Trinity Sunday

“Then God said, ‘Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us’… [And so] God created humanity in God’s own image.”

Before cars and trains and planes, most human beings never traveled more than five miles from where they were born. Today, most of us travel at least five miles every single day of our lives. More than anything, what separates us from all the people who have come before us is movement. People used to stay in the same place all their lives. And so did their children, and their children, and their children, and so on and so on, generation after generation after generation.

That kind of life is certainly stable. It can also be static, frozen and unable to change. I heard this week that the difference between a European and an American is that if a European tells you this great idea they've just thought of, and if you ask what they're going to do about it, the European will answer, "Do?" We Americans may move more and do more but as Alexis DeTocqueville warned, all our movement away from people and communities threatens to “make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

What does all this have to do with the Trinity? We hear today that God created us in his image. Incredible as it sounds, we actually resemble God. So it's right for us to look at our lives and see a reflection of the life of the one God who is also three distinct persons. Previous generations of Christians saw a trinity that was stable, seated on a throne somewhere high in the sky which they took to be the heavens. From this throne they looked out over a world that seemed as stable as the heavenly throne. But today, we who are always on the move find that the one God is always moving with us. And the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit move with each other, like dancers who move so well together, with such perfect choreography, that their individual movements just flow into each other, so that in their one dance they are one perfect dancer.

The Old Testament is pretty much about the confrontation between this one small nation clinging to its faith in one God and the rest of the world which assumed that the diversity of creation meant that there had to be a diversity of gods. So no one quite knows what to make of God saying, "Let us make humanity in our image." Certainly the faithful Israelites who were inspired to write Genesis didn't intend to give us a justification for the Trinity. But perhaps there was a truth hidden in this verse, which could only be revealed over a long period of time, like a flower that becomes more beautiful hour by hour, day by day, as its blooming petals slowly but surtely unfold. It took centuries for people to come to by know God, not just as the Father of all creation, but as the Son who became a part of creation and died for it.

It took the revelation of Jesus the Christ for people to understand that the same God who created human beings in the divine image loved us so much that in the person of the Son, he was willing to die for human beings. In the revelation of a God who made us, and also died for us, was the clue that when God said, "Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us," it meant that the God who is love is one, but is never alone. This one God is also three loving persons who are completely open to each other; nothing hidden or held back from each other, acting in such complete agreement that they act as one being.

Christians have struggled over the centuries to express this truth. That particular terminology -- three persons, one substance, or being -- has been accepted by the church since the mid-400s. When he was evangelizing the Irish, St. Patrick used the three leaf clover to represent how the three leaves flowed from one source. The problem with that metaphor is that the one God is not the source from which the three persons proceed. The one trinitarian God is no less a person than the three persons that make up the Trinity.

And like the stable, static age from which these metaphors came, this Trinitarian God is removed from our experience. What difference does it make in this world that our God is three in one? In an age of movement, where human beings are constantly on the move, it has become clearer that the God who made us to resemble him moves with us. Theologians have begun to see this Trinitarian God as one dancer, who consists of three dancers who move so well together, whose moves are so flawlessly coordinated that free of missteps they are one dancer.

And as Father, Son and Spirit dance with each other, so they dance with us. Of course we flawed and sinful human beings misstep all the time. Sometimes we don’t want to dance with God, or with each other. Sometimes in our lives, life seems to be as Paul McCartney described it: “It’s a Tug of War. Though I know I musn’t grumble, it’s a Tug of War. But I can’t let go. If I do you’ll take a tumble, and the whole thing is going to crumble. It’s a Tug of War.” We’ve all known those times. I have tugged with God. And this three-personed God, who is love, has tugged with me.

Even when we're trying to dance together, we step on God's toes and each others' all the time. And sometimes, we decide that we would rather just go off and dance on our own. Sometimes, we dance for awhile in the same place, with God and with each other, and our practice makes us better, if not perfect. But comes a time when the God we dance with calls us to go and learn a new dance. It doesn't mean that the old dance, at which we've become so proficient, is to be discarded as old-fashioned. It just means that the one God wants us to learn a new way of dancing with them, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Wherever we move, the Trinity dances around us, and invites us into their dance. When someone moves away from their familiar dancing partners, those old partners must let them go to whatever new dance God is calling them to join. Sometimes, a partner insists on staying in the old dance and teaching some new steps. That learning of new steps will lead to some toes getting stepped on. But patiently dancing with us, wherever we move, is that one three-personed God who never missteps, and will always keep pace with us as we learn to dance as they dance.