Sermon May 26- Holy Trinity Sunday
Please pray with me. Lord, bless the speaking and bless the hearing, that your Word may take root in our hearts and bear fruit in our lives, for the healing of the world you so love, and to the glory of your holy name. Amen.
During the fall of my second year at seminary, which was the year before I came here to Luther Memorial for this internship, I had a class called systematic theology. Taught by a brilliant professor, the intent of the course was to try to make sense out of how we think about God. I believe it is really important to wrestle with who God is, so I’m not against this class, but it’s no light topic, and you can probably imagine, I usually left systematic theology class in a daze with a mild headache. It’s not easy to understand something as all-encompassing as the Creator of all things! After we struggled with theories of creation and Christology, we came to that ever-precarious issue of the Holy Trinity. Since the third century, Christians have been asking the question, how can our God be three persons, yet one God? A head-scratching question, to be sure. Our professor gave us articles to read and had us write a reflection paper, so that we would have something to say on Holy Trinity Sunday, rather than avoiding the topic altogether as many Pastors tend to do. So when Pastor Julie passed out the preaching schedule several months ago and I saw my name next to this Holy Trinity Sunday, I wasn’t sure whether Pastor Julie was just passing it off to the intern, or granting me an opportunity to use some of those things I learned from my studies.
I am not up to the task today to explain to you the Holy Trinity in some way that will make perfect sense forever and ever, Amen. A pastor recently commented, as many of his colleagues were debating about proper explanations of the Trinity, that instead of explaining the Trinity, as the church in the West has tended to do with books and terminology and debate, we would do better to follow the lead of our Orthodox brothers and sisters and dramatize the Trinity, to play with metaphor and art and song to draw out a better of understanding of this deep mystery. Like trying to explain what love is, we desacralize its beauty when we try to chop these mysteries apart and analyze something that is ultimately beyond our control and understanding.
One of those metaphors that belongs to our Christian tradition is perichoresis, a fancy Greek word for a dynamic relationship of movement, often expressed as dance, as you can see in the song we will sing throughout the worship service today, “Come join the dance of Trinity.” To talk about the dance of Trinity is to say that God is a dancing community. The Creator, the Word, and the Spirit exist in the dance of relationship. That is to say that the image of a old man God, sitting by himself all alone in heaven is not where the Trinity points us, but instead to a relational God, a God of give and take, a dynamic dancing community. And this God invites all of us- and all of creation- into God’s dance. Come, join the dance of Trinity, we sing; we find ourselves being beckoned into the dance of Trinity, drawn into community by the Spirit’s invitation.
There is a church in San Francisco called St. Gregory of Nyssa that is the object of much of my liturgical envy- I covet the way they worship. Their worship space is in a large circle, and they have large paintings on the high walls of saints of old and more recent times- St. Francis and Martin Luther stand next to Anne Frank and John Coltrane. I’m not kidding! And these saints aren’t actually standing next to each other, they are dancing. This giant painting is called the “dancing icon of saints,” and with their hands and feet outstretched, they encircle the worshipping space from above. Because this church also has a passion for the arts in community, one of the things they do during their worship is dance. Not like they turn the lights down and a DJ blasts some music and everyone goes off in their own corner and jumps around, this is a real community dance. The worshippers stand in one giant swirl: one person’s hand rests on the shoulder of the person in front of them, around and around, so from above, you see layers of this pattern in a giant swirly circle, and the community steps in the same rhythm- sometimes 3 steps forward and one step back, or other more complicated steps. Thanks to youtube, I’ve seen them do this dancing to “simple gifts,” which I’m sure you recognize. ‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight
As they sang, they did a relatively simple step- right, left, right, up, down, up, back, feet together. They became a great moving swirl as they sang this Shaker tune, which was in fact written to be a dance song. The shakers, that group of charismatic Christians in the late 1700s, danced as a part of their worship of God, and you can feel the rhythm. 1, 2, 3 and 4, 1, 2, 3 and 4. So at St. Gregory of Nyssa the saints here on earth who have gathered for worship dance below as the communion of saints in the great circular icon dance above them, joined together in God’s dance for all times and places.
