blip : Beefcake Living In a Poof :

I hope it’s ok to say this: I think this is the best sermon I’ve preaching in a while.
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Title: “...a dancing God.”
Texts: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15.
Date: June 3, 2007.

“God was made human that human beings might be made divine”
-Augustine

Trinity Sunday. Why do we need to give one particular Sunday over to the Trinity? I mean, if Trinity is simply how Christians understand God, then I imagine that God gets preached about every Sunday. Maybe it’s because most of the time the task of preaching is turns into a desperate narcissism—the preacher goes through great trials to make these ancient writings about God relevant to us. But when we call this Sunday Trinity Sunday then it might be a hint that maybe we should just talk about God—forget about making it relevant, making God matter. Maybe simply talking about God is the most important word we need to hear.

So, this sermon is my attempt to be completely consumed in the irrelevance of God, and hope that maybe something about what I say about God might move you in ways you didn’t know you could. I will offer you the Trinity like we are offered novels—a good novel, I think, isn’t there to echo back the world you know; instead, a good novel takes you into a different world, and when you put it down, you come back to your world and everything is different. That’s how I want to talk about the Trinity—this is an invitation to a different world, a strange world.

First of all, we have to understand that ‘Trinity’ is shorthand for a story; it’s the story, the story we re-tell when we get together as church, that makes sense of God. And it’s a story best summed up in that well worn memory verse from John’s Gospel: “For God so loved the world, that he sent his one and only Son.”

But in order to understand this story, we have to go back to the very beginning. Trinity is the CliffsNotes to a story, a really really long story—in the version I have, it’s a 964 page story (i.e., the bible). But just reading the CliffsNotes doesn’t let you feel the story.

For the way I read the story, I think it’s all about a love-affair, a really long and involved love-affair. It’s a story about alluring love, a love that beckons, that desires, that longs for intimate union. It’s a story that starts in a garden, where Adam and Eve, that first community, took long walks with God, sat and feasted in God’s presence. And at the very end of the story, in Revelation, the story culminates with another intimate scene—a marriage feast, the union of bride and groom, the church and Christ.

But, as we know, the path of the story isn’t covered with rose petals. The constantly re-emerging problem comes at the very beginning. Humans, the object of God’s torrid love, refuse to accept union with God as a gift. They—we, I should say—would rather make it happen when we want it and how we want it. So, there’s Adam and Eve, our ancestors, trying to make themselves like God instead of waiting for God to offer a union beyond their wildest dreams.

That’s the constant temptation—making love happen, forcing love, making the other, the desired, love us and accept us on our terms, when and how we want it. I’m afraid our kind of love suffers from impatience, from anxious desperation. This is the impatience we see when Adam and Eve follow the advice of the serpent in the garden: you will be like God if you disobey God.

It’s also the impatience we heard about last week in the story of Babel. There we see a people who build a tower so they can get to heaven and become equals with God. It’s a refusal to be the kind of creatures, the kind of humans, God created us to be—the kind of creatures God created as the object of his love. It’s a refusal of that vision we see in Psalm 8. “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.” And then our Psalmist turns our gaze from above the heaves, where God is, to human beings—“You have made them a little lower than God” ...God above the heavens, and humans below the heavens. The people of Babel didn’t like that. They tried to transgress that boundary, to reach beyond it.

But, we must be sure to say, the desire to dwell with God isn’t a bad thing at all. After all, we are created for communion for God. We are created to share in God’s love, in the love that is God. But it’s all about the how—how we get there, or I should say, how God gets us there, how God brings us into his loving embrace.

And it happens in and through Jesus. That’s what our passage from Romans 5 says: it’s Jesus Christ who brings us into God’s presence, who takes us into God, who initiates us into God’s glory. As Augustine put it, “God was made human that human beings might be made divine.”

‘Trinity’ is merely another name for this story; this story of God’s movement, or I should say, the story of the movement of love which is God. This is where we get to an important insight of what we mean we when say ‘Trinity’; it’s that God is not static. God isn’t that old bearded man upstairs—confined to his throne. For one thing, he’s not a man; and neither is she a woman. “God is a movement, an impulse, a delight” (McCabe, God Still Matters, p.51). God is not even a person. God is the unceasing movement of love, endless invitation, the overflow and excess of self-giving.

A dancing God. In case you’re thinking I’m getting a little too fluffy and sentimental, I’ll give you the technical trinitarian term that I’m trying to explain; maybe you’ll believe me if I use big and important words. It’s perichoresis. It basically means that God’s identity is not static, not stagnant; God is not simply the person we call “Father,” or “Son,” or “Holy Spirit.” Perichoresis means that God is the relationship between the three; God is the way the three are not separate and divisible individuals. They exist in and through one another—completely dependent on one another. That’s why I say that our God, the Trinity, names a dancing God—always moving, always in relationship, always in love.

Always giving, always deferring—it’s a sort of dance where the lead gets shifted at every turn. Our passage from John’s Gospel displays this dance of giving (see John 16:12-16). Jesus says, “I have much more to say to you”—but he doesn’t. (By the way, the Greek that’s translated “to say” is the infinitive of logos). He leaves before he finishes speaking. And if we remember from the beginning of John, Jesus is God’s way of speaking, Jesus is the Logos, the Word, that comes from God. So, it’s no small matter that Jesus gives up his role as Logos, the one who speaks God to us, and allows the Spirit to take over that mission, that identity. As Jesus says in verse 14, “the Spirit takes from what is mine and makes it known to you” (paraphrase). But it’s not just the Spirit and Son working alone—a partnership. Jesus gives the only thing he can, the only thing he has… the Father: he says in verse 15, “All that belongs to the Father is mine.” Everything is shared. One gives to another. And it’s all for our sake, for the sake of intimate union with God.

How does this union play out? It’s one thing to listen to me go on and on up here and talk about how great it is that God is the triune dance of Father, Son, and Spirit; and it’s quite another thing for us to feel part of that dance, to receive an invitation to the dance, to stand in the glorious presence of God. It’s one thing to say, with Augustine and many others, that “God became human that human beings might be made divine.” And it’s quite another to feel our lives made part of that divine life of love.

Well, maybe it’s time for me to come clean. I believe something crazy. I think the church, our worship, this ordinary gathering, and all the ways this fellowship overflows into the rest of our lives, and through our lives into the world—this, all of it, is our dance with God. The good news of the gospel is that we are being lured into God’s love. The eternal life that we are offered is that very same eternal life of love that is our dancing God; eternal life is simply another way of talking about the triune life of God. And we are brought into that dance by one thing: the Holy Spirit—that’s the presence Jesus promised. And with the Spirit comes the whole dance, all three. Why? Because the Spirit is the very love affair of God, overflowing into our lives: As Paul says in our passage from Romans 5, verse 5: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

The best picture, the most complete vision, we have of God is Jesus—this one who is the Word of the Father, and who was filled with the Holy Spirit, who submitted completely to the Spirit, who was driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness of this world. Jesus is the embodied invitation from God, the Word of God, to enter into God’s dance, into the intimacy of God’s life of love.

And this is the most interesting and tragic part of God’s mission of love poured out in and through Jesus—that divine dance opened up for us. Jesus fails. He’s a colossal failure—I’m not saying he sinned (there’s a difference between sinning and failing). Jesus is the lure of God’s love that fails; he is God’s love rejected. Jesus gets killed before he gathers the people of God to the bosom of the Father. He lets his life end before his mission is completed.

He says, in John 16:5, “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me.” Jesus must depart; he will not cheat death; he submits to failure; he receives the rejection of the world; he let’s them kill his love, God’s love, for the sake of something else—the Holy Spirit who offers again and again the invitation to the divine dance; the Holy Spirit who offers again and again the Word made flesh; the Holy Spirit who offers again and again the possibility of being like Jesus, the beloved one of God, the one who is held forever in the embrace of God’s love; the one who loves despite our rejection.

How do we know if we have entered into the eternal dance of God—Father, Son, and Spirit? We know it by the way we come here, week after week, and discern and receive Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God’s invitation to the divine dance of eternal life. Our worship is how we open ourselves to the breath of God, the Holy Spirit, that forms us into the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ. And if the life of Jesus offers us anything to follow, then we can see that loving doesn’t always work—even God’s love is rejected.

But the rejection is never the last word. For in our original rejection of God’s love comes the movement of the Holy Spirit who offers us again and again God’s loving embrace, God’s invitation to the dance, the Word from God. And that’s called grace. We are forever invited to join a dancing God, a God whose love overflows into the whole world, even if that means being rejected.

What does the Trinity look like? It looks like John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his beloved Son that whosever receives him shall receive the eternal life of God.” (my paraphrase)

And what does this mean for the way we receive him, the way we receive the invitation of God, the Word from God? It means loving like Jesus loves. A love that is willing to fail; a love that is willing to be rejected, because it can’t do anything else but love—love is and becomes our very being, our very life, the life of God, through the presence of Spirit, who leads us like she led the Son, to the cross… rejected love, failed love. For the sake of something never before dreamed or imagined: the eternal love of God, the resurrection of a failed love affair.

Being like Jesus means surrendering our life, our perceived mission, our dearly held visions of success, because we can’t help but be driven by our love—our love for God embodied, displayed, performed, danced in our love for one another. With each of us, in every one of us, comes God’s invitation to a dance.

And when our invitation is rejected, when our love fails to join us to our beloved, we come to discover the suffering love of Jesus.

Romans 5: “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.”