Yesterday was "Trinity Sunday" in the Anglican liturgical year. I heard a really amazing semon on the Trinity by Graham Tomlin, the guy who head's up HTB's theological center. If you want to listen to it, its on their homepage.
I've been mulling over a lot of things because of that message. For instance, we often hear people say that "God is love." But the reason we can believe its true is because God is three persons in relationship. You can't love unless there is someone to love. If He were simply one, like Allah or Yaweh, then he couldn't be love self-existent. He would have to have created us first before He became love and would be dependent on us to be love.
Our language is so inadequate to describe our communal but whole God. St. Augustine said, "Yet when it is asked what the three are, human speech is embarrassed by the great poverty of language. However we say 'three persons,' not because that expresses what we want to say, but because we must say something."
As we are created in God's image, we are also meant to express ourselves in love to the other members of our body - the church. The Trinity gives us an example for how we can have both diversity and unity without having chaos or tyranny. And it tries to help us grasp the method by which we can actually relate to God: we access God the Father through Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit.
The speaker used this icon from the 1400s in his message. It was painted in the 1400s by Andrej Rublëv, titled "The Hospitality of Abraham." The three people are the three angels who visited Abraham, but they also represent the idea of God in three persons, the Trinity God. The icon includes a lot of symbolism, but the thing I like most is the empty place at the table :)
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