Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley and The Trinity

Sermon preached at St Mary's Church, Whitkirk, Leeds

Trinity Sunday - 3^rd June 2007

The artist Damien Hirst has struck again, this time with a diamond studded platinum cast of a human skull.  It is worth about £50m.  It is called ‘For the love of God’ and what you think that means will be reflected in the inflection you use to say it.  As the Independent pointed out, exclaimed with disgust and you will be expressing its vulgarity.  Murmur it somewhat pensively and you will be saying that you are entranced by its audacity and the statement it is making.

But what is that statement?  One person on Newsnight claimed that it announced our victory over death.  This is the most that we can throw at it - £50m worth of diamonds!  I don’t think so, I thought.  If this is the most we can throw at death then death very much has the final laugh and this sparkly skull is about as far from a statement of victory as we can get.  This is the ultimate avoidance and may be that is Damien Hirst’s point.

 
Cut to another piece of contemporary art.  This time we are away from the opulent bling of 8601 diamonds and standing on a windy Crosby beach on a rather dull bank holiday Monday.  That is where we went for the day last week.  The weather was so awful here that we headed west to Liverpool to see Antony Gormley’s installation on Crosby Beach.  Called ‘Another Place’, it consists of 100 bronze cast statues of the artist spread along the beach, looking out to sea.

At first the images are just interesting: a lone figure in the sand.  Then we come to another and another, and on it goes along the beach and out to the sea shore.  The impact grows slowly because it is cumulative.  Far from alone, these figures are all looking out into the distance looking at whatever passes, perhaps looking for something to come.  But they stand in a solidarity of the human condition, whatever that is bringing today.  These figures do not shout audaciously at death, rather they look firmly at life and say that relationships are key to understanding where we are and how we are.

Relationships are a good place to begin if we want to understand what today is about.  Today is Trinity Sunday and in it we focus on our doctrine of God, on how we understand God’s nature to be.  In the Trinity God is not seen to be about isolated whistling in the dark against the dying of the light, something to make the starkness of death seem more palatable.  In the Trinity we say that at the heart of God is relationship.  When we talk about God as ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, we are not just talking about three ways that we have come to experience God, but express a belief that at God’s core is an eternal relating.  It is in God’s nature to relate because at his core there is an eternal relationship: what we refer to when we say ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.  It is this triangle of the Trinity that communes and shares, stands in solidarity and pours out of its very self in all that we are given.

Because of this, there is something divine about human relationships, in particular that we have relationships at all and flourish in their warmth and support.  The different ways that we experience God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, express this in that they are three ways of God relating to us.  But there is more to this.  Relating itself is a significant way in which we share in the life of God.  It is not just an expression of the divine life, but enables us to participate in God.  That is a mystical faith and much more radical and intimate than we tend to realise.  There is a tendency to keep God at a distance and remote, but the Trinity presents a different picture, one of relating and participation.  That is much closer and tangible.  It also takes time to grasp it more deeply, as the relating deepens.

Before we dismiss Damien Hirst’s glittering skull completely, he does throw powerful questions into the equation, as his work often does.  One of these is the place of wealth in our relating.  It is difficult to look at 8601 faultless ethically sourced diamonds without facing that challenge.  A good deal of how we live is centred around economic activity: work, paying bills, concern over rising prices, what interest rates do to us.  It has also been predicted this week that we will soon see the first £10m a year footballer.  ‘For the love of God’, who needs that amount?  Wealth or money is a tool to be used to order and oil our social exchanges.  We buy food and all that we need, but there does come a scale when the point has been seriously lost and a diamond encrusted skull is a vivid way of expressing this.  There is an approach where money is used as a way of shouting at the darkness and avoiding the reality of the human condition.

Placing the diamonds on a skull next to Antony Gormley’s work and we are also confronted with the ways poverty attack our relationships.  Poverty eats away at us and can tackle not only our primary relationships but also our sense of solidarity of belonging, especially if we see others living in what seems to be a diamond encrusted world.  It damages communal belonging where some use their wealth to disregard those without it.  There is wealth that builds community and allows relating to flourish.  There is an opulence of wealth that serves to divide and exploit, to exclude and make those at the bottom more aware of the little they have.  Jealousy and envy are stirred alongside awareness of injustice and oppression.  There are cautionary observations that stand alongside the prophetic.

Antony Gormley’s sculptures dance with light and intimacy and in so doing do more than Damien Hirst’s shouting at the darkness with his spangly skull.  The play between these two works, though, gives us a reworking of that great hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13.  If we have all treasures, but do not have love, we have nothing and have missed the point big time.  The point to life is not wealth but relating.  This is what we are about and for.  We are created by God who has relating at his heart.  We are created to relate to God and one another, another three way trinitarian dance.  In this relating we share in and participate in none other than the life of God and we express that every time we use the three-fold name of God: ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.  Three persons, yet one God; three ways of relating in an eternal communion.  This mystery is at the heart of everything that there is and it is our distinctive Christian understanding of God.

© Ian Black 2007