The Eternal Dance

Sermon

Speaking of the Trinity, someone once said that it’s not about two men and a bird.

According to the liturgical calendar, today is Trinity Sunday, and my guess as to why it’s this particular Sunday goes something like this: we have finally acknowledged the three persons. God the Creator is always present; we have traveled with Jesus through his life, death, and resurrection; and last week, the Holy Spirit showed up on Pentecost. So to the minds that created liturgical time, we can now acknowledge our triune God, one in three and three in one.

Over my thirty years in ministry, I have avoided Trinity Sunday like the plague. And I’m the one who schedules who preaches when, so normally I don’t assign myself to this particular day, but this year I did. And I am glad of it.

The reason I have avoided preaching on Trinity Sunday is because the relevance of the triune God seems a bit fuzzy. With everything going on in the world—war, poverty, homelessness, Black Lives Matter, justice for LGBTQ folks, climate change, Christian nationalism—why spend time on this ancient doctrine of the church? And with everything going on in our lives—inflation, transitions, uncurable diseases, family rifts—how could the doctrine of the Trinity help us in any way?

These are worthy questions, not simply for the preacher but for anyone who steps along the path of following Jesus. This particular church doctrine seems as foreign and outdated as hoop skirts, muskets, and raising children to be seen and not heard.

Allow me a very brief overview of how this came to be. The Trinity is not explicitly described in the Bible, although God is active as a Creator/Parent, as one with the Christ, and a breath or spirit that hovers over the waters of creation and descends like a dove at Jesus’ baptism. As Christianity began to take hold as a bona fide religion, the ancient church fathers (and they were all fathers) tried to codify what this new religion was about and what it was not about.

Through several arduous church council meetings, from the third century to the ninth, with rigorous debate and not a little rancor, the church declared that God was one God in three persons. The language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was found in the liturgies of the church—in prayers and creeds and benedictions.

But does it matter that we believe in a triune God?

Well… let’s first acknowledge that all language about God is metaphor. We simply do not have the vocabulary to say what God is, only the vocabulary to say what we think and feel and know God to be like. To turn the metaphor into a simile, the church believes that God is like a father, a mother, a creator; God is like a son, a savior, a redeemer; God is like a Spirit, a paraclete, a sanctifier.

So let’s set that aside for a few minutes. I invite you to look at the cover of your bulletin.

In the early 1400s, the Russian artist/monk Andrei Rublev was commissioned to create an icon of the Trinity for the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius. Rublev did not follow the usual pattern of pictures of the Trinity—two men and a bird—but instead chose to illustrate the scene from Genesis in which three angels visit Abraham and Sarah (today’s scripture reading). The icon was well received by the monks in that monastery, and its artistic reputation grew over the centuries. It is now considered one of the greatest pieces of Russian religious art.

As one scholar writes, “… such an accolade is hardly surprising. Yet what won over the monks was something deeper and, moreover, more specifically Orthodox: the piece shows an ideal expression of God without God being represented. In the icon of the Trinity, we are in the presence of God, but we do not see him; we do not understand him. …these three angels …represent the three identities of the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. All three figures illustrated here possess identical features. This is not a mistake: the three persons of the Trinity are identical, each fulfilling its own particular role.” (http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-paintings/trinity-rublev.htm)

One of the things I find interesting about this particular icon is how it has influenced contemporary theologians in their understanding of the Trinity. As fresh eyes take a look at this ancient church doctrine, the doctrinal flatness morphs into something else, something dynamic, something still incomprehensible but possibly alluring.

Henri Nouwen called this icon a picture of Living in the House of Love. He writes, “During a hard period of my life in which verbal prayer had become nearly impossible and during which mental and emotional fatigue had made me the easy victim of feelings of despair and fear, a long and quiet presence to this icon became the beginning of my healing. As I sat for long hours in front of Rublev’s Trinity, I noticed how gradually my gaze became a prayer. This silent prayer slowly made my inner restlessness melt away and lifted me up into the circle of love, a circle that could not be broken by the powers of the world. Even as I moved away from the icon and became involved in the many tasks of everyday life, I felt as if I did not have to leave the holy place I had found and could dwell there whatever I did or wherever I went.” (Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, p. 33)

So taken with this image was Franciscan Monk Richard Rohr that he chose it as the cover of his wonderful book on the Trinity, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation. It’s a book I bought a week ago and wish I had bought a month ago because I didn’t finish it before I needed to finish this sermon!

He begins with why this book, and says, “If Trinity is supposed to describe the very heart of the nature of God, and yet it has almost no practical or pastoral implications in most of our lives… if it’s even possible that we could drop it tomorrow and it would be a forgettable, throwaway doctrine… then either it can’t be true or we don’t understand it!” (p. 26) Drawing on the ancient church fathers, writes, “Whatever is going on in God is a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three—a circle dance of love.” (p. 27)

What does the doctrine of the Trinity have to do with us? Why does God as “a circle dance of love” even matter?

Presumably you are here because there is something about the Divine—God or Jesus or whatever—that has drawn you in. Perhaps you are a reluctant believer, or perhaps you describe yourself as agnostic more than anything else. Perhaps you have always found God in the world or in your life; perhaps God is, as the old hymn says, a love that will not let you go, and God is also a love you will not let go.

And if you believe in God—and there are a lot of words to unpack in that sentence—if you believe in God, maybe once in a while, or every day, it is good to consider who God is for you, how you understand God to be in the world and in your life, what metaphor is most meaningful these days. The Trinity is one way to do that.

What I have loved about reading Richard Rohr’s book is his exploration of the dynamic nature of God. Even the most revered icon still depicts static figures, though time spent gazing at the image could shake things up. But to describe God as Trinity is to say God is many things all at once. It is to say that the very nature of our Creator is relationship, and since we are created in the image of God, our very nature as human beings is relationship. We truly do not live alone. We are not Tom Hanks as castaway on a desert island with only a volleyball for a friend. We cannot live alone.

At this moment, you are enjoying the labor of someone who cut down a tree or recycled paper to make a bulletin; you are enjoying the artistic creation of needlepointers; you receive the gift of composers and musicians; you are the heir to millions of hours of Biblical scholars and translators and archeologists and book binders. The coffee you had for breakfast was once grown by a farmer in Central America or Africa. We cannot help but live in relationship with one another.

That means we take good care of each other. There is one last piece to Rublev’s icon and the story that inspired it. In the long ago days of Abraham and Sarah, it was a social must that people showed hospitality to strangers. So as this ancient couple camped under the oaks of Mamre, and as three strangers showed up, Abraham and Sarah set to work. They brought water for refreshment; they killed the fatted calf, not as some hope for a reciprocal gift, but simply because they took care of each other—they took care of husband, of wife, of stranger.

Who is taking good care of you these days? And who are you caring for?

Caring for family, for neighbor, for stranger, is a way we put flesh to words, a way we turn doctrine into living. It is a way we celebrate the eternal dance of the Trinity. And as W. H. Auden once said,

“I know nothing, except what everyone knows –
If there when Grace dances, I should dance.”

To the glory of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.