The early 1980s, and I wonder if you remember the film that took its title from William Blake’s Jerusalem? It won four Academy awards, including Best Picture, and is now ranked 19th in the British Film Institute’s list of the Top 100 British films.
It was a film about striving for excellence:
Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire. Bring me my spear, O clouds unfold, bring me my chariot of fire.
Some of the training scenes are filmed on the three mile stretch of beach at St Andrews, and I was there, at university at the time – a friend of mine, Clive, was an extra in the running squad. It was exciting: these film stars around, the buzz. If you remember, the story was about the two main characters as they trained in preparation for the Olympics of 1924: Harold Abrahams, a Jew, who overcame the anti-semitic prejudice of the day to compete, and Eric Liddell, who came from a strict Scottish Presbyterian background. Eric Liddell’s family, particularly his sister, is disturbed by Eric’s involvement in the Games: that he might be losing sight of his faith, seeking his own glory instead of God’s. A memorable scene is when Eric Liddell accidentally misses a church prayer meeting because of his running. His sister Jennie upbraids him and accuses him of no longer caring about God. The plan is that Eric will go to China as a missionary, and perhaps he’s forgetting that that is what God wants of his life. Eric tells her that, yes, he does intend to return to the China mission, but that he also feels divinely inspired when running, and that not to run would be to dishonour God: "I believe that God made me for a purpose. But He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure." He says.
I feel God’s pleasure.

One of the delightful things about Trinity Sunday is the invitation to contemplate God. God as God is, in his very being, as one God, yet in relationship. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three persons, forever contemplating each other in love, in gentleness; a dance of joy, a mutual circle of divine love. Rublev’s icon captures it, many believe: the stately divine interaction. It’s difficult to love when you’re alone, after all. God is love. Love that needs an object; love that is – at the same time – the lover and the beloved, and the loving. Father, the lover, Jesus Christ, the beloved and the Holy Spirit, the loving.
But it doesn’t stop there, as some hermetically sealed, neat and contained thing. Because that love which is the Godhead overflows. Think of it like this: the Trinity is God’s love, overflowing into the world; overflowing and filling the world with God’s pleasure. Catching us up into the marvellous light and life and love that is God.

A newly born lamb. Can you imagine it? Already dancing around the field, confident in a ready supply of its mother’s milk, white and innocent, symbolic of all the freshness of spring.

Little Lamb, who made thee                   Gave thee life & bid thee feed.    Gave thee clothing of delight,                 Gave thee such a tender voice.          Little Lamb who made thee

Does thou know who made thee By the stream & o'er the mead; Softest clothing woolly bright; Making all the vales rejoice:  Does thou know who made thee?

         By this time of year, early summer, they are a bit dirtier, a little less attractive. By next year, if destined to breed, that lamb, so innocent and white, will be a sheep. Altogether less attractive. Grimy, straggled, rather stupid. It happens to all of us, doesn’t it – we start young and fresh and energetic, full of the joys of spring. But we get older, we get tarnished. The things we do lose their original shine. Innocence becomes knowledge, it can become cynicism, tired and rather grubby. We turn grey.
Now imagine the wool, shorn. Dirty and greasy piles of fleece, full of thorns and parasites, piled up in the corner of the woolshed. The original beauty of the lamb, so lovely, so much a symbol of new creation, lost. Instead a shorn sheep with something of its original whiteness, but nothing of the beauty and innocence of a lamb.
And someone comes along, and lovingly combs and washes the fleece. Washes out all the dirt and grime. Takes time and energy. Perhaps it’s done today by machine, but never mind – the care is there, turning filthy stuff into soft and fine yarn.
And someone else comes along and creates that. Angela Wright, it was. Taking wool, a natural thing, yet the product and work of human hands, and making it into a work of art.
It’s a work of art that speaks of the overflowing love of the Trinity. God’s love, spreading out its innocence and joy through all the world. Permeating you and me, all the corners of this earth, with love and peace. Stretching out tendrils into hardened hearts. Renewing and expanding bitter and withered souls, enabling them to crack open and live again. Silas Marner souls transformed.
Art, such as this, is so important. So important that we respond to God’s love with our creativity, making beautiful things to say, yes, God, we understand – we know your love that comes to meet us in our human condition. We know your love for us, and we respond. We offer back to you the work of our hands; we offer the best of our beauty because we want to be caught up into your nature of love.

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,               He is called by thy name,              He is meek & he is mild,                I a child & thou a lamb,                  Little Lamb God bless thee,

Little Lamb I'll tell thee; For he calls himself a Lamb: He became a little child We are called by His name, Little Lamb God bless thee.

 Jesus Christ became a child, became a human being, because God so loved the world. God became part of the natural world. The Incarnation. Jesus Christ. He was both the man who walked among us, and also the second person of the Trinity. The Logos, the Word of God who was with God from the beginning.
Many have thought that Christ is foretold in the book of Proverbs: the wisdom of God, that works with God to shape the world. Listen again: 
When he established the heavens I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit … then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the human race.
Wisdom that is alongside God the Creator: Jesus Christ, wisdom of God. Who is also the man, the child and the lamb, calling us to create with him, to become with God, co-workers of redemption. Christ inspires to create new lives, new opportunities from old and tired things. With God’s grace we make clean and white the dirty wool, we turn it into something beautiful that recalls the innocence of the lamb.
As a congregation, we need to thank Artspace, here at Bradford Cathedral, for bringing such art for us to enjoy. It takes us right to the heart of the Trinity.  A God who is pleased, who delights in humanity, whose love spills over into the world.
As you absorb the beauty of the wool, the light, the space, the proportion, I wonder how you respond. I wonder if you feel God’s pleasure.
I’d like to suggest that art enables us to say Yes to God. Yes, to being caught up into the Trinity. That, deep inside us, we are stirred by God’s pleasure, and know God’s delight in the world. Then, as we create, through art, we lift our spirits in turn.
Beauty inspires us to lift our human spirit to God. 
Because, of course, it’s not just the Angela Wrights and Eric Liddells of the world who do this, though they often show us the way. Each of us can respond to the Trinitarian love of God. One of the simplest ways is to do or make something beautiful. Baking a cake. Writing a letter. Simply smiling or showing some token of care. For such as these are transformative actions; small or large, acts of beauty, of love. This Trinity Sunday. Thank God for artists, and make something beautiful today and give it away.
And so we feel God’s pleasure, we rejoice and delight in the Trinity.

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation,
through your goodness we have this art to offer.
Fruit of the natural world and the work of human hands,
it will become for us a sign of your pleasure. 
 
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.