Have you ever watched someone wine-tasting? Describing how a glass of wine tastes can sometimes sound really bizarre, sometimes unintentionally hilarious. "Yes, I'm getting blackberries." "It's the smell of wax and an old Doc Martin boot." The thing is: that describing what wine tastes like is really, really hard; you can only do it by saying what part of the flavour tastes like.

When we come to think about the Trinity, it's in many ways one of the hardest things to try and explain, partly because everything we can think of comparing the Trinity to usually comes across as a very poor example to use. One of my favourite, but still flawed explanations is that the Trinity is like a three-leaf clover, three leaves but one leaf. Later in the service we will profess our faith in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, and yet understanding the way all three are separate and yet together the same is one of the biggest challenges of faith that we have when we attempt to reconcile and explain our faith to ourselves let alone to other people.

The Doctrine is:

1. God eternally exists as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
2. Each person is fully God.
3. There is one God.

So do we just sit back and say that it is just something we can never fully understand or explain? Or do we spend our lives trying to make sense of it? It doesn't even end there - during the course of the year we reflect on Jesus in many different ways; the babe in the manger all full of potential, the rebellious teacher who upset Governments, the public speaker who reached out to the most marginalized of society, the sacrificed Jesus who makes us both uncomfortable and glad at the same time, and the revelation Jesus who reminds us that God's plan is still being worked out in the world. The problem of speaking of God in the traditional terms as 'one God' become obvious. Perhaps the best illustration of the difficulty our minds have is seen in the episode of Jesus baptism

So we have Father, Son and Holy Spirit all in one passage! So Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit, who comes to Him from God? How can God be God the Father, and Jesus God the Son, and also God the Holy Spirit? The danger of us thinking of the Trinity and therefore of God as a puzzle to be solved is that we could distract our energies from truly understanding God in our lives

There is only one way to know what a particular glass of wine tastes like, all the flowery descriptions in the world don't begin to touch it - the only way to truly know is to taste it. There for me, lies the true way we come to understand the Trinity of God - through our experience of him in our lives. There's no need for us to think about God like a Magic Eye picture, that if we just stare at it long enough the picture will make sense.

We can experience God as Creator in our lives in the wonders of the world around us, the joy we can derive from it - the beauty of our gardens, the unconditional love of a pet or the indescribable joy that some of us may experience through our children. This world is so amazingly diverse - it is not random in its order - WE are not random - we are created to be the beautiful & different people we are - if we are fortunate we can glimpse God at work through it.

We can experience Jesus the redeemer in our lives through the way our lives change with the knowledge that we are loved. The knowledge that Jesus took on all our mistakes, all the rubbish that we can strew between ourselves and God - and he overcame it. Somewhere inside us, accepting this changes us.

We can experience God the Holy Spirit in our lives as we feel it invigorating us - even surprising us with what we are capable of achieving.

The journeys we take through life offer us a chance to experience and encounter God in all of his forms. Our key to understanding the Trinity is to experience it in our lives, we are not Christian because we believe things about God, we are Christians because we believe in God. We are Christians because we have felt the aspects of God at work in the world around us and in our lives and that connection has made sense to us, that connection has answered questions we didn't know how to ask.

If we are willing to embrace God into our lives then God will become apparent to us in three distinctly different ways, as a creator or parent, as a sustaining spirit, and as the one who shares our humanity. At different times and for different reasons we all need to experience God in these distinct ways. But each time we experience a different one of them we are reminded of a single constant truth, that God loves us and will go on loving us - for me at least this is how they are different and yet the same.

However limited our language in trying to explain it - we know what we've tasted.

Amen.

(Dan Joseph)