Readings: Genesis 1-2:4a; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20

"Once upon a time," so the story goes, "there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, "Hey, there is an elephant in the village today."

They had no idea what an elephant was. They decided, "Even though we cannot see it, let us go and feel it anyway." All of them went where the elephant was. Each of them touched the elephant.

"An elephant is like a pillar," said the first man as he felt the elephant's huge leg.

"Oh, no!" said the second man, touching the elephant's tail. "It is like a rope."

"You're quite wrong," said the third man as he touched the elephant's trunk. "An elephant is like the trunk of a tree.

"It's like a fan," said the fourth man, touching the elephant's huge ear.

"You're all wrong!" said the fifth man as he touched the belly of elephant. "It is definitely like a huge wall."

"It's like a solid pipe," said the sixth man touching the tusk of the elephant. And so each had their own idea based on their unique experience.

So is our understanding of God. "God is our father," we say. "God provides us with everything we need."

"God is our mother, birthing us, nurturing and caring for us," says another.

"God is our brother, our friend, our companion."

"God is the wind; we feel God without ever seeing what God is like."

"God is a flower, a butterfly, a rainbow, a mountain, a thunderstorm …"

There is so much to know about God that we can never comprehend it all. But we keep on exploring and discovering new and wonderful things about this great God of ours. People through the ages have written about their experience of God. In Christian terms we have come to acknowledge that experience as the Trinity.

That is the essence of this Sunday as we celebrate the attributes of our wonderful and mysterious God. Through the ages we have tried to define God. It has never been an easy concept. I have had people point out to me many times, "You've never seen God, so how can you presume to try to prove the existence of God to me." And no! I can't prove it to anyone. But through faith I can prove it to myself because I come to an understanding of God, not only through the doctrines of the Church and through the study of Scripture, but especially through my own very personal experience of who God is and how God has worked in my life.

Barbara Brown, one of the outstanding preachers of our time, says "to know God, we need to learn to see the world as God sees us, and to live as if God's reality were the only one that mattered." She goes on to explain that to accomplish that we would need to use our imaginations. And of course, imagination is a dirty word. It is about make believe. That would make our search for God an emotional exercise rather than the intellectual one we seem to think it should be.

But we come up against a real problem when we try to explain God using the doctrine of the Trinity because it is an intellectual way of expressing something that needs to be experienced to be understood. We make analogies to help ourselves understand how God can be three persons and yet one God. We get ourselves tied up in semantics and Greek philosophy. We get nowhere.

Yet when you come down to it, isn't the doctrine of the Trinity simply an emotional exercise that explains our relationship to God? 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' are all relational terms. They are not about how we think. They are about how we relate to God. When we speak of God in human terms, we are relating God to ways in which we experience and respond. And isn't that what people are really hungry for? We want to be in relationship to God.

Today's readings remind us of the connection between all living things. The Genesis passage expresses the story of our relationship to God as creator of the world. It is a very human God who whimsically yet methodically goes about the task of creating and then rests. God has a special on-going relationship with creation. God does not create and then abandon. God creates for a purpose, for God's purpose.

In the letter of Paul to the Corinthians we meet a group of people who are the product of Pentecost. They have experienced the power of God indwelling their lives. The Spirit that energizes creation is at work in them as they align their wills to God.

And in the Gospel we meet the disciples – a fractured community following the resurrection – but a redeemed community, an empowered community being sent out into the world to relate to it as God relates to us.

We must affirm then, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not some great truth that God has put in stone for us to believe. It is rather a metaphor developed over the centuries for how we experience God's presence. The concept of the Trinity allows us to explore our experience of God in our lives. It calls on us to turn to God to satisfy our hunger. In the midst of anguish and trouble we experience the God who walks with us. In the beauty of nature, we experience the One who created us with wisdom and care. When life gets too serious, we experience God joyfully dancing at the thought of creating the human race. When we are filled with guilt, regrets and anxieties, we experience a God who justifies us, not like Judge Judy – in black and white according to some rule book – not because we are worthy, but because we have claimed it and are significant to God.

Where have you bumped into God in the last few days? I'll wager it wasn't just in church this morning. Was it at the breakfast table? Or during a walk in the woods when you saw the beautiful spring carpet of trilliums? Was it when a friend apologized for an unkind word spoken in haste? Or when memories of good times came flooding back to you during a phone call from an old friend? Or was it with the warmth of the sun after the cool days we have been experiencing? Are those not the kind of events that we translate as love? Are they not ways in which we relate to our loving God?

Admittedly in some ways that can only leave us hungering for still more. Can we ever be satisfied of that hunger for truth? What we need to discover during this season is that the hunger is the Spirit itself drawing us into the truth, guiding, teaching, interpreting so that we may come to a deeper understanding of God. We need to allow ourselves to experience God in new and wonderful ways.

We can have confidence in God, our loving and caring creator. For we know the saving action of Jesus Christ. We know the guidance of the Spirit. We continue on our life long journey of discovery of the God in whose image we are created. That is the great mystery of the Trinity that we celebrate today. We share in the joy of the God who created us, sustains us and redeems us. Amen.