Many years ago, it occurred to me that the common idea of education, as the accumulation of answers, is terribly inadequate.  There are far too many people who think that they have life figured out, who, in reality, don’t have a clue.  Instead, I realized that our learning, our real education, actually takes place, at least ideally, in two phases. 

Phase 1 consists in accumulating answers.  It begins even before we are born and reaches its high point somewhere in early to mid-adolescence.  At that point, we have all the answers, clear and simple (although, as H.L. Mencken pointed out “There is always an easy solution to every human problem, neat, plausible, and wrong.”).

Phase 2, again at least ideally, begins somewhere around that point in life.  Phase 2 is the stage in life where we begin to focus on and begin to understand the questions.  And when we recognize how little we know and understand, and when we grow to become comfortable living with the questions – it is then that we are engaged is our real education.

Now I used the adverb “ideally” because some people, unfortunately, never reach that stage in life.  They continue to pretend as though they already have the answers to life’s most important questions, including questions about God.  They insist that the way that they were taught to think about God when they were children is the complete and absolute truth.  They reduce God to something they are able to understand and explain, preferably in a statement short enough to fit on a bumper sticker.  In doing so, they ignore a core teaching of Augustine of Hippo who, 1500 years ago, stated simply, “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”: “If you understand it, it’s not God.”

Today, we enter in a special way into the mystery who is God as we celebrate Trinity Sunday.  The early Christians struggled for centuries to try to come up with some sort of statement about the relationship between God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit upon which at least most of them could agree.  We know that statement as the Nicene Creed, formulated in the fourth century by two different councils of the church.  And yet, the reality of God, by its very nature, is beyond any set of words or thoughts that we can ever formulate.

Ultimately, we cannot understand God.  All we can do is to worship God.

The psalms, which have long been called “The Prayer Book of the Church,” describe and reflect on God’s relationship with the human race and the rest of creation.  But, most of all, they simply address God in worship.  Sometimes that worship is one of lament and protest.  Often, it is one of thanksgiving and praise.

That ancient Jewish approach to God, as reflected throughout our Old Testament, does not focus on philosophical statements about the inner nature of God.  Instead, it focuses on God as we and all the rest of creation exist in relationship with God.  Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about that relationship and the centrality of worship in this way: “God may be of no concern to man, but man is of much concern to God. The only way to discover this is the ultimate way, the way of worship. For worship is a way of living, a way of seeing the world in the light of God. To worship is to rise to a higher level of existence, to see the world from the point of view of God. In worship we discover that the ultimate way is not to have a symbol but to be a symbol, to stand for the divine. The ultimate way is to sanctify thoughts, to sanctify time, to consecrate words, to hallow deeds.”

This is what we do in worship.  We enter consciously into the presence of God, allowing God to sanctify our thoughts, the time of our lives, our words, and our deeds.  We allow them all to be taken up into God.  Or, more accurately, we allow ourselves to experience the fact that all of them are already taken up into God, for that is where we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28): in the gracious and loving God of all creation.

Worship is an acknowledgement of what I have called “Phase 2” of our education.  It does not provide answers as much as it invites us in and enables us to live in the questions.  As much as we might want to understand God and the ways of God, worship recognizes that it is only by accepting and embracing and entrusting ourselves to the God whom we do not understand that we can come fully to experience ourselves enveloped in the presence and in the life of God.

People throughout history have used countless names and descriptive expressions to identify the one whom we call “God” and to express their perception of their relationship to God.  Some have addressed themselves to the “Lord of Hosts Who is seated upon the Cherubim”: that seems to be the formal name by which God was known in the days of the first Jewish temple. Others have prayed to the one whom they have called the “Eternal Father,” to the “Source of All Being,” to “Adonai,” to “the Lord,” to “Allah the Merciful,” to the “Ground of All Being,” or to the “Encompassing Spirit in Which All that Is Is.”

In today’s first reading, Isaiah, ministering in the ancient temple, enters into the ultimate mystery who is God, never understanding, but willingly committing his life to the divine presence.  And, in our gospel reading, Nicodemus comes to Jesus, stating at first what “we know.”  But he leaves with his assurance stripped away, muttering only a question: “How can these things be?”  He didn’t realize it at the time, but he had just made great progress on his way toward God.  Jesus’ words had made him put aside what he thought he knew, a sure and certain answer; but, in doing so, he had begun to ask the real questions.

That journey would lead him later to challenge his fellow Jewish leaders when they thought that they had the answers and were ready to condemn Jesus.  And it later reached a critical point when he stepped out of the darkness to join Joseph of Arimathea in asking for and burying the body of the one who had raised the critical questions in them.

As Sir John Templeton has noted, “If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search.”  And in that searching, we might just find that God is both the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer.