Today, it is often said, is the only Sunday of the
Christian year on
which we celebrate not an event, a part of the story, but a
doctrine. And so, it is often also said,
this is a difficult Sunday to preach on and an even more difficult Sunday on
which to be preached, the implication that I will have to talk in such complicated,
theological terms that you will not be able to understand me or you will simply
be bored out of your mind.
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| Andrei Rublev's Holy Trinity |
Rubbish. It’s all rubbish.
We should be excited to be here this Sunday and I should be
excited to preach because we are celebrating together the very life of
God. “Trinity” is the way we Christians
have come to describe not only who God is, but how God is. And how God is, including how we know God,
is itself a living thing. There is
nothing static about it at all, as using the word doctrine implies.[1]
Jesus himself promised us this dynamic faith.
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…
Jesus promises us that we will for ever be learning about
and experiencing anew life with God, what he calls “the truth.” And this truth will not only be about God,
but will also be about ourselves, for, as he promises elsewhere
You will know the truth, and the truth will set you
free [and] if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.
Both Spirit and Son, we are told will continually work for
our freedom, which will always involve going more deeply into the truth,
including the truth about God. How will
they do this?
The Spirit [he says] 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 [that is, the Spirit] will
glorify me [the Son], 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 is declare it to you.
Jesus is very careful in John’s Gospel to be clear that he
does not act on his own. He acts on what
he has heard from the One he calls Father.
And he goes so far as to say that he and the Father are one. The Spirit operates in the same way. The Spirit leads us into the truth, the truth
he knows with Jesus from the Father, but this truth is not some sole possession
of the Father. The Son and the Spirit
are the truth itself.
This is how God works, in a wondrously ordered yet
amazingly chaotic way, in constant
dynamic mutual sharing of love that produces for us the constant dynamic truth
that sets us free.
Theological thinkers in the later years of the early church
in the east (that is, in contemporary Turkey and Syria) came up with a
wonderful word to describe this wondrously ordered yet amazingly chaotic way of
God’s being that is a constant dynamic mutual sharing of love. It is the Greek word perichoresis. This is your
new word for the day! And it’s a
wonderful word, a word well worth remembering.
Perichoresis
comes from two Greek words. Peri as a
preposition means “around” or “with.” We
hear it in English in the word “perimeter.”
The other word is chorein, a
much more complex word which means something like “to make room for,” or “to
contain,” in the sense of including.
Together they make a word that means “rotate,” which is, if you think
about it, a kind of containing by going around.
Or the act of going around can be a way of making room for something.
The word perichoresis
comes in Greek to mean, among other things, “dance.” And what a wonderful, lively metaphor for the
Trinity that is. Dancing is an activity
that requires individuals, but it requires them to act and react in community,
in a strange kind of interdependence that produces creativity and joy, what the
Gospel of John would call “glory.”
And it is vitally important that this is a dance not of one
or of two, but of three. Why? Well, think of it this way, the presence of
three keeps the dance from turning into what we use to call in my day a “slow
dance,” where the two do their best to become one. The presence of three keeps the dance open
and lively.
Of what possible importance is all of this to our
lives? The Trinity shows us not only how
God works but how life works. We keep
wanting to take the complexity and mutuality out of life. Generally speaking we
have a low tolerance for mystery and for relationships that are complex. We like our friends, and we most often choose
our husbands and wives to be much like us, easy and relatively simple to relate
to. But life is not really like that at
all. Life lived together with other
human beings is always complex, always a dizzying array of mutualities. You get more than a handful of people
together (like this church community, for instance) and watching them interact,
play off each other, creating together much more than they could ever create
separately is a truly wonderful thing, and part of the wonder is that order
seems to come out of the chaos.
But more and more, of course, scientists tell us that is
how the universe works. Chaos is an
essential condition for order to emerge, in fact, it is strangely part of the
order itself. In a world that works like that, believing in God as Trinity is
no sweat whatsoever. It is, as our
ancient Celtic ancestors understood, as natural a thing as there is.
The Trinity makes sense in relation to the liveliness of
the world. Life is rarely linear, you
rarely go from point a to point b without encountering point c, or even point
q. God is never linear. God is by nature dynamic.
Being church together should mean learning to live in this
godly dynamism, a life of ever-surprising mutuality, both with our chosen
partners and those “free radicals” we call strangers. All our attempts to predict, to simplify, to
de-mystify, to nail down the truth into something solid and static and
controllable are not only futile, they are keeping us from living into the
vision of God which is our glory which is our freedom.
[1]
Whether or not that is a correct use of the word “doctrine” or not (and I do
not think it is), that is the subject of another sermon.
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