Trinity Sunday celebrates the Christian doctrine of the three Persons of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is a piece of theology that doesn´t appear anywhere in the Bible and was fought over bitterly in the early Christian centuries. And even now is not easy for worshippers to hold it all in our minds. Instead we tend to slip into following that constituent part of God that most closely suits our own particular breed of Christianity.

So, there are the ‘Fatherists’, who’s God is almighty, if distant and at times aloof. They love their religion formal, they like the rules and the structures, they like to know where they are and to know where God is – in his heaven…away from everyday life. They like to look up to him and to look forward to a very “other-world” where he is ruler and Lord.

And then there are the ‘Sonists’…and their religion is very different. Their God is more a sort of hero figure…..not the distant Father, but the great miracle worker, the populist leader, the storyteller. Their theological champions always remind us of the importance of getting back to the “real” Jesus.

And then there are the ‘Holy Spiritists’, who look neither to the great God figure in the sky…nor to the historical Jesus…but to their own feelings and experiences of every moment of their lives. For their God is entirely imminent - here and now – and any theology, structure, or for that matter, historical narrative, is only ever a guide to experiencing God in the present moment all the more fully.

But the theology of the Trinity brings it all together – that God is one substance, though three persons. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit…one God, with three distinct ways in which we can know him, three ways of being God for us. Whoever partakes of one, partakes of all three.

The picture shows a mosiac of the Trinity, from The Trinity Dome at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC.

This year there are 21 Sundays after Trinity taking us up to the end of October, so covering almost half the church's year. Everything really exciting - Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost - has already happened, in the year’s first half.

So is that why the second half of the church’s year is referred to as 'Ordinary Time'? In fact not. Rather the phase ‘Ordinary Time’ comes from the way in which the Sundays are counted - with Ordinal numbers: first, second, third, etc after Trinity.

From 1980 to the year 2000, we followed a more ancient tradition of naming these Sundays after Pentecost, not Trinity, and this made a kind of sense. At Pentecost, after all the excitement of Christ's death, resurrection and ascension, the church finally comes into being, as the Holy Spirit fills the beleaguered apostles with faith, courage and a strong sense of purpose. And so it is that in these Sundays after Pentecost, and now Trinity, we start to understand what it means to be a Spirit-filled church, now expressing in our life together those big theological truths – like incarnation, salvation, resurrection – that we commemorated in the first half of the year.

The gospel readings now focus not on the big events in Jesus’s life, but rather on his teaching, healing and miracles. We will get to hear about his interaction with the political and religious establishment of his day, how he stood up for those who were abused or persecuted, how he got people to question their values and rebuild their lives, how people gradually became aware that he was someone special, someone filled with God.

So in a way these Sundays are very ordinary. We meet the Jesus of the every day, the Jesus of farmers and fisherman, who told stories of lost sheep, a man beat up by the roadside, a ponsy landowner, fishers of men, treasure buried in a field, seed sown by the wayside, or, as in today's gospel, we learn what happens when Jesus meets a tax collector, and when a woman with a severe haemorrhage touches his cloak (see picture above) – an every day world that suddenly became a canvas for the Holy Spirit. Here was God, not in far off Jerusalem, but walking every day through the fields, and along the shores, of Galilee.