The late Cardinal Richard Cushing once told of an incident from his days as a parish priest. Summoned to give last rites to a man who had collapsed in a store, Cushing knelt beside the man and began with the traditional question: “Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit?” The man opened one eye and said, “Here I am dying, and he asks me a riddle.”

            That may reflect how some of us think about the Trinity, God as three in one.

            It is true that no doctrine of the Trinity is set out in the Bible. Nevertheless, the teaching that the one God is the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is what the church celebrates today on Trinity Sunday — the only festival during the church year that honors a specific doctrine. It’s a teaching that’s worth celebrating. But how did we get here?

            Before we talk about that, I need to be clear that I am not saying that the Trinity isn’t in the Bible. There is indeed no formal biblical teaching there that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God, or any explanation of how that can be true. But there are a number of passages in the New Testament where the three are spoken of together in significant ways. We might think, for example, of the accounts of Jesus’ baptism in the gospels. And our text from Romans 8 is another of those passages: Paul tells us here that the Spirit leads us to become children of God and fellow heirs with Christ so that we can pray to the Father. This isn’t a doctrine about how the Father, the Son and the Spirit are related but a statement about

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