Joining in the Dance
Reflections for Trinity Sunday
RCL Trinity A
7 June 2020
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
When my sister and I were growing up, we had few opportunities to spend time with our grandparents. Our maternal grandparents lived in England and didn’t own a telephone. Travel across the Atlantic was too expensive for them or for us. So we had to do with letters and two lengthy and precious visits. Our paternal grandparents lived in New York and we would drive to visit them every other summer. Even as a child I knew that these visits were filled with tension, so they usually lasted only a week or so.
In 1965, two years after we returned from a three-year tour of duty in Germany, my family joined Saint Michael the Archangel Episcopal Church in Colorado Springs. We settled in and quickly found friends and a supportive community. Among the members of the parish were Jon and Elma Nottingham, a retired couple who became our foster grandparents. No birthday was forgotten, no major event left uncelebrated, no achievement left unnoticed.
Shortly after I was ordained in 1981, my parents and I were invited to lunch at Grandma Elma and Grandpa Jon’s house. At one point Grandma Elma asked, “Father Richard, do you want anything more?” I said to her, “Grandma Elma, you’ve known me since I was twelve-years-old, you don’t have to call me ‘Father Richard’.” “I know,” she said, “but do you want anything more, Father Richard.” Never try telling your grandmother, foster or otherwise, how to address you.
Grandma Elma was reminding me that our relationship had changed. It had become more complicated because she and I were now relating in two dimensions, one personal, the other spiritual. She was my foster grandmother and a lay member of the congregation. I was her foster grandson and a priest. Over the next few years she and I would navigate this new mystery where my public role and our personal relationship could not be easily put into separate compartments.
When I go home today, I will enter the house and re-engage the web of relationships that define my life. To my mother I will be her son. To my wife I will be her husband and, because she is a priest of the Diocese, I am also an archdeacon. To my younger son I will be his father. Somehow I have to integrate all these relationships in a life-giving and life-enriching way, sometimes successfully, often not so successfully. I’m sure that I’m not alone in this tricky endeavour.
When Christians speak about how we understand God, we are trying in limited human language to speak about the mystery of relationships. Each one of us knows that our lives are webs of relationships and that we play different roles in each one of them. Relationships are what make us persons. Human beings are not individual blocks of marble; we are more like diamonds with many facets, each one catching the light and casting a reflection unique to that facet.
And it is the relationship between the God whose love caused creation to come into being, the Christ who is God’s love embodied in time and space, and the Spirit who is the love that unites us into the communion of God’s life that we celebrate today. What Christians have been saying for two thousand years is that when we meet Jesus of Nazareth, however we meet him, you are meeting God. How will we know this? The Spirit will lead us to this truth. We are then brought into the complicated but invigorating dance we call the mystery of God.
At the end of his second letter to the Christian community in Corinth Paul blesses them with words we’ve come to know well: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” [1] In this one sentence I believe Paul gives us a way of discerning whether our relationships participate in the dance of the divine life God invites us to join.
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ”: Charis, the Greek word translated here as ‘grace’, is better understood to mean ‘a windfall, an undeserved gift freely offered’. when a relationship is freely offered to us, an invitation from one person to another to know and be known, with no other motive than mutual joy and growth, we are dancing with God.
“The love of God”: In Greek there are at least four distinct words to describe different kinds of love. Here the word is agapé. This kind of love is the offering of oneself for the good of another. Agapé expects nothing in return. Agapé seeks only the welfare of the one who is being loved. When we are in a relationship where another person embraces us with a love that helps us become more full the person God intends us to become, a love that encourages us to be more human, created in God’s image and likeness, we are dancing with God.
“The communion of the Holy Spirit”: As Anglicans we become accustomed to hearing ‘fellowship’, but koinônia, ‘communion’, is a far better choice. Communion is a unity that welcomes the diversity of people, of gifts, of experiences that can be found among human beings. Communion rejoices in the infinite variety God has caused to come into being. When we are in a relationship where are distinctiveness as a child of God is welcomed, respected and nurtured, we are dancing with God.
Today we celebrate the mystery of God and of ourselves as creatures made in the image and likeness of God. It is a mystery not to be solved but to explore with ever-deepening wonder at what God has wrought. It is the mystery of a God who seeks to be known in and through the kosmos, in and through human relationships, in and through the wonder of each human being.
So come and join the dance. Let us hold each other in our hearts even as we look forward to the day when we can actually join hands again. Let us dance wherever we may be, for the Lord of the dance is beckoning us to join the circle with the Lover, the Beloved and the Love, one God, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.
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