The Dance of Love - Trinity Sunday 2023

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Trinity Sunday June 4, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

The very last thing we are doing on this First Sunday after Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, is gathering together to worship a mathematical formula. Remember how what we now know as the Doctrine of the Trinity emerged. First century, observant Temple Jews who knew that to worship anything but the Living God was death-dealing idolatry, found themselves–almost against their better judgment–worshipping God in the person of Jesus. As it says in our snippet of a Gospel for this morning: “The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him” (Matthew 28:16-20). In Matthew, the most Jewish of all the Gospels, this happens again and again. You shall have no other God but me… and yet they find themselves on their knees pouring themselves out before the Jesus who pours himself out as peace-breathing love on them.

All the theological reflection that has come down to us as “three persons in one substance,” and all the rest is the working out, in prayerful thought and reflection using the language of the day, of this encounter with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. The encounter with the person of Jesus comes first, and the working out of the startling, rather baffling, implications of that encounter unfold. I remember seeing the Olympic Champion Ice Dancing pair Torvill and Dean at Maple Leaf Gardens at the height of their graceful prowess when they were out performing their iconic “Bolero” routine. It was breathtaking. Enrapturing. And when it was over, and after the five minute long standing ovation, I remember seeing the markings they’d left behind on the freshly zambonied ice with their blades. A scribble of a spin here. Long, slow swoops of a paired curve there. A chip of ice skittered to the corner where a pick dug in. As a skater myself, I could read the marks left behind by Torvill and Dean, and see the rough outline of the routine, but it paled in comparison to the actual experience of the dance.

As Anglicans, we begin, like those first century followers of Jesus, with relationship with the God who is love–the God who is Lover, Beloved, and Enrapturer. Doctrine might be seen as the scuff marks on the ice left behind by the Dance of Love. Looping traces of Lover, Beloved, and Enrapturer. Invitations to dancing encounter. That is why we say with Prosper of Acquitaine, Lex orandi, lex credendi: “Praying shapes believing.” Through daily prayer, weekly worship in common, pondering and dwelling on God’s holy word as revealed to us scripture, self-forgetful service to others in the spirit of sacrificial love and witnessing to justice and peace, we deepen our relationship with God so that the dance steps hinted at, pointed to, by the doctrine of the one-in-three and three-in-one might come to be danced, lived out, and reveal themselves in our own experience.

The amazing thing about the Christian life is that this dance of love is always already going on as the fountain of life and source of all being. The come-as-you are banquet has been in full swing since before the foundation of the world. And so the Divine Dance of Lover, Beloved, and Enrapturer is not something we cook up, but something we slip into, participate in, and live from. That’s why in our reading from Genesis we see that marked contrast between the one-way divine fiats of the let there bes–light, a dome, waters, living creatures and creeping, crawling things–and the let us make when God fashions humankind in God’s image and after God’s likeness. To be a human being, to make the journey into being a truly human human being, is to co-operate with God’s presence and action in our life. Through our freely given consent–our “yes” to God’s work in us–we make the journey from image as potential to ever more deeply realized Christ-likeness each in our own unique way.

We consent to our undiminishable belovedness received in the grace of baptism and let that love work on us–breathe over the chaotic depths of our unruly lives–that we might come to manifest more clearly what love looks like in this peculiar blood, bone, and sinew instancing with all its faults and foibles, its family history, its genetic inheritance, its perfectly dappled potpourri of unrepeatably unique gifts and besetting weaknesses. Breathed upon by love, touched by love, healed by love, transfigured even by love–what does the new song God is singing in Christ look like and sound like in this body when we let its music dance us away from self-enclosure in service to the other? Who is born when those diminishing stories of fear, scarcity, lack, and not enough go under the waters of baptism and we live instead from heavens-ripping belovedness as who we truly are?

This, thanks be to God, is the Spirit’s work in us, not something we accomplish under our own steam. We can’t manufacture the Holy Spirit with a little good cheer or conjure her with a dash of plastic enthusiasm. We open, allow, receive, and consent to Spirit’s sweep over the dark and choppy waters of our life so that who we are called to be might be lured, elicited, drawn forth from the fabric of our life. As St. Paul writes in the Letter to the Romans, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words” (8:26). Paul, that master of prayer who was taken up into the third heaven, tells us even he doesn’t “know how to pray”--that it’s the Spirit’s strong work in him in the midst of his weakness.

So what does it mean to pray if our real situation is not even knowing, with Paul, how to pray? What happens when we willingly enter that space where, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority,” as we heard in Acts a couple of weeks ago? It turns out that not knowing how to pray means, in fact, we’ve finally begun. We’re finally last, least, lost, and little enough for the Potter to do the Potter’s work. Not having everything pinned down and buttoned up, opens us to the work of the Holy Spirit that blows “we know not where.” Methods and techniques go out the window and our prayer becomes a simple Samuelesque, “Here I Am.” We let prayer pray us. We let praise praise. We let thanksgiving give thanks.

Thomas Merton, just before he went off for that final, fateful visit to Bangkok in 1968 visited a group of California nuns at Our Lady of the Redwoods. Speaking of the life of prayer, he said to them:

It’s a risky thing to pray, and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God. If saying your prayers is an obstacle to prayer, cut it out. The best way to pray is: stop. Let prayer pray within you, whether you know it or not.

This is Father Louie’s way of reminding us in some of his very last words to the faithful that truly to pray is simply to be. To be present to the Presence. To open the hand of thought, to turn aside, take off our shoes, and come home to the splendor of God’s radiant, effervescent, effulgent presence. Sun, moon, stars, bird song, dung beetle, car horn, and crabgrass burgeoning forth in God’s good, good, very good marvelous everywhere all-at-once happening. Knowing too much, talking too much, confusing faith with carnival barker certainty… all of these habits get in the way of letting God do God’s work in us. To understand the Trinity, then, is to enter into relationship with God–the God we see revealed to us in Jesus. Sweet Easy Yoke, let the little children come to me, laying on of hands and blessing Jesus. From encounter with Him, we are swept up into the divine dance of Lover, Beloved, and Enrapturer. We leave the formulas, and bad math behind and taste instead the arms-flung wide calling of all people from every tribe and language and nation into warm embrace.

Consenting to God’s presence and action, letting ourselves be loved just as we are–before we’ve prettied up the picture, figured it all out, done the math, or gotten our ducks in a row–opens the door to the work of the Spirit in us. Knowing in our bones the trustworthiness of God’s unconditional love for us, it dawns that if this true for me, it’s also true for you, and you, and you, and you. Each one–regardless of race, class, sexual orientation, or gender identity–touched with a Pentecost flame of belovedness, singing in their native tongue (rainbowed feather boas and leather chaps included). What else is there to do but greet each other with a holy kiss?