by CCW | 7 June 2020 08:00
In thanksgiving for the reopening of Christ Church for worship: Laus Deo[1]
God is communion. God is dance. Because “a door was opened in heaven”, our doors too are opened and we enter into the dance of the Trinity. “This is none other but the house of God; this is the Gate of Heaven.” It is written on the very walls of our church.”Behold!” The whole point and being of the Church is about our being opened to God and to our lives in and with God. And God is communion, the communion of the Trinity, and God is dance, the dance of reason and love, the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology so wonderfully expressed in the Athanasian Creed[2]; in short, the ways in which God is utterly other and beyond yet intimately connected to all reality. To think God is to know and love God in the mystery of God’s own being and life. The Creed we just proclaimed provides nothing more or less than a way of thinking about how God is at once more and beyond and yet present and with us. Here is the love that thinks and loves all things in its own loving and thinking. It is about the dance, the dance that connects Christianity to the insights and concerns of the world’s religions and philosophies about a divine principle whose self-relation is the ground of its relation to all else.
We have all gotten used to the strange and awkward dance of social distancing in these unusual times. But the greater dance is the dance of the Lord. “I am the Lord of the Dance” is the most favourite hymn of students at the Chapel at King’s-Edgehill, but even more radically, God is the dance. The technical theological term is perichoresis, the mutual indwelling or dance of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The doors are opened that we might celebrate the great wonder of God in himself without which God’s relation to us is mere idolatry and foolishness. How wonderful that our doors should finally be opened during the continuing concerns of the Covid-19 outbreak to celebrate God in himself. “Let us thus think of the Trinity!”
Think God. Nothing could be more counter-culture than this. We have missed out on the actual corporate celebrations of most of Lent, of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, of Easter and Eastertide, of Rogation and Ascension, of Ascensiontide and Pentecost, to be sure. But in the providence of God, we have been able to break our eucharistic fast, and never more wonderfully than on Trinity Sunday, the great feast of God in the majesty of himself, the feast which is the great gathering of all things into their source and ending, God as Trinity: God in the mutual indwelling life of Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Perichoresis signifies God in Himself, God in his own super-essential and utterly self-complete and self-sustaining life which is life essential for us and in every way.
Perichoresis is, we might say, the dance of the perpetual and eternal love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, their constant giving of themselves each and for one another; a dance, to be sure. The term, perichoresis, has to do with running or circling around. The term is associated, at least in terms of similar sound qualities (homophones), to the chorus in ancient Greek drama. The chorus was originally a dance group. It came to play a great role in the world of the ancient Greeks where drama, in the form of tragedy and later, comedy, and often with satyr plays, belonged to special dramatic events and contests which were not about entertainment, such as in our Netflix age of avoiding thought, but its exact opposite. The great dramatic festivals, like the Great Dionysia in Athens, were as much educational as entertaining. It was about learning your place in the dance of life, your place in the cosmos.
Thus, the Chorus, for instance in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex, is divided into two dance troupes, we might say, the strophe and the antistrophe, the one moving in one direction, the other in the opposite. Such a device illustrates the concept of dialectic, of a reasoning through opposed opinions and viewpoints that results in a more complete understanding. In a way, that tradition opens us out to the mystery of God as the mystery of life, and counters and corrects our narrow focus on just one way of looking at things. God cannot be reduced to us; the whole point is about how we are raised up into God. Such is the point of the Gospel reading from John. Clearly, Nicodemus, a leader and a thinker among the Jewish community of Jerusalem, wants to know, wants to understand, the paradoxical sayings of Jesus about being born anew. The simple point is that it cannot be taken literally, physically, materially, empirically. No. The whole point is about being born upward, being raised into the things of God; not God being collapsed into the concerns of our world and day without any regard for God as God. At a time when our world is fragmented and broken, fracturing and breaking apart more and more, we need this feast of gathering, the gathering of all things to God in himself, in his own self-gathering, the dance of the Trinity. That alone may speak to our distresses and divisions. We are gathered to God in God’s own gathering.
We confront in the current Covid-19 crisis exactly the age-old problem of collapsing God into our world and forgetting that in truth our life is only in God and God in us. Trinity Sunday is the great and profound celebration of God in himself, God in the dance of eternal life, God as communion, the communion of the Trinity. It is ultimately only in that understanding that we can have communion. It is not with one another. It is with God and only through God with one another. Such is the dance.
“A door was opened in heaven,” John the Divine tells us in his Revelation. We can only go through that door and into the divine life and vision, if we learn, like Nicodemus, the limitations of human reason and discover its truth not simply in the empirical and the practical that so often leads to putting God to the test, reducing God to us and our thinking, as it were, but in something much more transcendent and yet all encompassing. It is about the dance of mystical theology, letting God as dance dance in us to his praise and glory. His life in the mercies of Christ is our life. God cannot be for us, for our good and salvation without God being himself. God is communion; God is dance. That is our joy and life! And perhaps, never more so wonderfully than on this day when we have been able to dance with God, the God who is the dance.
Fr David Curry
Trinity Sunday, June 2020
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/06/07/sermon-for-trinity-sunday-11/
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