Today, before we begin, it’s important to make something clear. God is bigger than anything we might imagine, yet intimate enough that we can know him deeply and personally, particularly and especially through grace in Jesus. And with that, we rest confident that, as St. Paul says, of God, “my grace is sufficient for you,” and that to know Jesus is to know God. It is sufficient. But let us go forward today and consider our relationship with God so that we might grow as disciples live our lives to God’s greater glory.
Let us pray. May only God’s Word be spoken and may only God’s Word be heard; in the name of Jesus. Amen.
It’s October 31, and the students of Monster Academy have come together once again for the annual school dance. The tradition started years earlier, and it caught on in a flash. What with all the monster students and teachers who came each year, it was a graveyard smash. They called the dance the Monster Mash. This year was like years prior. The zombies were having fun. Others included Wolfman and Dracula’s sons. The scene was rocking, all were digging the sounds. Mr. Bogeyman and Mrs. Frankenstein were chatting by the refreshments, when Mr. Bogeyman remarks, “Did you hear about Drac? It seems he was troubled by just one thing.” Mrs. Frankenstein, interest piqued, responds, “Oh?” Mr. Bogeyman said, “Yeah, when he dropped off Vlad, Jr., he opened the door of his hearse, shook his fist and said, ‘Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?’ He’s still sore about that all these years later.” Mrs. Frankenstein shakes her head and scans the dancefloor. The party had just begun, but already, like always, the Monster Mash is the hit of the land. The whole school was there. But then Mrs. Frankenstein noticed something odd. “Mr. Bogeyman,” she said, “where’s Jack Skeleton? I haven’t seen him all night.” Mr. Bogeyman nodded and said, “Oh, he told me in class this morning he wouldn’t be coming to the dance.” Mrs. Frankenstein was a surprised and said, “Why not? Everyone’s here.” Mr. Bogeyman said, “He said he had no-body to come with him.”
Make no bones it, that was pretty humerus. Get it? Humerus? Well, it tickled my funny bone, at least. But I’ll get on with it before you think I’m a total numskull!
No—I’m not going to preach about monsters, or bones, or jokes today. It’s the Feast of the Holy Trinity, after all, that Sunday when we consider the mystery of the Trinity, God’s revelation of himself in the triune unity and the uniform trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For ages theologians have wrestled with trying to explain the Trinity, and they’ve always fallen short. They fall short because they’re focused on the wrong thing—trying to explain it, to pin down who God is. God, the triune unity and the uniform trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, isn’t something that’s meant to be pinned down and explained in nicely organized categories that fit our notions of the way that things work. This is God’s very own self we’re talking about here, and so it’s not surprising that we struggle to say with any kind of specificity or certainty just who God is. Recall Moses at the burning bush at Horeb when he asked God who he was. “I am who I am,” God replies. “And I will be who I will be.”
God’s very being defies human language. Anything we say about God will fall short of fully doing justice to God’s being.
And speak of God we must. Think of God we must. “For in him we live, and move, and have our being,” St. Paul writes. God is the source, life, and sustainer of all things. Everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, known and unknown—everything got started in God and its purpose can only be understood in God. And so we must think of God. We must speak of God.
Throughout the ages, people have done that—from small children to great theological minds. Everyone who thinks and speaks of God is a theologian. This isn’t to say that everything that that someone thinks and speaks of God is true or trustworthy. But anyone and everyone is a theologian at some level precisely because they think and speak of God.
Down through the centuries, those who’ve dedicated their work, sometimes their whole lives to thinking and speaking about God have considered the Trinity, and what many of them have come to realize is that the Trinity is less about who God is and more about what God does. The Trinity reveals to us that the very nature of God is inherently relational. God himself is made up of relationships within himself—relationship between the Father and the Spirit, relationship between the Son and the Father, relationship between the Spirit and the Son.
