Most ministers I know avoid Trinity Sunday like a plague of Egyptian locusts.  A couple of years back I decided it was time to stop the avoidance and engage with the challenge; for the most part people seem to appreciated it.  One of the challenges, irrespective of the age of your congregation, is finding suitable illustrations, well, assuming of course you want to go that way of course.  Many of those I found on a quick web trawl are familiar - the shamrock leaf, the three states of water, the dreaded trifle (which I'd never heard of until I began training as a minister and its badness has stuck firmly in my brain) and this time I found eggs, apples and even jaffa cakes!  The problem with these images is that they slip into modalism - three modes or functions of God - three people rather than the three personae.  Trouble is, the more theologically orthodox concepts are utterly impossible to explain or illustrate, which is why I suspect we live with the modalism.

Evidently St Patrick held up his shamrock/clover leaf and said "is it three-in-one or one-in-three?" His hearers allegedly said 'both,' which is about as good, and non-modal, as you're going to get.

So, I'm back to mulling over what I'll do for the "all together" part of our service and thinking the shamrock is a pretty good contender, all things considered.  Perhaps we over-rationalise mystery, perhaps we stetch metaphors to breaking point, and perhaps we're either too fearful or too ignorant of heresy to find creative means of exploring the wonder of a triune God?

What is the difference?  Probably not a lot... it seems to be mainly a matter of nomenclature.

I think it is probably that gnats bite with an English accent, wheas as midges bite in Scots.

There are, now and then, moments when the church visible and invisible, militant and triumphant, now and not yet, are palpably one.  It is one of those mysterion (sorry no Greek letters on this platform) that I find more as I get older and have been in more congregations in more roles; it probably has something to do with having done dozens of funerals and now and then singing hymns or songs that connect me with people, times and places (some of my friends find it rather wierd that I date pop songs by what I was doing and where; if there's no association I can't date them.  Increasingly pop songs link me to certain crematoria!!).

Last evening was one of those moments, as we we sang the old redemption hymn It Is Well. I learned this hymn for a funeral because it was the favourite of the deceased, a lovely older man in my former congregation.  Tom (not his real name) had served in WWII and was twice held as a POW in Japan.  What he saw and experienced he never told, though in his final days, in our conversations, he was able to lay down some of it before he died.  This song had sustained him through horrors I cannot begin to imagine.

I like to think that as we sang the hymn last evening somewhere, just out of reach, he was singing it too...

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows, like sea-billows, roll,
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
It is well, it is well with my soul, with my soul,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And has shed His own blood for my soul.
Chorus

My sin - O the bliss of this glorious thought! -
My sin, not in part, but the whole,
Is nailed to His cross, and I bear it no more:
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
Chorus

For me be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live!
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.
Chorus

But, Lord, 'tis for Thee, for Thy coming, we wait;
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
O trump of the angel! O voice of the Lord!
Blessèd hope! blessèd rest of my soul!
Chorus

Horatio G Spafford (1828-1888)