Put on your dancin' shoes! (Trinity, 2015)

Holy Trinity Sunday

May 31, 2015 (SMLC confirmation)
Romans 8:12–17

Grace to you and peace from the one who was and who is and who is to come. Amen.

            As many of you know, my dad is also a pastor. He tells a story about the second parish he served, where someone was complaining about the preaching of his predecessor. My dad asked her what was wrong with this pastor’s preaching, and she answered, rolling her eyes, “He preached 52 sermons a year on looooove.”

            Well, love is a very nice topic to preach on, but I can see how focusing on only that every single week might get be a bit tiresome and redundant. On the other hand, I can also see why that preacher might have always been drawn to that particular message, being that it’s a pretty central piece of our understanding of God and faith. And so today, I think I will do it – preach on love, I

mean – because I think this Sunday, on which we celebrate the Holy Trinity, is one of the best on which to talk about, as my dad’s parishioner so eloquently called it, “looooove.”

            Perhaps this is a surprise to you because, well, the doctrine of the Trinity is not known as one of the most accessible doctrines of the church, and doesn’t usually bring love to mind. It’s very heady, even as it is impossible to adequately describe or understand. It’s one of those topics that, try as you might to help someone understand how it is that we worship one God, but it’s also three, but it’s still one… you will inevitably end up in some heretical trap at some point. After 2000 years of conversations, debates, and a few burnings-at-the-stake of outright heretics, scholars and clergy have a much easier time saying what the Trinity isn’t than what it is. It isn’t three different masks worn by

Heretics being burned at the stake

the same one God. It isn’t three different jobs done by one God. It isn’t that God the Father created the Son, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. (It really isn’t that one – that was a huge heresy in the early Church, and is why today we say in our creed that Jesus was “begotten, not created.”) If you want, you can go to the Wikipedia page on Christian heresies and read for yourself all the ways that we are not supposed to understand the Trinity.

            So why, then, would I saw that this Sunday on which we celebrate this hard-to-define doctrine is the perfect Sunday to talk about God’s love? For starters: because when we talk about God as Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we can see that ours is a God who at the core is relational. In other words, ours is a God who does not want to be alone, but rather reaches out again and again in love: In love, God created the heavens and the earth and all its creatures, including you and me. In love, God went to great lengths to show the Israelites how to love God and one another. In love, God saw that the world remained a broken place and so sent to us Jesus, who was God incarnate (made human), who modeled love of neighbor and ultimately showed us that the love of God is so strong that He wanted to actually be among us, to know us, and to allow us to know God. In love, God recognized that, because death is the ultimate sacrifice, that Jesus must die for all of us, to show us God would do anything, anything to prove His love for us. And in love, God sent the Holy Spirit, the continuing divine presence on earth, to guide us, comfort us, encourage us into service, strengthen us, empower us, pray for us, inspire us.

            Do you see? Every way that God has acted throughout history, and every attempt that God has made to know us and be known by us, has been out of a deep and divine love. When we understand God as one-in-three and three-in-one, we understand God as one who is so interested in relationship, that God’s very self is a relationship.

            Maybe by now I’m completely blowing your mind, or maybe your brain already short-circuited and shut down and you’ve completely tuned me out. (Either way, welcome to my first year in seminary, patristic theology!) Wherever you are, come back to me now, and let me talk about this in a different way. In honor of this year being the 50^th anniversary of my favorite movie, The Sound of Music, let’s talk about this by singing a song. Our hymn of the day today is a helpful image for me in trying to understand how the Trinity expresses love. The first verse goes like this: “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 arise by chance, but as the Three, in love and hope, made room within their dance.”

First of all, notice the hymn describes the Trinity not as people or things, but as an action, a dance, into which the whole universe is brought. Now, a dance is necessarily relational. I remember taking dance lessons with my college boyfriend. He was a good lead, but I of course always wanted to have a little more say in what we were doing on the dance floor. Well it turns out that when you’re dancing and there are two people trying to lead, it looks a lot less like dancing and a lot more like…uh… wrestling, toe stomping, crashing, and tripping. Lesson learned: a dance is a relationship, in which we act and respond to one another, not try to plow one another over. So when we think about the Trinity as a dance, maybe as a circle dance, we think about it as flowing, joyful, mutual, cooperation. And in love, God the Holy Trinity invites us into that dance, invites us into that cooperation, that joy, that love.

            And that invitation is extended to us in our baptism. In baptism, we come to the font professing our faith (or in the case of infants, the parents’ faith) in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We remember the ways that God has made God’s love known to us throughout history. We vow to live a life that expresses our trust in God’s promises. And then we are baptized – in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit: the Trinity. And in this moment, we are welcomed and brought into that divine dance. We are enveloped in that love, joy and mutuality. We are, in the words of Paul in the letter we heard from Romans this morning, adopted by God, made children of God. We belong to God, to the Holy Trinity, and we become a part of that divine circle dance.

Today seven young people at St. Martin will affirm their participation in that dance as they affirm their baptism, otherwise known as confirmation. It is a time when they, having attended worship and Sunday school and two years of class with me on Bible and catechism, have a chance to stand before the congregation and say, “I believe that what we say happens in baptism really happened to me, and this matters for me and my life. I believe that God has brought me into His divine life and dance, and claimed me as a child of God, and that I am therefore a participant in God’s mission here.” That’s a lot that these young people are claiming today!

So the question here, for our confirmands and for all of us, is: does all this really matter for your life? When we witness something like a baptism or a confirmation, we have the opportunity to reflect on those events in our own lives. We hear again the promises made, hear again the saving

works of God, hear again those powerful words that indicate that we belong to Christ. And when we do – do we believe them? Do we care?

My prayer – for all of us and especially for those being confirmed today – is that they do matter, today and every day hereafter, that a day won’t go by when you won’t realize with joy that God’s love for you extends beyond your wildest dreams, that indeed God has done and will do anything to show you that love, whether that be by coming to earth to be among us, sending a Holy Spirit to lead, guide, push, and empower us, surrounding us with people who can show us the loving ways that God works in the world today, or even helping us be the people that show that love to others. I pray that the knowledge of this unconditional love will give you freedom when you feel trapped, hope when you feel hopeless, peace when you feel anxious, and strength when you feel weak. And I pray that every step you take will be a step that adds something beautiful to the dance of Trinity, of which, thanks be to God, we are all a part.

Within the dance of Trinity, before all worlds begun, we sing the praises of the Three, the Father, Spirit, Son. Let voices rise and interweave, by love and hope set free, to shape in song this joy, this life: the dance of Trinity. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.