Trinity Sunday 2022

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on June 12, 2022 by Revd Sally Hitchiner

What do you picture when you think of God? Which actor plays god in the movie of your mind? Charlton Heston, Octavia Spencer or Morgan Freeman – booming authority or the kindly, old grannie or janitor waiting for you to visit? Or perhaps you have Jim Cazel or one of the many people who have played Jesus in films, smiling and sitting near you but then not there at other times? Or perhaps you don’t imagine God as a distinctive person but as a mist, a force?

Whatever our picture of God, we tend to imagine God as static, waiting for us to come to him… and it usually is him. God is patient, compassionate, maybe mysterious but static.

Today is Trinity Sunday. In our following of the Christian year, we’ve walked with the disciples through Easter with Jesus’ death and resurrection, we’ve looked with them as Jesus ascends into the clouds and waited with them for Pentecost. Now, as the drama dies down and the plod of existence resumes we wrestle with them about what all this means. What was all that about? Who is this God that we’ve been getting to know all this time?

The disciples were good Jewish monotheists. From childhood their mothers would have taught them that the first thing they say when they wake up in the morning, the first thing that Orthodox Jewish men still say when they wake up is a prayer. The Shema starts “Hear Oh Israel, the Lord, the Lord your God is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.” Every morning since they learned how to speak they had said that. God is up there and we are down here and ever more it shall be.

And then they look back on three years of hanging out with Jesus and they realise that Jesus is also the Lord. Jesus is also God. And he spoke about another, coming from the Father to comfort and instruct them about his words. Another Lord. Another God.

So were they wrong to pray the prayer of their ancestors every morning? Are there three Gods?

The church lived with the ambiguity for a while, until the Church worldwide was having so many arguments about it that in the year 325 they decided to make a collective decision. The doctrine of the Trinity was stated, we use terms like Father, Son and Spirit but from the start these weren’t fixed, we could also use phrases like Lover, Beloved and the love between, or Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. Whatever you call them, the belief that God is Trinity is now one of the very few statements that all Christians attest to. We may disagree on the virgin birth, on what happens at communion, most recently on gay marriage but one thing we all agree on, if you are baptised in the name of the Trinity, you are recognised as a Christian. If you are not, your baptism isn’t considered to be Christian. However hard it is to understand, this is what Christianity is.

So, what does it mean to be baptised into a Trinitarian God?

If we were to draw a map of our relationship with God according to traditional Monotheism, it would have us down here and God up here at the end of a long line that can never change. I suspect that’s how most of us imagine God when we say our prayers. The Victorian Christianity, that we’ve all inherited, encouraged it. “At the end of your day, kneel by your bed, send up a list of the things you’d like God to do for you and don’t forget to ask for something for those less fortunate than yourself while you’re at it.” You can see how it worked for the British Empire. It’s somewhat compassionate but everyone knows their place.

What if I was to tell you that this isn’t anything like God.

The map of God is more like the recycle sign. God is one but God is also three persons, all God, all equal in dignity. What difference does it make if we really believe we worship a God who is community? Let me tick off some of the easy ones.

It means there is no one definition of perfection. If you’re Trinitarian, you can’t say Fathers are better than Sons. Or while we’re talking about Fathers and Sons, you can’t say that someone gendered in one way is better than someone differently gendered like the Spirit. You can’t say that any type of person is intrinsically more valuable or more important than another.

It means that the measure of meaning isn’t independence and self-sufficiency. It’s not power to force your will on others. The life of the city banker or a prime minister isn’t leading a better life than the life of someone with learning disabilities who is unable to earn money or live independently. The measure of a meaningful life is love.

There are also a couple of more complex outcomes of this belief about God.

God is Love.

Other beliefs can say God is loving or God loves us but only if there is a loving community within God, only if there was someone to love before there was anything other than God, can we say God IS love. There has never been a moment, there is no part of God that isn’t entirely about loving relationship. It is God’s DNA.

The general public may be concerned that if a political leader was cruel to their spouse or children that this may mean they’d be cruel in their decisions in ruling the country. There is no room to accuse God of this. We can trust that God is always going to be loving in relationship with us because there is no possibility of self-centredness in the Trinity.

It also means that the love in God’s DNA isn’t the type that engages from a distance. God doesn’t reach down to fix our problems then leave us to get on with things like Jesus dying on the Cross was like Santa Claus dropping off the presents and then sneaking out of earth before most of us knew he was even here.

