The first and only time I’ve taken dance lessons was a month into marriage with Alli. We signed up for a partner ballroom dance class because we thought it would be fun and our friends were teaching the class. Each week we learned a new style – waltz and swing and foxtrot.
And it turned out to be brutal for Alli and I: I went into learning mode – focusing as intently as I could, trying to memorize precisely the correct count and rhythm for each footstep and swivel.
Alli went into teacher mode – figuring that if I was struggling with my steps she could work twice as hard and do it for both of us. What happened was that I stepped on her feet a lot and we’d careen wildly into other couples who were gliding blissfully across the floor.
We’d leave class and hop in our car frustrated that we weren’t progressing and we’d hash out what went wrong: it seemed the harder we tried the worse we got.
On this Trinity Sunday we celebrate a dancing God. We affirm that God is one God and God is three-in-one. God is the creating Parent, the word made flesh in Jesus, and the Spirit of love.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost dance in a whirl of lovingly mutual indwelling and envelopment.
But talking about God doesn’t necessarily mean that we are in relationship with God. A dancing God calls us to dance with abandon, not just to talk about dancing or to try harder to dance better.
Trinitarian language for God as three-in-one is a creative attempt by humans to describe the majesty and mystery of who God is, always acknowledging that our words about God are not godself. Our words are human responses to who God is. And God is a dancing God.
The Catholic priest turned Anabaptist leader named Menno Simons, for whom we Mennonites get our church name from, also beautifully named both the necessity and conundrum of talking about the Trinity. Menno wrote that,
“These three names, activities, and powers, namely, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost (which the [early church] fathers called three persons, by which they meant the three, true, divine beings) are one incomprehensible, indescribable, Almighty, holy, only, eternal, and sovereign God…. And although they are three, yet in deity, will, power, and works they are one, and can no more be separated from each other than the sun, brightness, and warmth. For the one cannot exist without the other.” (Writings, 496).
If Menno uses the metaphor of the sun also giving off heat and light yet being one thing to describe God’s working. Psalm 29 gives us another image for God – the idea of God’s voice – God speaks – and God’s roar is mighty, majestic, powerful, almost violently dynamic. Witnessing the earth-shaking impact of God’s voice – the Psalmist proclaims God’s glory.
Similarly, in our text from Isaiah 6, the prophet glimpses just the hem of God’s robe filling the temple while the fiery winged flying snakes called Seraphim yell out “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of God’s glory!”
If God’s voice alone is this powerful, if just the fraying seam at the edge of God’s jeans is this expansively beautiful and awe-inspiring – then how are we to comprehend and speak of and follow and love this God who is this big and incomprehensible? How do you learn to dance with such a God?
When we imagine of God as the Trinity – we remember that we don’t have to learn to dance alone. The Spirit of grace and transformation invites us to encounter and know and dance with God. We can only know God through the help of Godself. Paul in his letter to the Romans writes that “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
We are only able to recognize and speak of God and begin to dance in joyful freedom with God because of the Spirit’s gracious and unexpected movement in our lives. Paul uses the language of adoption to describe this gift. We are adopted into the life of God: as children of God, Paul describes us followers of Jesus as heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.
When I first hear that word “heirs” it makes me think of money and property and legal claim; like if the kids of a deceased parent show up to argue over how to split the money from the estate sale of their parent’s dusty possessions.
But I think that Paul means that through Christ we share in the life of God. We experience the joy and are drawn into the mystery and glory of the relational dance who is the Triune God.
“If we’re children of God, then we’re also heirs, says Paul, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” By the Spirit’s movement in our lives we come to dance with the God who groans with all who suffer and a God whose glorious and powerful love surpasses our ability to understand it.
About a year after my bumbling and ill-fated attempt at learning how to ballroom dance – I found myself back out on the dance floor.
Except this time I was myself with a couple hundred other people in an old barn with a dirt floor, its doors opened up wide to let in the wind blowing over the Kansas plains. I was at the Prairie Festival, a gathering known for being “an intellectual hootenanny” hosted by the Land Institute, an organization working to transform agriculture through developing perennial grain crops.
The first night of this gathering about land and food and culture the tradition is that there’s always a dance party. And so a motley assembly of musicians with stringed bluegrass instruments and drums and some singers played songs while a leader called out the moves to line dances, beginning with easy steps for us all to participate.
We passed and spun from partner to partner regardless of ability. New people gathered and joined in when the song changed or the circle changed direction. I found myself spinning and laughing and not at all thinking or worried about getting the rhythm or my moves right. An hour or two flew by in delight!
Paul reminds us that, as children of God, we have not received a Spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but we received a spirit of adoption. When I danced in that barn that evening at the Prairie Festival I was adopted into an impromptu family that swept me up in its joy and liveliness.
Yet when I took ballroom dancing lessons – I danced with fear: fear that I was doing the wrong move, fear of counting in four beats during a waltz, fear of stepping on Alli’s foot or bumping her into the old couple wearing Wranglers and belt buckles and cowboy boots. I danced enslaved to an expectation that I had to get the dance right, that there even was a right way to dance at all – and therefore I couldn’t mess up. And as the one dancing the male role in the partnership – there was pressure on me to be the leader, to set the cadence with confidence.
But Paul says that as children of God, as siblings in Christ, we have not received a Spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but we received a spirit of adoption. The Roman world would have conceived of adoption and being an heir as assuming the power and property and privilege of the family you were joining.
But when we cry out, “Abba, Father! Holy Holy Holy! Creating Mother! The Earth is filled with your Glory” we aren’t claiming our piece of the pie for a patriarchal estate being passed on. We’re crying out because somehow, mysteriously, the Spirit of God has moved within us to proclaim and acknowledge our gratitude and awe at who God is.
I hope that you have your own language and metaphors and songs and moves to dance with the mysterious one we call the Triune God. Maybe to speak of God as sun and light and heat or God as one wearing a robe, a robe whose fringe overwhelms our lives, or maybe speaking of God as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost aren’t words that welcome you into that mystery.
But I pray that whatever words we use to get at the awesomeness of the God who has made us and the world, a God who knows what it is to be human and eat and bleed and die and dream, a God who moves to a freedom beat that breaks prison walls and sets those in slavery free and sets tongues to praising and feet to dancing. I hope you learn how to dance with this God.
I pray that we as a church get out on the dance floor with this God, that we find ourselves drawn into the very life of this God, a God whose creative dance of love has no end.
In the name of the Mothering Creator, of Jesus the Christ, and of the Brooding Love…
In the name of the Creator, of the Redeemer, and of the Sustainer…
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.