John 16.1-5
For many years Trinity Sunday has coincided with my
annual holidays, but this year there was a calendar malfunction. Fortunately, earlier in the year something caught my eye in a blog
about Christian contemplation, written by a Fanciscan priest called Richard
Rohr.
He was reminiscing about his childhood when, he
recalled, priests used to tell him and his friends that the Trinity is a
mystery, something so difficult to comprehend that we shouldn’t even try to
understand it. I remember being told exactly the same thing, and it always
seemed peculiar to me that we should be encouraged to believe in something
which we couldn’t get our heads around. How can we really be expected to
believe in something even if it’s a total mystery?
The solution, as Richard Rohr observes in his blog,
is that on every other day of the year most Christians get around the problem
by behaving as though the Trinity doesn’t exist. Quoting the famous theologian
Karl Rahner he says that, if the Churches all agreed to give up the doctrine of
the Trinity tomorrow, nine-tenths of everything ever written about the
Christian faith wouldn’t need to be altered at all. [1] Even our Gospel reading
from John 16, verses 1 to 5, doesn’t try to describe the mechanics behind
the Trinity. John only implies that there is a moral unity between
Father, Son and Spirit.
But ignoring the Trinity because it’s too difficult
to think about certainly won’t work on Trinity Sunday. In any case, Richard
Rohr says he’s come to realise that divine mystery isn’t something we can never
understand, it’s something we can endlessly understand, because it has
so many meanings that we can go on exploring it forever.
So, for instance, he suggests that one way of
thinking ourselves into the meaning of the Trinity is to use the metaphor of
dance. I asked everyone at the 9.30 service whether they like dancing -
perhaps at weddings - or at least like watching Strictly Come Dancing or
Dancing on Ice? Or I asked, what about ballet? Even the presenter of BBC
Radio’s culture programme admitted on air last week that to him ballet was a
mystery. He’d never understood it or even sat through a whole ballet
performance. Of course, there was an expert on hand from the National Ballet to
complete his education for him!
Richard Rohr says that God doesn’t just enjoy
dancing, God isn’t just one of the dancers in the dance of creation, God
is the dance itself.
He suggests that we think about the building blocks
of life and the universe. They’re all made up of smaller particles or life
forms bound together or moving around one another.
In the atom there’s a lot of hugging and dancing
going on. Here protons and neutrons hold onto each other in a tight embrace in
the nucleus of the atom while electrons dance around them, although I think
it’s a bit more complicated than that.
In the tiny cells that make up all living things
there’s an ancient life form lurking, called mitochondria, which you can see
dancing around inside the cell giving it energy. The mitochondria themselves
are constantly bonding and separating as they dance around inside the cell,
where they have a symbiotic relationship with the creatures they inhabit. We
can’t live without them, and the energy they help us to burn, but they
can’t exist without us.
On a much bigger scale, the moon orbits the earth
with its waxing and waning face in a constant dance of high tides and low
tides. And, on an even larger scale still, the planets orbit the sun and stars
dance around one another in galaxies, sometimes with slender arms spiralling
out into deep space.
Richard Rohr says that the Trinity is ‘embedded as
the code [which is] in everything that exists.’ The Trinity is engaged in ‘a
circle dance of love’, so is it any wonder - he asks - that people and animals,
birds and fish, move and swirl in complicated patterns too - shoals, flocks,
herds, packs, social groups and families, not to mention children in music and
movement classes, all dancing and sometimes tip-toeing around one another?
And God is the dance itself. And God wants
us to join in the dance, to dance with one another and with him. And it doesn’t
matter if we’re notorious Dad dancers, or we have two left feet. We are all
invited to get on the dance floor!
Speaking of which, in 1990 the Methodist Church - in
a report to Conference about human sexuality - compared the Trinity to the
relationship between two people. When we attempt to describe the unity within
the Trinity we talk about three persons being in such complete unity that they
are one and the same, and the report said that human relationships can be
something like that - with two marriage partners becoming united together in
the Spirit.
Jesus himself said that when two people get married
the two should become one. Of course, he wasn talking about the perfect unity
that exists between the three persons of the Trinity but the report said that,
in sexual intercourse, human beings come as close to experiencing what it means
for two persons to become one as most of us are ever likely to get. When I
mentioned this in a sermon at the time, a church steward commented wryly that
it was the best excuse he had ever heard - but I don’t make this stuff
up.
According to the report sex - at its best - really
does become a way of better understanding the mystery of God, of joining in the
dance at the heart of all creation. It says, and I quote, ‘The Trinity [is] an
expression of the outgoing love of God in creation, re-creation and [personal]
relationships… Therefore, sex is to be enjoyed and celebrated within this
context... We celebrate our sexuality because we have been made by God with the
potential to be fulfilled in deep loving relationships and... [so can] be at
one with another person.’ And it also says, ‘A secure, intimate, stable, loving
bond, [between two people] is itself a reflection of the mystery of the
relationship within the Trinity.’ [2]
So it’s fitting that today. on Trinity Sunday
itself, we will be marking and celebrating the renewal of two people’s vows to
one another after fifty years of Christian marriage.
[2] The Report of the Conference Commission
on Human Sexuality, 1990
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