The other thing I love is that because they dance in a swirl and not just in a circle, there is always room for more to join in, to put their hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them and join in. This holy dance is not a closed circle only for a certain few, but an open-ended swirl, inviting more into the dance. The dance of Trinity, the very Being of God, is a dance that is always inviting, always open to new life, always making room for more to participate in this dynamic, life-giving dance. At the beginning of worship we sang, “Come join the dance of Trinity, before all worlds begun, the interweaving of the three, the Father, Spirit, Son. The universe of space and time did not arrive by chance, but as the three in love and hope made room within their dance.”
Wisdom, Sophia, raises her voice in the first lesson from Proverbs, describing the way she was present in that dance from the beginning: “I was God’s delight day after day, rejoicing at being in God’s presence continually, rejoicing in the whole world and delighting in humankind.” Rejoice is a word we hear often in the church, but in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, rejoice was the same word as to dance. So the Creator, the Wisdom of God who is Jesus, and the Holy Spirit rejoiced in the created world that came into being through their dance, and they delighted in the creation of humanity. They passed along their delight in dance and gave us reason to join in, to rejoice and to dance with God.
This congregation has been blessed with a wealth of musicians who sing and play instruments of various kinds, and I know that you have felt the power of music to move people. Sure, emotionally move people, but I mean physically, too. Last night, I went to the Folklife festival, and even tried out the Scandinavian folk dancing for a bit, and as you probably know, you can see there musicians from many other parts of the globe, and what I noticed was that this music was meant to get people moving. The rhythm’s intent was to bring people into the dance, to shake off complacency, get off their chairs, and participate. As a banjo player, I know that there are a few tunes that always get a sure response from people: they start tapping their toes. It’s like you can’t help it. The Holy Spirit moves like this, too, capturing us in body, mind, and soul, with something that stirs inside of us and calls us beyond our fears and insecurities to move along with the spirit. You cannot tap your feet, you cannot move to the rhythm, but you have to do it consciously, you have to say, “no.” God doesn’t force us into the dance- it is always an invitation- but it is possible to refuse to join, to say no. This is very similar to the way Martin Luther understood faith- we don’t have faith on our own, it is a gift. Our faith is a result of that holy rhythm, a response to an invitation that will naturally spring forth in us, though we can choose to say no and remain firmly planted in our way of living, refusing to move.
The important thing about perichoresis, the relationship of the Triune God, is that their dance of relationship is an equal one- the three persons are in a relationship of equality, of full freedom for each. One person in the Trinity does not dominate the other two, two persons do not gang up on the weaker part. The relationship is one of equality and honoring the other as well as oneself, like an equilateral triangle of love. The relationship is also one of freedom- which is why the dance metaphor is so appropriate. To dance is to express our freedom, to not be chained by the “yoke of sin and death,” as our hymn so eloquently says it. It is no wonder then that the Shakers who danced in their worship also institutionalized the equality of women, to grant them voice as preachers and leaders, and led the way in the abolitionist movement to grant freedom to slaves and break literal chains in the American South. The divine dance spirals out into the world, taking its joy and freedom and equality into places that only know the yoke of sin and death, not the divine dance of life.
This is the Gospel, my friends: that when we find ourselves wearing the yoke of sin and death, God beckons us with a holy rhythm, calling us onto a dance floor of freedom, and joy, where there is room for all and equality for all, and a spirit of celebration and delight in the created world. Rejoice, rejoice, dance, you people of God! Come, join the dance of Trinity, and we will find ourselves caught up the spiral of a celestial dance, gathered with all of God’s children, united with and blessed by the communion of saints who danced the way this far for us and we will continue their movement in life and in death for those who will come after us. The last verse of “Come, join the dance of Trinity” is a final invitation: “Let voices rise and interweave, by love and hope set free, to shape in song this joy, this life: the dance of Trinity.” May the dance of Trinity call us off of our chairs, break the chains that confine the world, and invite us to dance with God in joy and freedom and love. Thanks be to our dancing God, Amen.
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