Trinity Sunday, May 22, 2016 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Dancing in a Circle

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
Proverbs 8:14, 22–31
John 16:12–15

God can never be apprehended except in love and love can never be known except in community; it is the community of the Trinity that describes God’s perfect love.

John P. Chalmers

Today is Trinity Sunday. This day focuses on one of the central doctrines of Christian faith: the Holy Trinity. The Trinity is familiar to us; we reference it every Sunday in our worship service several times. Symbols for it are depicted in our architecture, as noted in your bulletin.

Still, the doctrine of the Trinity is difficult to understand or explain. What is this concept about three in one and one in three? Eldridge Cleaver, in his book Soul on Ice, wrote about an incident in his youth when he was Catholic. In his catechism class the priest asked if anyone present understood the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Eldridge said, “I had been studying my lessons diligently and knew by heart what I’d been taught. Up shot my hand, my heart throbbing with piety (pride) for this chance to demonstrate my knowledge of the Word. To my great shock and embarrassment, the Father announced . . . that I was lying, that no one, not even the Pope, understood the Godhead, and why else did I think they called it the mystery of the Holy Trinity” (Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, p. 31). Eldridge said it was just as well he hadn’t been called on, because he had intended to explain the Trinity with an analogy to 3-in-1 oil.

Neither the word Trinity nor the doctrine of the Trinity can be found in the Bible. What is found in the scriptures is a record of experiences people have had of God and a variety of metaphors and names for God. The doctrine of the Trinity developed over a long period of time out of people’s experience of God.

The first disciples were all Jewish. In worship they regularly recited the words, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.” They were clearly monotheistic, worshiping God as the creator and ruler of everything that is, the Lord of heaven and earth. They praised the God of their ancestors, who kept covenant relationship with generation after generation.

Then came Jesus. Initially his followers regarded him as a rabbi, a teacher, a healer, and a prophet. But these categories grew to be too small for him. Jesus called God by the intimate name of “Abba,” or Father, and spoke of his oneness with God (John 14:9 and John 10:30). The disciples came to believe Jesus Christ was more than a divine messenger, that he was in essence part of the message. They saw Jesus as the supreme manifestation of the Divine.

Then Pentecost happened. Jesus had died and was gone but had promised to send them the Spirit. After he died they did not feel abandoned, and indeed, they were not abandoned. The Holy Spirit empowered them to devote their lives to God. They experienced what Jesus had said: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” Christians believed the Holy Spirit was a manifestation of the same God who was the Creator and the Christ.

But it wasn’t until hundreds of years later that Christians started using the language of Trinity and “God in three persons.” Long ago the word person didn’t mean what it does today, referring to distinct individuals. Years ago, coming from the Latin word persona, it referred to a mask worn by an actor to indicate a role he or she was playing at any given time. The same actor may play different roles and so wore different masks. With the phrase “God in Three Personas” the church was trying to express its faith in one God who acts in three distinct ways or roles.

Theologian Shirley Guthrie wrote that if we want to translate the ancient doctrine of the Trinity into language that is meaningful now, we could say, “‘One God in three persons’ means one personal God who lives and works in three different ways at the same time” (Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, Revised Edition, p. 84).The God who is Creator is the same God who is Redeemer is the same God who is Sustainer, One God in all time.

A variety of metaphors, analogies, symbols, and names for God can help us express and expand our experience of God. I recently discovered this on a spiritual retreat. The week before the retreat, my father had died after declining for several years both mentally and physically. On the retreat I decided to make a few SoulCollages, which are small collages that each use only a few images to convey one particular theme. I had brought along copies of a few of my favorite photos of my dad. For my first collage I cut and glued these together on a background of an image of a sunrise, which for me symbolized resurrection. Then I started looking though a magazine and was surprised to find a painting of a skeleton in a chair looking out the window. I decided to make a separate collage on Death with it. I put a different background behind the window so that the skeleton was looking out over a field of golden wheat into a cloudy blue sky. I thought it was finished. I returned to the same magazine and was drawn to a painting of two dark-skinned people running through a field with birds and butterflies flying above and alongside them. I followed my intuition to create another collage using that image, though I didn’t initially know why. As I cut and glued the picture together I realized it represented freedom. Thinking I was finished, I started to clean up the scraps of paper and noticed a small red bird remaining. I glued that bird in flight in the sky of the collage where the skeleton was looking out the window. Once I added it, it took my breath away. I recognized this bird was Spirit—my Dad’s spirit flying free from all physical constraints and God’s Spirit, ever present with us. Through the images of all three SoulCollages I felt God comforting me. I put these collages on the Communion Table in case you want to see them. I continue to see more in them. Just this morning I realized I had created a trilogy: my loving father, Christ the Liberator, and Spirit our Comforter.

The Holy Spirit is often depicted as a bird. A bird travels between the heavens and the earth, flies freely, and cannot be contained. But of course, this is a metaphor. We know the Spirit is not literally a bird. A bird is but one symbol for Spirit.