Early church leaders, many of them native speakers of Greek, described the relationship—not God, but the relationship within God’s own self—as a dance. They recognized that God himself was similar to a traditional Greek wedding dance. While you might think that a wedding dance is made up of just two dancers, the two lovers, the traditional Greek wedding dance doesn’t have only two dancers, but at least three. The dance starts in circles, weaves in and out, in a fantastic choreography. Faster and faster they dance, but all the while keeping perfect rhythm and harmony with each other. Eventually, they are dancing so quickly, yet effortlessly, that it becomes a blur. Yet even when the dancers are many, as they move, they dance in relationship with one another in a single dance.
It’s a kind of relationship like this that God calls us into as his creatures. God created the world, God created us to be in relationship—with the whole creation, with each other, and with God. Jesus, God’s own Son, was sent into the world that we might have yet more clarity about God’s desire to be in relationship with us. In the same way, Jesus speaks his peace to us and breathes the Holy Spirit into us, filling us with the fire of God’s love, filling us with God himself—for God is love. This is what it means to believe, to have faith—to live in harmonic, perfect relationship with all of creation and God. To believe, to have faith is to live in God’s peace, in Shalom—at harmony in the dance of creation that is filled with God’s very own self.
In today’s gospel, Jesus sends the disciples into the world to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teach everything that he had commanded them. This is none other than saying that Jesus now sends the disciples, sends us, commissions us to join the dance, to join God’s dance. We are sent to form relationships that are marked by the love we’ve experienced in God, and to bring more and more into this same dance of love by sharing the hope that is within us—by teaching, by enlightening, by sharing, by demonstrating our trust in God’s promise by our very own lives.
Yet we might be tentative to join the dance, for whatever reason. Unsure that God could truly love us. Skeptical that any of this makes any sense. Cynical at the state of the world. To be sure, we are buffeted with any and all manner of ills that seek to undermine the harmonic peace of God’s love. We might be tempted to even think that in the whole scheme of things, in the design of God’s vast, vast creation, we don’t really make that much difference, that we couldn’t matter that much. Why bother when the deck seems so insurmountably stacked against us?
And yet, we…you do matter and have a role to play—precisely because God has said so.
Why bother? Because if you, whom God has loved, whom God has called, whom God has commissioned, doesn’t do it, who will?
But this is the danger of isolating ourselves, the danger of separating yourself from the pattern of the whole creation. By ourselves, we can never see our purpose in the pattern of the grand design. We must see ourselves in relationship to one another, to the whole creation, and ultimately to God. We aren’t alone. It isn’t that nobody is with us—God is with us. Once again today, as Jesus sends us to join the dance and bring still more into the dance, he reminds us, “I am with you.”
He is with us in the Word read and studied in Scripture, in the Word sung and preached. He is with us in the bread and wine, the Word made flesh among us, in communion with you and everyone in every time and place who’s tasted even a nibble of God’s goodness. He is with us in the faces, hands, feet, voices, and hearts of those around us who we call sisters and brothers, here in this place and around the globe—who sometimes think like us and sometimes don’t think like us. We don’t dance alone. We have somebody to join us in the dance—somebody who since before the dawn of time has been dancing all along. That somebody is God himself.
Today, on this Holy Trinity Sunday, let’s not focus so much on who God is, but rather what God does. Let’s celebrate God’s desire to be in relationship with his creation, and what’s more, to be in relationship with us, with you—a desire mirrored in God’s very own relational self. God makes room for us in his own life, a life lived like a lively dance, in a peaceful give-and-take relationship within himself, and invites us to join in that relationship. We don’t dance alone. We have a dance partner, God himself, who’s been dancing all along, who knows all the fancy steps, and is ready and wants to teach us more and more movements in the dance of love, the dance of God. And though we might worry or feel inadequate, though we might stress or sometimes have questions that have no easy answers, God still wants us to join the dance.
He’s ready to tango!
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev'd Daniel W. Spigelmyer, Jr. 