship, Doubt, and the Mountain
Matthew's Gospel ends on a mountain.
Throughout Matthew, mountains are places where heaven and earth seem to meet. Important moments happen there: teaching, temptation, transfiguration, and now resurrection.
The disciples gather before the risen Christ.
And Matthew tells us something remarkably honest:
"When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted."
Both are present at the same time.
Worship and doubt.
Faith and hesitation.
The Greek word Matthew uses suggests wavering rather than disbelief. The disciples stand between what they once knew and what they are now seeing.
Yet Jesus does not send the doubters away.
He sends all of them.
The worshipers.
The hesitant.
The uncertain.
The mission of God has never depended on perfect certainty. It depends on people willing to keep following Christ even when they do not have all the answers.
The God of Communion
Jesus commissions the disciples in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Not names.
Name.
One God experienced a relationship.
The early Church eventually described this mystery with the word perichōrēsis, a mutual indwelling, an eternal sharing of life and love.
God is not solitary.
God is communion.
And if God is communion, then relationship lies at the very heart of reality itself.
This understanding echoes in Paul's closing words to the Corinthians:
"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all."
Paul wrote these words to a church that was divided and struggling.
Instead of offering them a system, he offered them a vision of God.
Because division is not healed by becoming more right.
Division is healed by becoming more rooted in communion.
The challenge of Trinity Sunday is not whether we can explain God.
The challenge is whether we can live like God is real.
Can we remain at the table when disagreement arises?
Can we recognize the image of God in those we find difficult?
Can we become a church that reflects the communion of the God we worship?
Entering the Mystery
The Gospel ends with a promise:
"And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
Not sometimes.
Not when we get everything right.
Always.
Perhaps Trinity Sunday is not about solving a mystery.
Perhaps it is about entering one.
The mystery of a God who creates.
A God who redeems.
A God who sustains.
A God who is beyond us and yet closer than our breath.
A God who walks beside us.
A God who lives within us.
A God who calls us not to certainty, but to communion.
Not to mastery, but to trust.
Not explanation, but presence.
And maybe that is enough.
