To Dance With God A sermon on the Trinity
To Dance with God
Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31/Romans 5:1-5/John 16:12-15
Trinity Sunday/ Year C/ May 30, 2010
Today is Trinity Sunday, the day in the church calendar when we acknowledge the importance of the Trinity in our understanding of God. When we look at the Trinity and try to understand what it means it becomes confusing and downright nonsensical to our rational 21st century minds. We understand that God is the Creator who spoke the world and all that is in it into being. We say we understand that Jesus is God’s son, Emmanuel – God with us- that God became a human being in order to bring us into relationship with God. But we do not always understand the Holy Spirit, the life, giving, breath of God that was present at the beginning and is still present today. When we talk about the Trinity we tend to focus more on the first two persons, the father and the son. The Holy Spirit tends to be a non-descript entity that seems to exist independently of the father and the son. For centuries the church has fought and argued over the meaning of the Trinity. The church has written creeds and confession that attempt to articulate the churches understanding of the relationship of God, the Son and the Spirit. Much of what has been written is sometimes incomprehensible to our rational 21st century minds. How can God be one God and yet three persons? In struggling with this issue, the early church articulated the defining marker of God by which Christians find their own identity, the doctrine of the Trinity. According to this doctrine, there is one God in whom there are three persons who share one substance. Further, according to this doctrine God has a name that denotes those three persons-Father, Son and Holy Spirit. When Christians pray typically they address the Father through the Son, in the Spirit. And when we proclaim the “Good News” we do so in the name of the God: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Even today there is still heated debate over the words we choose to describe the divine. Is it right to address God with such gender specific words as Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Why not use more generic words to describe the Godhead such as creator, redeemer and sustainer? The real issue though is how do we understand the relationship of the three persons. How do the father, the son and the Spirit relate to one another in relation to the creation, preservation, and perfection of the world?
I have struggled with this doctrine for a long time. How can the one God be three persons each with distinct attributes? How can Jesus be both Father and Spirit and human at the same time? Ultimately it is a mystery. I would like to say that I have an answer, but I know that my answer, as with any answer is inadequate to bring understanding. The depth of God and God’s being is deeper than our human minds can penetrate. We cannot know the whole mystery of God. We catch glimpses of the whole in the different persons of the Godhead revealed in the scriptures. Even though the Trinity is not named directly in the scriptures, there are snapshots so to speak of their actions and presence scattered throughout the Bible. What we do know is that it is the power of God’s Spirit that guides us and directs us in our understanding of God and God’s purposes for us and for the world.
William P. Young in his bestselling book The Shack seeks to wrestle with and bring understanding to the difficult questions of the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and where is God in a world filled win unspeakable pain?
Macenzie Allen Phillips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she had been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Now four years later, in the midst of his “Great Sadness,” Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently sent by someone called “PAPA.” The note invites him back to the shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he goes. He walks back into his darkest nightmare. What Mack finds there will and does change his life forever.
Mack is talking to PAPA.
Mack is struggling with the Why did this happen question; he asks;
If you couldn’t take care of Missy, how can I trust you to take care of me? (there he had said it, and he noticed his hands were knotted into fists, ready to strike)
“Mack, I’m so sorry.” Tears began to trail down her cheeks. “I know what a great gulf this has put between us. I know you don’t understand this yet. But I am especially fond of Missy, and you too.”
He loved the way she said Missy name and yet he hated it coming form her. It rolled off her tongue like the sweetest wine and even through all the fury still raging in his mind he somehow knew she meant it. He wanted to believe her and slowly some of his rage began to subside…
“Honey, there’s no easy answer that will take away your pain. Believe me if I had one, I’d use it now. I have no magic wand to wave over you and make it all better. Life takes a bit of time and a lot of relationship…”
“I think I would do this better if you weren’t wearing a dress.” Mack said attempting a weak smile.
Mackenzie, I am neither male nor female, even though both genders are derived from my nature. If I choose to appear to you as a man or a woman, its because I love you. For me to appear to a s a woman and suggest that you call me PAPA is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling back into your religious conditioning… To reveal myself to as a very large, white grandfather figure with a flowing beard, like Gandalf, would simply reinforce your religious stereotypes, and this weekend is not about reinforcing religious stereotypes. …
Hasn’t it always been a problem for you to embrace me as your father? And after what you have been through, you couldn’t very well handle a father right now could you?
Why there has been such an emphasis on you as being a father? I mean it seems to be the way you most reveal yourself.
Well, there are many reasons for that and some of them go very deep. Let me say for now that we knew once the creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking that mothering. Don’t misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering was needed because of its absence…
We are not three Gods, and we are not talking about one God with three attitudes, like a man who is a husband, a father, and a worker. I am God and I am three persons and each of the three is fully and entirely one.
“HUH! Exclaimed Mack.
If I were one God and only one person, this you would find yourself in this creation without something wonderful, something essential. And I would be utterly other than I am.
And we would be without…? Mack didn’t know how to finish the question.
Love and relationship. All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists within me, within God myself. Love is not the limitation. Love is like flying, I am love…
You do understand, that unless I had an object to love, or more accurately , a someone to love, If I did not have such a relationship within myself, then I would not be capable of love at all. You would have a god who could not love. O maybe worse you would have god, when he chose, could only love as a limitation of his nature. The God who is cannot act apart from love. Each of us is love incarnate… we are in a circle of relationship, not a chain of command, or a great chain of being and your ancestors called it. What we are is relationship without any overlay of power. We don’t need power over the other because we rest in each other. Its like a great dance with three partners each dancing together in love…1.
The relationship of the Trinity is like a Divine dance to use the Greek term perichoresis. As one writer has put it:
“The Divine Dance. The Divine Dance of the persons of the Trinity.
In the beginning was the Dance, and the Dance was in God, and the Dance was God…
An eternal Dance; the three persons of the Godhead dancing eternally, in an embrace of love, mutually giving and receiving. Always dancing.
In the beginning God created a Dancing partner…
The world was created in its own dance, and invited to join the Dance. But the lead dancers said No! and started their own dance. The hands of God are extended to restore the Dance, and inviting us to Dance: The Son, and the Spirit, the two hands of God.
The Dance for us has a beginning, and an end, and they are not the same. The beginning starts with anticipation, expectation, and desire; the end concludes with satisfaction, completion, and rest – until the next Dance.
We look upon the Dance of God, as he ever circles about us. We try to understand. We so often fail. The Dance goes on, and the part we have in the Dance goes on, though we are not Dancing, only dancing, yet that dancing seems to be incorprated despite our best efforts. We look, and the Dance seems to change, to reverse, to go back on itself – it repented the Lord that… – and then the Dance goes on, seeking it’s goal, never seeking return to the starting point – I the Lord change not. This is the nature of Dance: round and round you go, sometimes to and sometimes fro, but the Dance goes on.
And us? Some of us sit as wallflowers. We won’t dance under any circumstances. Some of us are dancing around our handbags in our own dance, while the Dance wheels about us. We dance on our own. But dances are communal, not individual, everyone knows that. Dances are free, though structured: God’s Line Dancing.
Will you join the Dance? God’s two hands, The Son and Spirit, await you, pull you, invite you, to take you into the Dance, to wheel you about, make you dizzy at times, exhilerated at times, exhausted at times, fearful at times. But it is The Dance.”2
1.Young, William P.; The Shack; 2007, Windblown Media, Los Angeles, California pp. 92-102; p. 122
2. Perichoresis is the Divine Dance. http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/archive/index.php/t-27144.html
