DANCING WITH THE DIVINE STARS

June 4, 2023
Trinity Sunday
Gen. 1:1 – 2:4; Ps. 8; 2 Cor. 13:11-13; Matt. 28:16-20
Rev. Denise Clark-Jones

The professional basketball season is taking its final laps with the championship series between the Denver Nuggets and the Miami Heat. Since Denver has never won a National Championship, naturally I must pull for the Nuggets. It’s that “turn the world upside down, lift up the lowly” mentality that characterizes Jesus’ description of the Kingdom of God that fuels my partiality toward the underdogs. I must admit that the exception is when my college team is playing. Duke basketball has enjoyed many national championships, but I still root for them to win every time. Since I don’t have a favorite NBA team, whoever is not the popular favorite is my favorite in a particular game, play-off, or championship series. I went to a Cleveland Cavaliers game this year, so maybe when we move there, I will become a fan. My grandchildren being Cavaliers fans certainly weighs heavily in that decision. But since they’ve only won one national championship in over 50 years, they still have underdog status like the Cubs.

After the winning team is crowned, there will be one last hurrah for pro basketball – that’s the All-Star game. Trinity Sunday reminds me of an All-Star game. We’ve commemorated the major observances of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and Jesus’ parting gift of the Holy Spirit, then we celebrate the divine team – the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit who come together, united with singular intention and purpose.

The word, Trinity, does not appear anywhere in the bible, it is a theological construct created by our need to wrap their minds around the mystery which is God. The early Church Fathers presented the Trinity as a metaphor for perceiving the mysterious ways God acts from beyond us, beside us in the person of Jesus Christ, and within us in the person of the Holy Spirit. As the psalm we sang today affirms, we alone among God’s creatures have the ability to think about God and therefore have recognition and some understanding of God’s revelations and interventions in the world. The Trinity isn’t real, but it points to something real that is beyond the full grasp of our senses.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity was established at the Council of Nicea in the fourth century. The product of that council was the Nicene Creed, the earliest official church creed and the only one accepted by each branch of Christianity – Roman Catholic, Easter Orthodox and Protestant. Our ancient church fathers argued it out and came up with the theological construct of God who acts in three persons in such a relationship that they are one. This was described as a hypostatic union and the symbol became the triangle for the Western Church.  However, the Eastern Church preferred the early church’s concept of perichoresis, with the circle as the symbol of the Trinity.

More recently, Christian theologians have revived the concept of “perichoresis,” in their discussions of the Holy Trinity. It is a Greek word formed by first combining two words, “chora,” a noun meaning “space” and its verb form, “chorein,” which means to “make space.” Then the Greek word, “peri,” meaning “around” is placed like a prefix to create “perichoresis,” meaning, “to make space around.” Perichoresis is reminiscent of the Jewish and Greek circle dances, in which the dancers make space for the addition of more dancers, The circle continues to widen to include more and more dancers. As the tempo increases the dancers become a blur and the individual dancers are perceived as one large dance.  The early Christians saw a parallel between this circle dance and the relationship between God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Their relationship of mutual giving and receiving extends to our relationships with one another in acceptance and our sense of belonging. The Holy Trinity acts upon us in such a way as to make it possible for us to relate to one another with love. Which is the very reason God created us.

Today we read from Genesis 1, from what we call the Old Testament.  The ancient text reveals God created an interdependent world. All of the natural resources found in the earth, sea, and sky, along with the plants, and the creatures were designed to support one another in a delicate balance. Each new creation was dependent on the previous one. This is also true of scientific evolutionary theory. We read that God paused after each day of creating and said “it is good.” The Hebrew word for “good” is “tov.” When the Hebrew bible was first translated into Greek, the word “tov” was translated as the  Greek word, “kalas,” meaning “beautiful.” The psalm we sang earlier attests to the beauty of Creation. We are awed by God’s handiwork in the natural world and experience God in its glory, but we are often blind to the beauty of our sisters and brothers and fail to see God in them.

The beginning of creation was the ordering of chaos. We don’t like chaos, it makes us anxious and afraid. God’s order, however, left much room for creative freedom and intersections of relationships. We can become confined by our efforts to order our world, which limits our ability to form relationships. We order people by labeling, separating, and judging. In this way, God’s holy dance is turned into a profane, goose-stepping military march. Over the course of human history, our desire for order and predictability have led us down some destructive, even deadly, paths. We have been willing to give authority to people who promise order, even when the order they try to impose is in direct conflict with what the Bible tells us about God’s will and Christ’s teaching. Authoritarian leaders build their power base by creating enmity towards people who they deem not worthy or even dangerous to society. Culture wars have no place in the kingdom of God.