God answering your prayers today isn’t like a superhero: fly in, catch the falling lady, pour water on the burning building and then fly off as a solitary child shouts “Gee Thanks Superman!” The Trinitarian God doesn’t seem the type to fix your needs then disappear.

With God the point isn’t fixing as much as community. God wants to be with you. In fact, if you imagine God as a map with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Christianity means that humanity, you, are included here, with the Son. Right in the middle of the party.

Christianity says God is a party.

As I said at the beginning, we imagine God as a fixed point, demanding that everyone else revolve around God. But what we find if we look into the idea of the Trinity is that God is in constant creativity and response. The early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this – perichoresis – from “choreo” to go and “peri” around – to go around another. To move oneself around another. When early Greek Christians spoke of perichoresis in God they meant that each divine person harbours the others at the centre of his being. In constant movement of overture and acceptance each person envelops and encircles the others. Instead of demanding that the others revolve around them, each of the members of the trinity revolve themselves around the others. And because each of them is constantly revolving around the others, there is constant movement. A Dance.

Think about all the times you have danced, maybe dancing with a child, dancing with friends at a party or a wedding, dancing with someone you’re in love with. The times dancing feels most meaningful, are the times when you’re not thinking about getting your moves perfect. Maybe it was even dancing in your kitchen, just for fun. The times when you glimpse something of what the idea of dancing is always trying to be are the times when you and those you’re dancing with, slightly forget yourself and get each other. They move in one way and you move with that and vice versa. You are individuals but you are creating one dance.

If God is essentially three people dancing and moving along with the others, it means that God is not rigid. God is able and willing to be flexible. God thinks about the other and responds rather than demands the other responds to their fixed point. Think about when you’ve been delighted by someone, whether it’s a child, a new friend or a romantic partner or someone we’d like to be our romantic partner, we enter into a dynamic orbit around them, we centre on the interests and desires of the other and as they move, we move.

The easiest thing for human beings to do is to say that this is like romantic encounters. Maybe the most powerful thing we have to compare this relationship to is when two people come together in love. But God doesn’t fit that exactly. God is three. When three people are each aware of the other two and are moving in synergy with each of the others it creates more movement. A two person dance can be a journey from separate to united, even blurred. But a three-person dance holds the tension of the individuals. You could say like magnets holding attraction equally between three forces. But these are people not objects, creative, unexpected so the Trinity is constantly in movement.

For us it means that God doesn’t sound like the type to zap you from afar into some abstract perfection that isn’t really you. Almighty God comes close to you, moves around you, responding and interacting with who you are and what you create. And what we see in Christ is God doesn’t give up moving around, moving with humanity, no matter what the cost. God will be moving around you, responding to your movement and holding space for you in God’s very heart forever. God can’t do anything else. It’s God’s DNA.

But there’s more… we are invited to respond to the dance. We are invited to make moves through our day to day lives that are in response to the movements of God. One definition of mission is to spot what God is doing in those around you and join in. When you encounter others, think ‘What characteristics of Christ is God doing in their life right now?’ Is God comforting someone or challenging someone? Is God raising questions or anger at injustice in their life? Is God sparking wonder or gratitude? And join in with that. It turns out the idea of responding to another with all the parts of who you are was there at the start. The Shema, the call to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength was, perhaps, a pointer to how God loves us back, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

A few weeks ago I was on holiday with a group of university friends. My friends now all have young children so don’t get out much but because we were all staying in a large house, there was an evening, after supper when all the children were in bed and the baby monitors were lined up on the sideboard. Someone turned on some music and a few folk got up and started dancing.

One of my friends is a producer at a famous dance theatre. As part of her job she goes to observe dance productions multiple times every month. I found myself on the sofa watching the others dance and I asked her what she thought of them bopping away to 1980s pop songs. How do they compare with the professionals? Now, I thought she was going to say “Well obviously they don’t have dancer’s bodies” or “they’re a bit clumsy” – but she thought for a moment and said “They’re not committing enough – you can tell they’re thinking about what they look like. It adds a split second before they move and their movement choices aren’t entirely in tune with each other. They need to listen to and respond to the music and the movement of the others without thinking about themselves so much. That would be the difference with people who dance as a vocation.”

So I have a question for you. Are you willing to wake each morning and say you will love God with all your heart, soul and might? God is a party and is dancing around you today. Do you want to dance like God dances? Will you join in?