Trinity Sunday 27th May 2018

James Hadley – Ordinand, and Philip Usher Scholar.

 

If you have been to Salonika you have probably visited the ancient Roman imperial complex of Galerius, and its Rotunda. You can’t help be struck by is cavernous interior, which in the ancient world was second only to the Pantheon in Rome. Probably when Constantine converted the rotunda into a church in 326 it was the largest church in Greek-speaking Christianity, and later under Theodosius, in it one of the great miracles of mosaics in the ancient world. Some parts of the mosaic remain, the brilliant gold and silver architectural fantasies with martyrs standing before them. The most intriguing parts are barely discernible, but with your camera lens you can begin to count them, one, two, three, four, five, once upon a time some 36 human sandaled feet. These feet are turned in all directions, on tip toes, or foot outstretched; they are in fact dancing feet. It seems that these earliest of Greek-Christians had dancing in their blood!  ♪♪♫ (Hummed) Dance, dance, wherever you may be…

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Created by Pope John the XXII in 1334, its one of these rather odd western celebrations known as an idea feast because it’s not our typical biblical episode of Jesus’ life. Instead, our worship calls us to reflect upon our most core Christian belief, the idea, that God is One: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Perhaps if you are like me, the oddity is not so much in the feast, but in some seemingly impossible math; 1 in 3, 3 in 1. Perhaps you too had shamrock therapy as a child? Should we think this dubious, theoretical physics is making the concept less daunting. For example, string theory suggests that there is one particle that has the capacity to be all else, and is a proton, neutron, electron at one and the same moment – 1 and 3.  But I’d like to say today that, the point of the Trinity is not about doing math, where we seemed to have ended up in Western Christianity, it’s about doing life….

Life. Here the ancient Greek church was onto something. Like our mosaics in the rotunda, when they spoke of the Trinity they used the word PeREE, HOReSEES.  PeREE, “around,” and chorein, which means “to give way” or “to make room”, an “in” and “out”. Forget math, God is a dance! And what this meant for the early church is that from the beginning of all time, the God of the universe was relationship, relational, re-lative, a relative. In God’s self, there is a relationship between Father and Son, and in the “making room” between them is the spirit of Love, as a circle dance they contract and expand, the beating heart of the cosmos. WOW. Our faith in the trinity, the Christian difference, therefore is a proclamation that the foundation of everything is built of this ‘loving relationship’. That God formed the world, not out of a command of submission, but out of an invitation of Love. That God’s character is not shifting, a guessing game of incarnations, but an ever present relationship of Love…So the challenge put before us today is how do we do the dance, how do we live the life of the Trinity? Do you know how to dance? ♪♪♫ dance, dance, wherever you may be.

To be honest, I don’t think it’s particularly easy for us. We tend to think the Father is Zeus out there. We tend to think Jesus was either a man here, or God out there, and we’ve likely misplaced the Holy Spirit altogether. Our gospel reading helps us: Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus in our Gospel gives us a sense the Trinitarian view of God. Nicodemus comes to God in the dark, invited by the spirit of witness, to encounter the Christ who is sent by the Father. Already we see that Nicodemus is placed by the spirit in the loving relationship between the Father and the son. Paul, in our second reading, calls this adoption, (a relationship) meaning that our salvation is not simply Jesus on the Cross, but a whole work of the trinity. We are saved by their whole interweaving relationship, by their divine dance.

The Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev pictured it this way; God as three angels seated at a table. You’ve probably seen the icon. Notably, the perspective of the icon is such that there is a fourth place at the table, for you. Some art historians even think there was a small mirror mounted to the table. You, the viewer of the icon, were literally put at the table. The trinity isn’t really three, but four, me, and you, and you. But here’s the challenge. If the trinity is the height, width, and depth of God, God’s “making space” for us, and if God is not out there, but in here, if we are born again, we too are the height, width and depth of God. So the question becomes, who and what are you making room for? You cannot be the height width and depth of God, and invite nothing in. Frankly, I think, joining the dance is hard because we don’t get to choose the dance partners. So we end up spending our time fighting against the inclusion of what is other; wrong country, wrong gender, wrong attitude, wrong beliefs, wrong politics, wrong colour. But Like Nicodemus, you must go to God in the darkness, trusting. Being this open indeed is scary, it’s the vulnerability of God. But the truth is, it is only by being in profound relationships that we enter the dance. We know it intuitively, we can feel it, the most content moments in life are either with God or with others. The challenge of learning the dance is expanding our hearts. ♪♪♫ dance, dance, wherever you may be.

Now of course I grant you that in life we don’t always feel like dancing. The second challenge. There are those hard parts of life. The job lost, the dream differed, an abandonment, the goal gone, the loss of love. We get it. But the good news is this – God is not ‘out there’ – the cosmos and each of us is held in the trinity. We have been included in god’s internal dance, and it is to be played out fully in each of us and in all creation. And because god is relationship long before us God already had the end determined before the first step was ever made – God knew he was God before we were there to tell him, God was healer before there was something to heal, God was provider before we had a need. God was the lover before we were the beloved. So take heart, in the life of Trinitarian love when one weeps, the other tastes salt, when one needs the other provides. I will never leave you nor forsake you scripture says. So if the steps to the dance aren’t clear, have faith, for God is already there. Like Nicodemus seeking in the dark, even then God is at work, arranging salvation. Even in darkness there is dancing. ♪♪♫ dance, dance, wherever you may be.

In the rotunda at Salonika, the sandaled saints originally danced around the image of the God-Man Jesus. When emperor Theodosious first saw this mosaic spinning like the sky of heaven he was purported to have exclaimed “surely God is all around!” Today we celebrate this God all around, in whom we move and live and have our being; Spinning God of Kycladic dancers, Spinning God of church chandeliers, Spinning God of the cosmos. Not a math problem – but a divine dance;

                                          ♪♪♫ Dance dance wherever you may be, God is the God of the 1 in 3.