The Image of God in us: Trinity Sunday 2007 – Proverbs 8; Romans 5.1-5; John 16.12-15: Revd. Canon Dr. Alan Winton

The members of the church book groups may well struggle with this fact, but there are some people who only ever read books of non-fiction: an argument I’ve heard is that some people only want to read about things that are true, books that describe what is really the case or that offer practical advice and explanation. Others of us, particularly the book groups, enjoy fiction as well. It’s not that we are not interested in truth, or in the reality of the world and people’s lives, it’s simply that we believe that a story involving an element of imagination can be as truthful and helpful as the most practical textbook. Fiction can also be fun, it can entertain us and transport us away into worlds we can inhabit for a while before we have to return to the reality of our lives, but in the midst of the entertainment that such writing offers, there can also be deep insights into the human condition or observations about life that strike us as profoundly true.

Perhaps a similar division exists in the way that we look at and enjoy art, although the boundaries here are much less clear. At one end of the spectrum are those paintings where you really struggle to tell if what you’re looking at is a painting or a photograph. It

often seems to be the way with people who paint wildlife, that what they really want to do is make an exact, photographic copy – and for some people this is the highest point art can reach. Without going too far in the other direction, a Picasso, for example, is clearly not an attempt at a photographic reproduction of reality. But the crunch really comes here in whether we can see authenticity and value in such an artist’s attempt to express truth in this kind of non-realist painting?  In many areas of the arts there is this fundamental division between those who only really find truth in what offers as exact as possible a mirror of reality, and those for whom truth can come from something that they know to be, in some sense, a fiction.

Today the church celebrates Trinity Sunday: what are we to make of this central doctrine of Christian faith? Perhaps the first thing to say is that the doctrine of the Trinity is not something that is ever expressed explicitly in the Bible. The church came to formulate the doctrine as the result of various pressures and on the basis of texts like the epistle and Gospel we heard today, where God is spoken of in the form of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. You could say that the doctrine of the Trinity was developed as an attempt to tidy up and make explicit what was implicit and never neatly or fully expressed in the Scriptures. The Bible does speak of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, but never really reflects systematically on how they are to be related.

My thought for today is that perhaps we should view the doctrine of the Trinity through the metaphor of a work of art, recognising that the way in which it is seen to express truth about the nature of God will vary among Christians. There will be those who see it as an exact representation of how God is, finding no problem or contradiction in the idea of three persons, one substance. While others may see it more as an image that expresses truth about God without needing to be seen as a simple or uncomplicated representation of the exact reality: more Picasso than wildlife illustration perhaps we might say.

But of course the real question we need to ask is what truth is the doctrine trying to express, however falteringly. For me, it is simply trying to make sure that we identify properly the nature of the God whom we worship.  When the militant atheists of the 21^st century talk about God, you realise that their ideas owe more to poor philosophical caricatures than to the teachings of the Bible. But difficulties can also come from within the church: the recent storm that brewed for a while following some comments from our Dean of St. Albans on the subject of the atonement is another case in point. To hear the way some Christians talk about the meaning of the cross seems to completely disregard what the doctrine of the Trinity claims about the unity of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

But for me, the power of the idea of the Trinity comes into focus when we think about the powerful idea that we are made in God’s image. What this doctrine teaches us of huge importance is that God’s nature is expressed in the relationship of love and self-giving between the Father, the Son and the Spirit. And so we only truly reflect God’s nature in our lives when we are in relationship with one another, relationship of love and self-giving also.  In order for my life most fully to express God’s image, I need you: it is in the love that binds us together that we bear most eloquent witness to the love and true nature of God. That is a rather convoluted answer to the oft repeated question: do you need to go to church to be a Christian? Well, it is difficult to express faith on your own, because it is in the wonderful and often complicated dynamics of love and giving between people that God’s image is most fully expressed.

That links to the way that we often speak of the church through the image of a family, and we will be doing that in a particularly important way in a moment or two (later this morning), as we welcome a very special and precious member into God’s family following her baptism. But for now we celebrate this Trinity Sunday, at peace I hope about the way that this snapshot of a doctrine captures something of real importance about the God whom we worship, even if we might all struggle to know quite how much this doctrine expresses the full picture of the nature of God. But it is worth the struggle to reflect on the idea of the Trinity for what it says of God has real importance about how we understand ourselves as his creatures, and it challenges us about how our lives together can truly reflect the love and self-giving we see and worship in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.