Will you dance?
Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021
Isaiah 6:1-8 • Romans 8:12-17 • John 3:1-17
Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday. And I can imagine that between all of us here today there is probably a wide range of feelings and understandings about the word ‘Trinity’. For some it is perhaps another one of those opaque examples of religious code that we’re so used to hearing in services that we don’t pay attention to it, for others it might be a seemingly artificial and irritating construct that has no real meaning, and for yet others, the understanding of the Trinity might be central in their personal theology. It is certainly a word that can have little meaning to casual visitors poking their noses inside our doors.
Words are wonderful, extraordinary creations. Each one of them, from the smallest, most inconsequential to the largest, have enormous power in our lives; in both our physical lives in the world and our interior lives of imagination and memory. We need them to help our thinking and our understanding. Sometimes we need words that determine something exactly: either something is or isn’t. There is a pleasing completeness in classification: in these ‘closed’ words. However, in many areas of our lives, we are nourished by words that can open doors and windows in our mind: poetry and prayer being the media that make most use of this ‘open’ language.
In our religions, those very human attempts to articulate our relationship with the living God through ritual and practice, language is an important tool. Language using words both of the ‘closed’ variety, making it clear what is acceptable and what is not, and ‘open’ words, attempting to facilitate the journey of the spirit towards the inexpressible. One of the many reasons that I am an Anglican, with the particular local choice of the Episcopal Church, is that we treasure the beauty and possibilities of ‘open’ language. Anglicans are generally less interested in putting up barriers by saying ‘no’, and more interested in saying ‘yes’, welcoming in and having conversations.
So, having said all that, I hope you’re not expecting me to give you a nice, tight definition of the Trinity! At the heart of my personal theology, however, lies the ever expanding concept of the Trinity. For me, the Trinity expresses the complete presence of the continuously creating, eternally incarnated, ceaselessly inspiring and loving God in all things: which is what we are trying to encompass in our Trinitarian language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and all subsequent non-gendered versions.
If I try to look directly at the concept of the Trinity and try to dissect it in any way, I will fail. It’s like an extraordinarily powerful and beautiful dance going on at all times in all things, just out of our sight.
Nicodemus, from today’s Gospel passage, is more than a casual visitor poking his nose into Jesus’ door. He is a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership, the group that will ultimately condemn Jesus to death. He comes under cover of night: he does not want anyone knowing of this visit that he just has to make. His colleagues are wanting to close this Galilean upstart down by any means, but Nicodemus has seen and heard enough to think Jesus might be the real thing: a teacher from God. He needs to speak with Jesus.
The conversation that follows is an excellent example of the confusion that can happen when someone, used to closed, legalistic language, encounters open, liberating language. Jesus is inviting Nicodemus to abandon his physically limiting understandings, and choose instead to live a life in the spirit, reaching ever closer to the Kingdom of God. For Jesus to call it a rebirth, seems entirely appropriate. For Nicodemus, it is incomprehensible.
As a church, particularly a church coming out of the pandemic experience, I think it’s important for us to think about how we go forward. While Holy Innocents and other congregations in our diocese continue to thrive, the national statistics for church attendance show a discouraging slide downwards. How much of that might be to do with the opaqueness and seeming irrelevance of the words we use? Words that can discourage curious visitors. And is it possible that we are so used to hearing the extraordinary words of possibility in our worship that even we let their beauty and familiarity wash over us in a comforting wave. What might happen if we allowed the power of those words to be reborn in us? How might our imaginations be stimulated? How might we live our lives more fully, allowing the inspiration and movement of the dance of the Trinity activate us?
We are in the process of walking through the portal from pandemic life to post-pandemic life. As Arundhati Roy wrote in the article I quoted from last week, do we walk through dragging all the things that were no longer working, in fact were limiting even damaging us, or do we consider leaving that baggage behind and looking to align our lives with the enlivening dance of the eternally creating, inspiring living God? What might that look like? Who will choose to dance with us?
To close with the words of this morning’s opening prayer:
Enfolding God, Trinity of love, you are our source, our goal, our life: may we be born again in you no more to live alone and unconnected, but sharing in the Spirit’s breath and carried to your heart; through Jesus Christ, who lifts us up. Amen