There is a word in this Creation story that seems not to be relational, and that is the word “dominion.” The Hebrew word used does not have a direct correlation to the English word. There is also some question if it is even the correct Hebrew word. Biblical Hebrew had no vowels. As the language evolved, vowel markings were added. These vowel markings were added somewhere between 700 and 1000 CE. (formerly known as AD) – the Middle Ages. By changing one dot, the word becomes one that means “to walk alongside” rather than “have power over.” The Hebrew word translated in the text we have today has connotations of shepherding, kinship, and communal power, rather than absolute control over. Thus, the right relationship here of humankind to the earth and all other parts of God’s creation may be seen as one in which humankind nurtures their life and growth. Humankind is called to walk alongside, or we could say dance with, God’s beautiful and good creation for the well-being of all the earth.

In our epistle reading from 2 Corinthians, a ministry colleague speaking for the Apostle Paul addresses the value of relationships within the church and admonishes a congregation in conflict to submit to God’s authority.  The author tells us: “So I write these things while I am away from you, so that when I come, I may not have to be severe in using the authority that the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down.” (2 Cor. 13:10) In essence, the author is reminding the congregation that God is the ultimate authority from whom Christ received his authority and passed on to his disciples. Once we misuse that authority, it no longer comes from God and is therefore no longer authority at all, but willful destruction of the relationships in which God created us to participate.

In each of the four gospels, we have an account of Jesus teaching his disciples how they are to continue his mission by bringing more people into the community of faith. In our reading from the gospel of Matthew, Jesus bestows his authority from God to baptize others in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Their power will come from the mutual indwelling of the Holy Trinity. Contemporary theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, a contemporary German Reformed theologian, has written extensively on Trinitarian perichoresis. He writes: “The community of the disciples of Christ not only corresponds by analogy to the divine trinitarian community, but also is to become a community in the divine community of the triune God so that ‘they may also be,  in us,” citing John 17:21. Moltman describes this as the mystical dimension of the church”…”The unity of Jesus with God is not an exclusive, but an open and inviting community…Love is another word for this mutual indwelling.” (1)

In a recent article in Presbyterian Outlook, Cynthia Rigby, professor of theology at Austin Presbyterian Seminary, describes what perichoresis looks like in our daily lives. “It looks like fewer boundaries, and more connections.” She believes the model of perichoresis shows “sharing life together and belonging go hand in glove.” (2) But “belonging” is not a state of being that is easy for us. God created within us a need for God and one another, which is experienced in a sense of belonging. We yearn for it, yet we have distorted our need to belong by creating boundaries to identify others as not belonging. When this occurs, we distance ourselves from God, fail to follow Jesus, and ignore the Holy Spirit. Or, in the words of writer Anne Lamott: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Brian D. McLaren, Christian author, pastor and hymn composer, describes the “belonged-ness” of the Trinity as:

“An eternal dance of the Father, Son and Spirit
sharing mutual love, honor, happiness, joy
and respect… God’s act of creation means
that God is inviting more and more beings
into the eternal dance of Joy. Sin means
that people are stepping out of the dance…
stomping on feet instead of moving with
grace, rhythm and reverence. Then in
Jesus, God enters creation to restore the
rhythm and beauty again.” (3)

Christ has invited us into the divine dance that God began. I think of the Holy Spirit as providing the music, guiding our steps, setting the tempo and rhythm to a tune that invades our consciousness and makes it hard not to set our feet to dancing.

One of the memorable moments of my time at Westminster was at the evening meal on the last day of our first children’s choir camp in 2015. Seeing the fellowship hall filled with children and families of every skin color from neighborhoods all over the Peoria area sharing a meal with this nearly all white congregation, I could feel the power of the Holy Trinity. An invitation was extended and accepted; and on that night, everyone belonged. The trinitarian perichoresis danced through the hall and later in the joyous concert experienced in our sanctuary. I may have started the camp, but you can continue it. Let the Holy Spirit bring you to the dancing circle of love at the camp this summer in whatever way you can participate.

Today we are invited into God’s circle dance of love at the Communion Table. Here, with the Holy Trinity, we enter into the divine dance and extend our hands to widen the circle.

Amen. May it be so!

Notes:
-Moltmann, Jurgen. “Perichoresis: An Old Magic Word for a New Trinitarian Theology.” WordPress.com. Jan. 2013. p. 121-122.

-Rigby, Cynthia. “Joining the Dance.” Presbyterian Outlook Foundation, Richmond, Virginia. Presbyterian Outlook.Vol. 205, No.03 March 2023, 34.

-McLaren, Brian. A Generous Orthodoxy. Zondervan Press. Grand Rapids, MI. 2006. p.23-24.

© Rev. Denise Clark-Jones, 2023, All Rights Reserved
Westminster Presbyterian Church | 1420 W. Moss Ave. | Peoria, Illinois 61606
WestminsterPeoria.org | 309.673.8501

“Why am I a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church?  Two words keep  floating up in a rather persistent way  –  “home” and  “family” – and I realized that it is an inescapable fact that is what this church means to me. During my 40 years here, so many life events have happened and Westminster has been there for me through all those times – good and bad.    It has been my home and family.  They say “home is where the heart is” and I’ve found the heart of Westminster to be as open and warm as a family’s!”