So we find ourselves on Trinity Sunday. Feared by congregations, who expect something boring, irrelevant, or complicated. Feared by preachers, who feel they have to get all doctrinal and give a theological lecture.

So, I'll begin with one of the great theologians of the church: St. Augustine. Augustine was puzzling over how he could understand the doctrine of the Trinity. Walking along the seashore, he came across a child, scooping up the seawater in a seashell, and pouring it into a hole which he'd dug in the sand. Augustine asked him what he was doing. 'I'm going to take all the water out of the sea,' the child replied, 'and pour it into this hole.' Augustine smiled at the child's foolishness in thinking he could get the whole ocean into such a small hole. Then he realized that he himself was being no wiser, in imagining that he could get the whole nature of God into his own little mind.

There's a hymn which reminds us about this:

There's a wideness in God's mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in his justice
which is more than liberty.

There is plentiful redemption
in the blood that has been shed;
there is joy for all the members
in the sorrows of the Head.

There is grace enough for thousands
of new worlds as great as this;
there is room for fresh creations
in the Lord's unfathomed bliss.

For the love of God is broader
than the measures of our mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.

But we make his love too narrow
by false limits of our own;
and we magnify his strictness
with a zeal he will not own.

If our love were but more simple
we should take him at his word;
and our lives would be illumined
by the glory of the Lord.

Indeed, God is far bigger than the human mind, and if we think we can explain everything then we've probably got it wrong. But to leave things there is a definite cop out. If we're to pray to God, and know his love, we must at least believe that God exists. An atheist wrote in a newspaper recently that belief in God is utterly unreasonable, so a Christian wrote a letter to the editor, outlining a number of observations which are much easier to explain if there is a God than if there isn't. A friend remonstrated with him, asking what he was doing, applying reason to questions about God, when the Church teaches that all you need is faith. 'Ah, but,' replied the Christian, 'faith is not unreason-able. The Christian faith doesn't fly in the faith of reason. Nobody can prove that God exists, and nobody can prove that there's no God. But each of these observations - the beauty, complexity and efficiency of the world in which we live; the number of intelligent people who believe in God; the words of Jesus claiming that God is revealing himself through him, and so on - each is hard to explain if there's no Supreme Being. Arguing from any one of these observations, you can show that it's more probable that God exists. It would be unscientific to take the less likely explanation, that these things happened by chance; it would be sheer folly to prefer the more improbable explanation in every case.'

Bishop Hugh Montefiore, an old boy of my old school, published a book with the title, The Probability of God, in which he examined each of these arguments in detail, showing that it's more reasonable to believe in God, than not.

So where does faith come in? Faith isn't believing in unreasonable things because the Church tells you, like the Queen boasting to Alice that she could believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Faith follows a logical line of reasoning as far as it'll go, and then goes further because we trust what God has said about himself.

We're using the word faith with two meanings here. You can talk about the Christian faith, which is summarized in the Creeds; we believe that these things are true, because God's revealed them to us. But we have faith in God because we've found God to be trustworthy.

One of the hymns that we sang contained the lines:
Where reason fails with all her powers, there faith prevails.

In daily life, we believe in many things which are not contrary to reason, but go beyond it. We believe things we can't prove, which we can't understand, or which we've no personal experience of, because we trust the person who told us. We believe the bus is going to the place named on the destination board; but the only way to prove it is to get on the bus in faith.

An elderly scientist took a young colleague fishing with him, who asked the older man, `How do you explain the constant flow of this river, the same in dry and wet weather?'
'I don't,' replied the scientist. 'I just fish in it.'

One of the early Kings of Siam was told by a Dutch traveller that in some seasons, the water in his country becomes so hard that an elephant could walk on it. The King was at first doubtful, because he'd never seen ice; but he realized at length that the traveller was trustworthy.

So on Trinity Sunday, we're reminded of the teaching of the Church, based on the words of Jesus, that Father, son, and Holy spirit, are different aspects of the godhead, yet there's only one God. We can't understand this, because God's greater than the human mind. But like the scientist who didn't need to understand the river in order to fish in it, it's not unreasonable to worship God through faith, though he surpasses our reasoning.