The Dancing Trinity!

Sermon ~ St Mary’s Kemp Town – Trinity Sunday 2013

Proverbs 8.1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8
Romans 5.1-15
John 16.12-15

If you ever find yourself talking to a member of the Watchtower and Bible Tract Society, better known as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the conversation may turn to the Trinity.

They may challenge you to find were the Trinity is explicitly spoken of in the Scriptures.

Don’t try looking – you won’t find it.

The Trinity is better experienced rather than explained.

Although it is not explicitly mentioned in the Scriptures the Trinity is implicit in many places in both Old and New Testament Scriptures.

Beginning with the picture of creation in Genesis where we have God the creator, the Spirit of God hovering over the waters and the Word sent forth from God with creative power.

Now immediately your minds should have raced on towards the opening prologue of John’s Gospel.

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’

That’s exactly what John wants to remind us of, that the Word comes amongst us and as the Message Bible puts it, ‘has moved into the neighbourhood.’

The Proverbs reading for this morning also speaks of the Spirit of Wisdom that some scholars identify with the Holy Spirit.

This idea is picked up in 1 Corinthians 2 verses 10 ff.

‘The Spirit searches for the deep things of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.  This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught us by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.’

In December we celebrated the Word coming amongst us. We then journeyed with Jesus through his Triumphal Entry, his Passion, death and resurrection. Then a few weeks ago we celebrated Jesus Ascension and last week the coming of the Holy Spirit as prophesied by Joel and spoken by Jesus.

Notice if you will the forward motion of all of these events, for God is a sending God and we are a sent people.

A dictionary definition of mission is sending, i.e. to be sent out to accomplish some purpose or task.

We, as the people of God, are the sent ones, sent out by God.

Here we must note that the initiative always lies with God, ‘who so loved the world that he sent his only Son, not to condemn the world, but to save the world.’

It has been said that the ‘Church of God doesn’t have a mission but the God of mission has a Church.’

Today at this celebration of the Eucharist the most important words that will be said come right at the every end – ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord.’

The dismissal from which in the Latin rite we get the word Mass. ‘ite, missa est’

After his resurrection John recalls Jesus commissioning the disciples in these words…

‘I am sending you, just as the Father sent me. Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Note another implied reference to the Trinity, the Father who sends the Son who then sends the Holy Spirit upon his disciples.

The same ‘Holy Spirit’ who will come, as we heard from our Gospel reading this morning, to guide us into all truth so that the Son might be glorified.

So what is our mission, what is the task for which God called us and commissioned us?

We return to the Genesis story and God’s good creation.

In that story you might recall that Adam hid in his naked shame before God.

In 1 John3.28 we read ‘Children, stay united in your hearts with Christ. Then when he returns, we will have confidence and won’t have to hide in shame.’

The disobedience of the first Adam and its subsequent outcome is made right by the obedience of the second Adam.

O loving wisdom of our God,
When all was sin and shame,
He, the last Adam, to the fight
And to the rescue came.

That is our calling and our commission; to proclaim in word and in deed that Kingdom of God has come. That a way has been provided for all creation to be reconciled to God through Christ’s sacrificial obedience, vindicated by God’s raising Jesus to life.

This is at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer. Something we may know ‘off by heart’ but do we know it ‘in our hearts?’

Your Kingdom come, your will be done, here in Kemp Town as in heaven.

May your name be held in honour – and to stop saying OMG I think would come into this category!

You know the rest; however the key is that whilst we may know the rest of the Lord’s Prayer; do we live it out in expectancy?

The Father, the creator God sends the Logos, the Word, who sends the Holy Spirit who sends us out as Ambassadors for Christ to bring about the redemption of the cosmos.

To set right the time; ‘when earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost.’  

(Milton – Paradise Lost)

To the end that we may see a realized Lord’s Prayer in our own lives, in our homes, our communities, our nation and our world.

The early church leaders described the Trinity using the term perichoresis. (Peri = around & Choresis = dance, as in choreography) The Trinity is an eternal dance of the Father, Son and Spirit sharing mutual love, honour, happiness, joy and respect. God’s act of creation means that God is inviting more and more beings into the eternal dance of Joy. Sin means that people are stepping out of the dance, stepping on people’s toes instead of moving with grace, rhythm and reverence. Then in Jesus, God enters creation to restore the rhythm and beauty again.

You and I are invited to a dance with the Holy Trinity as together in creative harmony we dance into our communities the love and light and joy and peace that redeems God’s good creation. This morning allow the Holy Spirit to lighten your soul and set your feet dancing to the delight of our heavenly Father as you come to receive Christ in the sacraments in preparation to go dancing in the streets.