June 7, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. | Trinity Sunday

Endless Dance of Love

Cynthia M. Campbell
President, McCormick Theological Seminary

Psalm 139:1–12
John 3:1–17

“For God so loved the world.”

John 3:16 (NRSV)

God is One, unique and holy,
Endless dance of love and light;
Only source of mind and body,
Star-cloud, atom, day and night:
Everything that is or could be
Tells God’s anguish and delight.

Brian Wren
“God Is One, Unique and Holy”

Many years ago, in what seems like a galaxy far away, I earned a doctorate in Christian theology. I taught in that field for a number of years before returning to parish ministry. When I taught theology, I was often accused by first-year students, or by church members when I taught adult education, of using highly technical and often obscure vocabulary. People like me will often say “imago dei” instead of “image of God” when talking about how God made us. Or we will say “simil justus et peccator” (one of Martin Luther’s favorite phrases) when we could just as easily say “at the same time justified and a sinner.” And Presbyterians, of course, can often be heard using the phrase “ecclesia reformata et semper reformanda”—the church reformed and always reforming (or “always being reformed,” and then we get to argue about the meaning of the gerund in Latin).

I used to think this annoying habit of using technical language was limited to professional theologians until I started hanging out with economists, investment bankers, and lawyers—the kinds of people who populate McCormick’s Board of Trustees. In my nearly fifteen years at McCormick Theological Seminary, I have picked up a whole new vocabulary, and I can fling it around (almost) with the best of them. I can talk about sunk costs. I know when to say that the problem with an investment is that “you can’t mark it to market.” But my new favorite is a phrase I’ve learned from my friend and colleague David Crawford. When evaluating whether one party should engage in an enterprise with another or when considering a consolidation or merger, David will more often than not say, “One plus one has to equal three.” The obvious point is that in order for that kind of a venture to succeed, you need to feel that the two together will add up to more than the sum of the parts, that there will be a new something added to make it worth all the effort and energy. One plus one has to equal three.

That’s not quite how Trinitarian logic works, but it gets us headed in the right direction. To be a Christian is to believe that, in the divine mystery, one plus one plus one equals One. The Sunday after Pentecost is one of the very few Sundays of the Christian year when the church celebrates not an event (like the birth of Jesus or his resurrection) but rather celebrates an idea. Today we give our attention to who God is for Christians: God in Three Persons, the Holy Trinity.

This idea of the triune God is, in fact, with us every Sunday here in worship: in the Doxology, the Gloria, and the Creed, we sing and say this faith every week. The Great Prayer of Thanksgiving we use at communion has three sections, each naming God and God’s work in distinctive ways. When we baptize new Christians, we use the triune name—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Visually, threefoldness is all over this sanctuary. Windows, chancel chairs, organ casement—our eyes are drawn to tripartite divisions or groupings all around us.

The doctrine of the Trinity, the idea that God is One and Three, is one of the most distinguishing ideas of Christian faith. It sets us apart from our friends who are Jews or Muslim, who believe (as we do) that there is only one God but not in God’s threefoldness. Truth be told, the very idea sometimes confuses us, but this mystery is deep in the DNA of our faith. There is so much that could be said and a whole lexicon of fascinating, obscure vocabulary not only in Latin but also in Greek. But there is also a fairly simple idea here: God is One and the way God is one is to be in relationship. And the character of that relationship is love.

The latest fad in religious publishing is the books lauding atheism as the only way for right-thinking modern people to live. The arguments are not new: you cannot “prove” God’s existence empirically or logically—granted. The Bible is full of contradictions and historical inaccuracies and therefore cannot be counted as evidence—agreed (and I would say that thinking of the Bible in this way is absolutely wrongheaded). The Christian church (which claims to be following God) is guilty of violence, warfare, injustice, atrocities, and all manner of general unpleasantness—obviously (and if you want to know more, I invite you to enroll in a church history course at McCormick or almost any other reputable Christian seminary!)

In these new books on atheism, there is nothing new under the sun. I would suspect if you have read any of them, your reaction would be the same as mine. The God these authors think doesn’t exist is most certainly not the God I believe in. And thereby hangs the tale: the real question for today (as every age) is not whether you believe in God (which most people say they do). Rather, the question is, what is the nature of the God you believe in? The question is not, do you believe in God? The question is, who is the God you believe in; what is God like?

