The Sermon by Rev. Dr. Tim Gaden

Rublev's "The Trinity"

If you look at the front of this week’s Contact, you will see that we have printed a picture of God. Not a photograph, but a picture. God cannot be photographed, just as God cannot be captured by human language. Our words for God are metaphors Father, Creator, King of Kings, Lord, Fortress, Rock. God, of course, is not really a fortress, or a Father. These are words that describe important elements of Christian experience about God (i.e. God is strong and safe like a fortress, loving like a good parent), but they are not literal descriptions. In a similar way, this picture suggests what God is like. It is a visual metaphor. Some of you may have seen it before. It is a very famous, perhaps the most famous icon, painted by a Russian monk called Andrew Rublev in the fifteenth century. It is a little hard to make everything out. If you can’t see it clearly there is a bigger copy of the icon in the chapel. It is often called Rublev’s icon of the Trinity. The background, which is hard to make out, especially the tree, suggest the ancient tradition that the three angels whom Abraham entertain under the oak at Mamre (Gen 18) were in fact the three persons of the Trinity. The figure on the left is the Father, whom we see robed in gold and majesty. He gestures with a blessing towards the Son at the top, who is clothed in the red of his passion. By indicating towards the chalice on the table, which you can just about see here, he makes reference to his role as the sacrificial lamb, whose blood will be shed for the salvation of the world. The Spirit, sits to the right, wearing the green robes that speak of the Spirit’s role in giving growth to the people of God. Their one-ness or unity is indicated by the way their head incline one to the other, making the outline of circle. This shows how they are bound together into one by the common will and mutual love that unites them.

Two things in particular are worth noting about this picture. First, one side of the table is unoccupied, the side facing out of the picture. The Spirit, in fact, points towards it, and looking out of the picture, invites us to join them, and complete the circle. Here is an important truth about God, a truth that is also contained in the creed. If you look at the creed we say every week, you will see that it has four sections, a section about the Father, a section about the Son, a section about the Holy Spirit and a section about us, ‘the Holy catholic and apostolic church’. It is no accident that these four sections correspond to the four sides of the table. Neither the creed, what we believe, nor the picture, the circle of God’s life is complete without us. And so the pictures reminds us that God is not turned in on himself, endlessly contemplating his own perfection, but is turned outwards in love towards the world, and towards us. Or we might say the it is in the nature of God’s love that it overspills the relationships of the Trinity and reaches out to creation. That the picture says, is how God is.

Secondly, we are people made in the image of God. So any picture of God is doing to show us something about the way we are or about the way we should be. And the image of God which he has been pleased to reveal the church is an image of ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, of three persons united in one nature by a common will and mutual love. Sometimes Christian tradition uses other titles Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer; Lover, Beloved and Love itself; Judge, Forgiver, and Comforter, but always the stress is on the shared equality of differing persons. In a world that thrives on division and hierarchy, this is a subversive and radical thing. Augustine, for example, uses the analogy of a family of equals—mother, father and child—for the Trinity, unusually according children equal dignity and status in an adult-dominated world, picking up Christ’s saying that the kingdom of God belongs to children, and judging our assumption often visible in the world and the church alike, that children are less important than grown-ups.

This picture of the Trinity and the reality of God to which is points, stands in judgement on all relationships that are based on exploitation or domination. Statistics in the UK suggest that one in ten husbands beat their wives. This they say is their right as the head of the household. The figures here cannot be that different. Many more relationships are distorted not to the point of physical violence, but by the use of sex or children or money as weapons of subjugation. I cannot stand here and say that I have not done these things. I doubt if any of us can. God, God the Holy Trinity, stands in judgement on our sin in this, but also points a way forward, offering us again and again this three-fold model of mutual love and common will, which should be the pattern of living.

To confess belief in the Trinity, is to confess that Christians are people committed to living in relationships made up of equal, loving and loved individuals. Christian communities will be places where everyone ministers, equal in dignity and mutual service. Our society too would be one in which power and resources are shared equally, where strangers are not reviled and difference not persecuted. On Trinity Sunday, then, we have these two things to do. We celebrate God’s love for us and the world, spilling out and inviting us in. And we examine our relationships to see if they fit the pattern of our threefold God. If they do, we can celebrate again. If they don’t, we acknowledge our sin and ask God’s help in making us brave enough to live that way.