COME, JOIN THE DANCE OF TRINITY TRINITY SUNDAY YEAR C MAY 26, 2013 BECKY ROBBINS-PENNIMAN CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, DUNEDIN, FL

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1 COME, JOIN THE DANCE OF TRINITY TRINITY SUNDAY YEAR C MAY 26, 2013 BECKY ROBBINS-PENNIMAN CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, DUNEDIN, FL Proverbs 8:1 4, Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world s first bits of soil. 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, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, 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. Psalm 8 O LORD our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world! Out of the mouths of infants and children your majesty is praised above the heavens. You have set up a stronghold against your adversaries, to quell the enemy and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, What is man that you should be mindful of him? the son of man that you should seek him out? You have made him but little lower than the angels; you adorn him with glory and honor; You give him mastery over the works of your hands; you put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, even the wild beasts of the field, The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatsoever walks in the paths of the sea. O LORD our Governor, how exalted is your Name in all the world! Romans 5:1 5 Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. John 16:12 15 Jesus said to the disciples, I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. Copyright notices: The Scripture text is from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all other content is original and copyrighted by Becky Robbins-Penniman, All rights reserved.

2 One day during my second quarter in seminary, my beloved mentor and theology professor, Walt Bouman, asked, how many of you would lay down your lives in order to defend your belief that Jesus is the son of God? Nearly every hand from these good, pious Lutherans went up. Then he asked, how many of you would lay down your lives in order to defend the doctrine of the Trinity? Lots of squirming on seats. No hands. This is Trinity Sunday; I ll bet even most of us here today didn t know that until you got here this morning. How many of us really have in interest in, let alone a way of articulating, your own understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity? that God is, as the hymn [we just sang] put it, three persons? In lots of artwork, these three persons are depicted as a stern old man with a white beard, a stern young man with a light brown beard, and a bird. Two beards and a bird are sort of hard to get excited about, let alone lay down your life for. One religious observer joked: no wonder Islam is growing so fast. In Christianity, you get one wife and three gods. In Islam, you get one God and three wives! How did we get to this whole messy Triune God thing, anyway? Search the Bible: it never once uses the word trinity anywhere! Amazingly, the whole concept is built on logical inferences. Imagine! Logic being used in religion! But, let s have a go at this; I doubt whether, in the next few minutes, I can make you passionate enough about the Trinity to consider martyrdom, but I do hope I can make it a little clearer that the whole concept really does matter to us all. Where to start? Most people begin with Creation. That there is something rather than nothing implies a Creator. Every religion, from Zoroastrianism to Taoism to Judaism has some kind of vast cosmic story about how it all began. Some talk of dragon guts, others of eggs, and others of supreme consciousness. We don t have time to explore all those today, so we ll focus on our own heritage from the Jews, which one of the religions that asserts God is supreme consciousness. Genesis says creation came from the mind of God who imagined; in Proverbs we are told that this One s breath, the Spirit of wisdom (same word in Hebrew!) made the images real and created them. But then what? Did this Creator create once by ordering atoms around, then walk away to do something else? Or is this Spirit still active? 1

3 2 One of my favorite theologians, Jürgen Moltmann, said it this way: [I]n the quickening breath and thought of the form-giving word, the Creator sings out his creatures in the sounds and rhythms in which he has his joy and his good pleasure. That is why there is something like the music of the spheres. 1 In our tradition, our first person of the Triune God is the Creator, One who is wise and joyful still creates every moment of every day, breathing even singing all that is into being. If the breath, the Spirit, ever stopped, we would wink out of being as if we had never been. Who is the second person of the Trinity? Once again, we turn to our heritage, this time to today s Psalm. The psalmist tells that humanity has been crowned with glory and we are in God s creation, made to be just a little lower than the angels. And in Proverbs, we are told God delights in the human race. So, God s Spirit, God s breath the first person creates humanity. Into this humanity one day was born a man called Jesus. Not too many people would disagree that Jesus, at least as a figure in history, changed the world. The stories told about his earthly life assert that Jesus was a good man, a teacher, a healer, a critic of injustice, a heroic person. But there have been many good, heroic people, many prophets who died for their beliefs. Something extraordinary happened, however, to cause people to claim that this Jesus was not just a great man, but was God with skin on. The extraordinary happening was, of course, Easter. Without the Resurrection, Jesus is just one more tragic account of a young man who died too soon the kind of story we hear so often on Memorial Day. After he died, those who knew Jesus experienced him againhis power, his strength, his personality, his sheer presence were as real to them as any living being is. Grown men fishermen, soldiers, government agents, laborers hardly people given to doe-eyed hysterics became convinced that Jesus life was not stopped by death. The resurrection of Jesus blew away all the assumptions the disciples had; they had to come up with some new way of comprehending how life and death work which wasn t the way they d always thought. It was then that they remembered what Jesus had told them when he lived among them, such as our reading from last week: "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. [John 14:9] 1 Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions. Fortress Press, p. 289.