Christians say that God is love and that the way we know this or see it most clearly expressed is through the doctrine of the Trinity. God is love. It flows so easily off the tongue. But what does it mean? And how can God be “love” in the face of the awful things we face in life? When you watch your father fade further and further away with Alzheimer’s or dementia? When a young woman with a bright future dies of cancer? When a child is shot and killed while sitting on her front porch? When one of the most highly educated and Christian nations in Europe rounds up and murders six million people simply because they were Jewish? How, exactly, is God love?

This is the question posed by the immensely popular book, The Shack. The young daughter of the main character, Mack, has been kidnapped and brutally murdered. For four years, Mack has been devastated, depressed, and deeply angry—especially angry with God. Summoned by a note, Mack goes to the cabin from which his daughter disappeared. There he meets God—God in three persons: an African American woman, a Middle Eastern man dressed as a laborer (complete with jeans, plaid shirt, and tool belt), and an Asian woman dressed as a gardener, who seemed to fade in and out of visibility. Over the course of a weekend, the three interact with Mack and guide him through his pain into a remarkable vision of God’s presence and into a profound understanding of forgiveness that does not deny but rather overcomes evil.

This book may not be everyone’s cup of tea, although the best-seller list says it’s pretty popular. What I find most intriguing is the way the author makes the persons of the Trinity into characters and develops the idea that a relationship of love exists among them. The author is correct, I think, in affirming that it is this loving within God that is the answer to the pain and anger that have enveloped Mack’s life.

The doctrine of the Trinity seems (probably because it is to most of us) hopelessly abstract. But the reason the preachers and teachers of the early church were led to it was because of their experience of the story that unfolds in the gospels. The Bible does not contain a “doctrine” of the Trinity. It presents a narrative from which the idea grows. Presbyterian theologian Bill Placher describes it this way: After the resurrection, the first followers of Jesus came to believe that Jesus was not only truly human but also God.

But, the New Testament tells us, Jesus prayed to someone he called his ‘Father,’ someone he said had sent him and to whom he was obedient, someone who raised him from the dead. He promised the coming of yet another, a Paraclete, the Spirit who had conceived him and descended upon him at baptism. Jesus’ cry of abandonment from the cross leaves no doubt that there is distinction between him and the one he had always before called his Father—yet Christians prayed to Jesus and relied on him for their salvation. If that was not idolatry, then the one crying out as well as the one to whom he cried must be God. (The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology, p. 131)

It is striking that Placher points to Jesus’ cry of abandonment, because that is the dramatic enactment of the verse we read this morning that we all know so well: “For God so loved the world that God gave the only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Or as the epistle of John puts it, “In this is love, not that we first loved God, but that God loved us and sent the Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

During the weeks after Easter, the church traditionally reads from chapters 14 to 17 of John’s Gospel. We often call this Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” because this long monologue is set in the Upper Room on the night before his arrest and trial. The words weave in and out, mystic poetry, drawing us into the mystery of God’s loving: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” Love—that is how Jesus described the relationship he had with God, the relationship into which he invited his friends and followers. Then he promised that these friends would not be abandoned. He would no longer be with them, but the Holy Spirit would take his place. Through the Spirit, they would be reborn from above—that is, from God. And then they would be transformed, set free to love even as Jesus and his Father loved one another with a love that would carry them to the cross and through the pain and to the other side.

This is a profound mystery, just as love always is. Hymn writer Brian Wren calls this mystery an “endless dance of love and light.” In using the word dance, Wren captures one of the most important insights of my favorite theologians from the early centuries of Christian life. Their insight is that the one God is not a merger of three other entities (Father, Son, and Spirit). Rather, the one God is a dynamic interrelationship of loving whose story we learn by reading the Bible. When we say that God is “love” we should not think of love as a noun but rather as a verb. God is not love in the abstract. God is the act of loving, of self-giving, the pouring out of one’s whole self for the sake of the other, the deep joy of sharing everything one is and everything one has with one’s beloved. And the most amazing mystery of all is this: you and I are invited in to experience, to know, to share the loving that God is. This is our very birthright as daughters and sons of God.

To God be all the glory and the praise! Amen.