Holy Trinity Sunday Year B May 27, 2018
Luther Memorial Lutheran Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Hutson
Isaiah
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
The war had ended and Pat’s family had settled back into life as usual in small town Iowa. Pat’s older brothers were both in high school and both active in sports, football, basketball, baseball. Pat’s father had resumed his job at the factory on the edge of town and Pat’s mother did what all of the mothers in this and many towns like it did…she went back to tending to household matters like cooking and cleaning and raising the children.
Pat had but one great love, one activity that occupied both mind and heart. She loved to dance. Pat’s aunt, Dee, was the local dance instructor in town. All of the children who took dance lessons were students at Dees Dance Studio. We’ll set your toes tapping was the slogan on the awning out front. In addition to tap, Pat took ballet and acrobatics as well, back before it was called gymnastics.
Recitals were the high point of Pat’s year, every year. When she was just a little girl they’d dressed as daisies and sunbeams, beaming up there on stage. But now that she was in Junior High, Pat had more sophisticated dances and she even helped with the smaller children’s classes. Pat loved to dance and she loved being at the dance studio. It was her safe and happy place.
When Pat was in eighth grade, though, her father was laid off from the factory and in order to find another job that would support the family, they had to move away from the town where her aunt’s dance studio was located to a town two hours away. Pat’s brothers were allowed to live with their aunt and uncle to finish high school and remain on their sports teams, but Pat had to go along with her parents. “Is there a dance studio where we are going?” she asked her mother one day.
And her mother told her that it didn’t matter; that they’d only let Pat dance because Aunt Dee didn’t charge them for the lessons and that Pat’s interest in dance was just a “pastime” to keep her busy. She wasn’t really a dancer at all, her mother said.
From that time on Pat only danced in the secret, private places in their home and in her heart. In her room, with the door closed, she would meticulously go through the steps and movements to each routine she’d performed on stage. From that time on Pat didn’t really know who she was, if she wasn’t a dancer.
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Somewhere you learned something about who you are. We all did. If you were very lucky, the people around you spoke the truth of that…calling forth your gifts and naming all that was true and beautiful and wondrous about you. That you were kind or smart or wrote beautiful poems. That you were funny or a good singer or a fast runner. That you were a loyal friend or a splendid musician or a graceful dancer. Somewhere you learned, if you were very lucky, that on those days when shadows of doubt edged into your soul, these things that had been spoken of you were true and that you could count on them to remain true.
In a similar way, somewhere you learned something about who God is. That God is a wondrous Creator, a support for every season of life. Or maybe you learned that God is an angry judge or an old bearded white guy who lives in the clouds, waiting to smite the next person guilty of not pleasing God.
And somewhere you learned something about who Jesus is. That Jesus is a friend, a savior, a wise teacher, a prophet, a justice seeker. You learned that Jesus died and rose and if you were very lucky you learned that his death was not to save just a few chosen, but for the sake of the whole world. God so loved the world, that God sent the Son.
And somewhere you learned something about who Spirit is. She is holy wind and flames of fire and descending dove. She is agitator and comforter and advocate. She is truth. She is love.
Today, on this final Sunday before Ordinary Time in the Church, we gather for Holy Trinity Sunday. It’s almost impossible to explain the Trinity – this idea of God being Three persons, but One God. There are so many awful analogies around this and I’m fairly certain I’ve used my fair share of them in sermons. And the truth is that every one of those analogies falls short because we are trying to explain something that is essentially unexplainable. We are trying to explain a relationship between the three persons of God; the three primary ways God is known to us. And we have all sorts of words and metaphors and analogies and examples. But not one of them is sufficient.
Trying to explain the Trinity has been a theological task for the centuries. In the 4th century the Council of Nicea tried and all they could really agree on was what the Trinity was NOT and they called those ideas heresies. The 20th century theologian and priest Robert Farrar Capon once described human attempts to explain the Trinity as being like an oyster trying to describe a ballerina. There just aren’t words for it. We simply don’t have concepts that are wide enough or beautiful enough or deep enough to describe the meaning of something as mysterious and wondrous as the true nature of God.
But this Sunday in the Church year, before we enter into the wide grace of Ordinary Time, after these great feasts and festivals of Pentecost and Easter and Lent and Epiphany and Christmas…..this Sunday invites us to ponder this for a time. To consider with the eyes of our hearts the mystery of God as three persons, however we name them, yet one God.
To help us with this, I want to tell you some more of Pat’s story. Pat didn’t dance again, except in the safety of her bedroom and from time to time at a school dance, although she definitely thought that was different from the stirring shuffle ball change of her tap class and the plié of her ballet class and the round offs and back handsprings that left her breathless. Eventually Pat became a teacher, though, which was not exactly what she’d always dreamed of, but it was what her mother said was a good option when it became clear that marriage wasn’t happening for Pat. Late at night, after lesson plans were done and papers were graded Pat would lie in bed and mentally remember those dance routines from her Aunt Dee, who was now long gone. Her hands would move and it was as though she could imagine herself back on the stage, in the silver tutu and her toe shoes.
When Pat retired from teaching, she traveled to new places and met new friends and eventually she met a person who became her beloved. Pat’s beloved named every good thing that had always been inside Pat, but had not been lifted up: her keen intellect, her sharp wit, her deep insights into people and her love of new experiences. And every night, after dinner, Pat’s beloved and Pat would put some music on, and come together in their kitchen and dance. They would dance together and separately and lose themselves in their dancing. It turns out that Pat actually was a dancer deep down inside. That those words spoken to her and of her that said otherwise were not true. And it was in that dancing, together and apart that Pat and her beloved knew who they each were alone, enough and complete, but that when they danced together, they were more fully known. More of who they truly were, in the movement and the dance and the joy and the surprise and the wonder of it all.
Beloved community, God is mystery and majesty and wonder and holiness. We will never have words that are sufficient. But God is known in the back handspring of Creation, in the grand plié of mercy, in the toe taps of grace in our lives, and in the waltz that is love.
Dear Ones, it takes faith to dance in these days, but we are the dancers and we are the dreamers and we are the disciples of a God who is beyond our capacity to describe, but who knows us and loves us without condition and without end.
Thanks be to God and let the Church say…Amen.