We need to remember that all our ideas, symbols, images, and names for God are just that and no more. They are not God but serve only to help us articulate our experience of God. That is also true of the doctrine of the Trinity. As Robert McAfee Brown says, it “is a picture, or an image, or a formulation, or a concept about God, and no more than that” (Robert McAfee Brown, Reclaiming the Bible, p. 89). As the whole is said to be greater than its parts, so is God greater than our doctrine of the Trinity. Scottish theologian Donald Baillie put it this way:

Everything that we say or sing about God is but an attempt to put into our poor blundering human words something that can never be perfectly expressed in human words; stupendous divine realities too great to be grasped by human minds or comprehended in human categories. . . . We need to be reminded that God cannot be contained in any of our statements. (Donald Baillie, “The Mystery of the Trinity,” A.D., October 1972, p. 8)

We also need to be careful about the images and metaphors we use, for some limit and even distort our understanding of the mystery of God.

One such image that distorts who God is unfortunately is the one that appears most frequently if you Google Trinity. That image is a triangle. At the top point of the triangle is the name Father, with Son on the left base point and Spirit on the right base point. The problem is that this depicts Father as the “top” God and Christ and the Spirit as lesser beings. It also paints a picture of God as an isolated individual who exists in solitary autonomy at the top of the heap, like a supreme monarch who rules in self-sufficiency with absolute power, dominion, and control. Add to this picture the reference to God as “he” and we tend to think of God as the supreme Male who rules with dominating power over all. Even though God has no gender, God often appears in art and in our imaginations as an older, white man with a long beard. This has a limiting, negative impact on the ways we relate to God and one another. As feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote more than four decades ago, “If God is male, then the male is God.” Critics of Western monotheism focus on the limitations of this individualistic, hierarchical, patriarchal, authoritarian view of God.

A corrective image to the triangle can be found in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Eastern Orthodoxy typically uses the circle as its model for the Trinity. One of the most beloved icons in the Eastern church is the Russian icon of the Holy Trinity created by Andrei Rublev in 1410. It is also printed in your bulletin. There you see three figures sitting around a table together. They have identical physical features—face, hair, fairly androgynous—showing a sameness among the three beings. All the figures are holding identical scepters, signifying that divine power and authority are shared equally among them. There is more symbolism in this icon, but I want to point out one more thing. The three figures form a circle. Draw a line following their shoulders from the Spirit, around Christ, to the Father, to where the circle is left open at the front. The table is open for you to belong in this loving community, where the interrelationship is loving and mutual.

An egalitarian circle image for the Trinity was similarly articulated by John of Damascus, a Greek theologian who lived in the seventh century. He worked with a concept called perichoresis. Peri means “around,” and choresis literally means “dancing.” He likened the three figures of the Trinity to dancers holding hands, dancing around together in joyous freedom. Their dance reflects the unity of a community of persons who love one another and live together in harmony. Each person is who they are only in relation to one another, co-divine, and co-eternal love.

Hymn writer Brian Wren calls the mystery of the Trinity “an endless dance of love and light” (from the hymn “God Is One, Unique, and Holy”). The good news of the triune God is that we can give up thinking about who is number one at the top of the heap and can learn to think first of God, and then of ourselves, as living in the circle of a community of free, equal partners who live joyfully and thankfully with and for one another, dancing in unity (Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, p. 94).

This image of God as one community in a circle hopefully deepens our understanding of God. But this same icon could distort our understanding if we locked its meaning to be that God is Russian or light-skinned or male. Our images and names for God need to stay connected with their intended meaning. A candidate for ordination to be a Minister of the Word and Sacrament was being orally examined on the floor of presbytery. A presbytery commissioner turned the subject to the Trinity and asked the candidate, “What sex do you think the Holy Spirit is?” There was a long pause, and then the candidate replied, “I never thought of the Holy Spirit having sex.” Laughter erupted. And laughter should have erupted at the question, because when we speak of God as Father and Christ as Son and the Spirit as the Spirit of the Father and Son, we are not talking about the gender of God. It is a way of describing the kind of intimate relationship they have with one another that is like the intimate relationship between parents and their children.

You may have noticed we sang new words for the Doxology for today. The Doxology and the hymns we are singing in today’s service use more than forty different names for God. Though most of the names are ancient, the texts of this music were all written within the past thirty years. Their Christian composers recognize that we need to use a wide variety of names and images to portray a fuller picture of God. A few names for God are inadequate, including the familiar names of the Trinity. We need to be careful not to get too attached to our most familiar names for God, lest they limit whom we worship. Instead, let us dance with the mystery of the Holy Trinity. For the

Triune God [is] mysterious Being, undivided and diverse,
Deeper than our minds can fathom, greater than our creeds rehearse.
(Carl P. Daw Jr., the hymn “God the Spirit, Guide, and Guardian”)

Amen.