4 And, a little earlier in John, we are told that Jesus knew that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God. [John 13:3] Finally, in our lesson today, the night before he died, Jesus promised them that death was not the end not only would he rise again, he would send the Father s Spirit of truth to lead them, just as he had. The disciples wove the events and the memories together and began to see that Jesus was not ONLY a human, like them; they proclaimed that during his life, Jesus was God in flesh who sought out humanity in all its misery and frustration to tell us who we are what our place in creation is and how living is so much more than we thought. The first disciples were so convinced that Jesus was and is God, still present and active and healing and teaching that they gave their whole lives to proclaiming it. Not only that, but they, indeed, received the Holy Spirit, which Jesus promised he would send. How can you send God s Spirit if you aren t God? The amazing thing is that it was not just those first companions of Christ who received that Holy Spirit; billions of people through the millennia including me and you have been encountered by that Spirit. And, through that Spirit, billions also have met the risen Christ: we have experienced the power, strength, personality, and sheer presence of Jesus; he is as real as any living being is. In fact, that s why I think church is so important; it s one place we can go and safely say, I ve experienced the divine... I ve felt this amazing, holy presence... and no one thinks you re weird! We don t all experience these things the same way, but we know somehow this risen Christ has encountered us we yearn for more, and come here to find it. So the second person of the Triune God is Jesus. This Jesus, we know from Scripture, was in constant conversation with one he called Father. In his ministry he sought guidance from and talked about his Father; in the Garden of Gethsemane, he prayed to Abba, papa, with tears and sweat like blood. While suffering on the cross, Jesus asked his Father to forgive his tormentors. and cried out to his God in agony. If we have concluded Jesus is God, still, it is clear from this, that God is something more than Jesus. The Father is the one is beyond all limits of time and space, who holds all Creation together and also sends the Spirit to keep creating every moment of every day. 3

5 But, we are treading on dangerous ground now, and have reached the limits of what logic can do, because we are beginning to talk about the Triune God as if God could be dissected into constituent parts. Two beards and a bird, each with a job assignment. Maybe it s best not to think of the Triune God as a person at all, but as an action, a verb, a tour de force. God is God when God is doing what God does, which, Scripture tells us, is creating, loving, rejoicing, teaching, healing, redeeming, sustaining and sending; Asking which one does which misses the point: the Triune God who acts as one. Brian McLaren reminds us that the from the earliest days, church leaders described the Trinity using the term perichoresis (peri circle, choresis dance, like choreography): the Trinity was an eternal circular dance of God s being where God s very self shares mutual love, honor, happiness, joy, and respect. Against this backdrop, God s act of loving creation into being means that God creates by calling [or singing, if you will] into existence more and more stars, planets and people into the eternal dance of joy. Sounds fabulous! you might say, but we know the world isn t like that! What about all the things that are wrong, wrong, wrong? Where does sin come in? McLaren s answer is simple: Sin is when people step out of God s dance into some other dance. 2 Again, in the Dance of the Triune God, to ask which part of God is Father or the Son or the Spirit is simply misses the point. For there to be a dance, you need a person, you need movement, and you need a pattern whatever it is that makes it a dance instead of a walk or a run. But the important thing is the dance itself. Just so, it is the Triune God that s important, not the doctrinal technicalities. The Gospel, the Good News, is that we, and all creation: all that was, and is, and will ever be are being created to be part of the perichoresis, the circle dance of the Trinity. You probably know the poem Footprints in the Sand by Mary Stevenson about the person who dreamed that her life was represented by footsteps in the sand, with the footsteps of Jesus beside hers. Except she saw that, during times of trouble, there was only one set of footprints in the sand; this was not when Jesus had abandoned her, however, but when he had carried the her. Mark Littleton came up with another image of the footsteps, which I ve adapted just a little. 4 2 Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy. Zondervan, pp

6 Two people, a man and a woman, have the same dream. They see that during their lives their footprints in the sand are growing closer to Jesus in fact, the footprints merge together. They are following Jesus very closely, and this makes them very happy But then toward the end, something awful happens: the footprints grow wildly apart, zig-zagging all over the place They are heartsick, thinking they have somehow ran amok. The woman awakes with a start and begins to weep in sorrow. She calls her friend to shares her dream, still crying. To her amazement, he says he had the exact same dream! The woman cried, What did we do wrong? The footprints were a mess! The man, to her surprise, laughed! I guess I slept a little longer than you did, he said, because in my dream, I got to ask Jesus what I had done wrong. What was it? exclaimed the woman anxiously. The man said, Jesus smiled, and said, No, my friend; those footprints show when we all danced. 5 Sermon Hymn: Come, Join the Dance of Trinity by Richard Leach, 2001 Selah Publishing Co., Inc.