Dancing With God

Dancing with God

Romans 8:9-11[1]

Last week I mentioned that there is a reason for the things I say and do every week in worship. And it’s not just about taking the easy way out. As I mentioned last week, I frame every sermon with a reference to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I do that because, believe it or not, I think that our faith in the one God who is revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is essential to our understanding of God, of salvation, and of our place in God’s work to redeem the whole creation.[2] We understand that God truly entered this world to become “God-who-is-with-us” based on our belief that Jesus God the Son. It is that same belief that enables us to understand, based on Jesus’ life and death, that God is also “God-who-is-for-us.” And God the Spirit makes all the amazing things God has done for us real in our hearts and lives to this day.

So, yes, it is my heartfelt conviction that a Christian view of God is only possible through the lens of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the one triune God working together to gather us all into the love that defines God’s very being.[3] Without the creation of all things in love, we would not have the assurance we do that God loves us all. Without the sending of Jesus the Son of God to show us God’s love, we could not be sure that God loves us all. Without the constant presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, our faith in God’s love would be based solely on stories of events that happened a very long time ago. It’s only the love of God as revealed in creation, as demonstrated by Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to new life, and continually poured into our hearts through the Spirit that gives us confidence to trust that God’s love for us never fails!

This isn’t just some abstract conclusion based on ivory-tower speculations of theologians. It is written into virtually every page of the New Testament. The word “Trinity” may not occur in the Bible, but the idea is written into virtually every page of the New Testament. We see it especially in our lesson from the book of Romans for today. There’s one verse in particular that has always fascinated me. It’s Romans 8:11: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” St. Paul is talking about the new life that we all have through our faith in Jesus Christ. But he makes it clear that this new life in us is the result of what God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit does in our lives.

Notice that it starts out with a reference to “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead.” Well, the one who raised Jesus from the dead is always God in the NT. So Paul starts this beautiful declaration by talking about what God does in order for us to experience new life. He’s the one who sent Jesus to demonstrate his love for all people by his life and death. God is also the one who raised Jesus from the dead to make it clear that our new life was not just intended for this world alone. And God brings us to new life by giving us his own Spirit within us. All of this originates in God’s very being, which is defined in the Bible as “love.” God’s love is a love that reaches out to claim us all, and God never stops reaching out to us all to claim us in his love.

St. Paul also refers to the role of Jesus Christ, the Son of God in our experience of new life. Jesus the Son of God is the one who came forth, bearing God’s love into the world in human form. Everything he did and said was to demonstrate God’s love for us all. Particularly the fact that he refused to exclude those whom the religious people of that day would normally exclude from God’s love. Of course, his death was a decisive demonstration of God’s love for us. Indeed, it has been said that in Jesus’ death on the cross God was present, drawing the whole world into his love.[4] And the final demonstration of God’s love reaching out to us to bring us new life took place when Jesus rose from the dead. Every aspect of Jesus’ life happened the way it did to demonstrate God’s love for us all.

St. Paul’s description of the new life we enjoy through our faith would not be complete without the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s because the Holy Spirit “dwells” in us that we have this new life. In the NT, the fact that the Spirit “lives” in us, or “dwells” in us is not a reference to some kind of “come-and-go” presence. Although we don’t always “feel the Spirit moving” in our hearts, make no mistake: the Spirit is always there! That’s one reason why I like Gene Peterson’s translation of this verse in The Message: “It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s”!

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is hard to wrap your head around. Some of the most brilliant theologians throughout history have tried. Having read some of them, I’d have to say that I’m not sure their efforts always shed light. Many times they only make it harder to understand! I think what might make the most sense of “trinity” is the idea that the varied ways in which God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit works in our lives are all expressions of God’s love that seeks to draw us to himself. We know God’s love through creation, we know God’s love in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and we know God’s love through the presence of the Spirit within us.

There have been a lot of analogies that have been used to illustrate the idea of “trinity” throughout history. There is one analogy that makes sense to me. It is the analogy of dancing. We sing about it in our hymn “I Danced in the Morning.” The analogy is an ancient one. The idea is that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are joined in an eternal dance by the love they share for each other.[5] But love always seeks out others, and so the purpose of this eternal dance of God’s has always been to draw all of us to join that dance. The God who has loved us from all eternity not only became one of us, but also continually takes us by the hand, leading us gently but persistently into this ongoing dance. I’m not much for dancing myself. Unless it’s a wedding for one of my children, my grandchildren are there, and I’m feeling particularly silly, I’m probably not going to join in the dance. Someone would have to take me by the hand and pull me out there. Being that kind person, I’m grateful that God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, keeps reaching out to all of us, drawing us into God’s love, continually teaching us all what it means to join in the dance of love.

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[1] © 2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 5/26/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 53: “the church can only understand its own position or abode in participation in the movement of the history of God’s dealings with the world, and therefore as one element in this movement. Its attempts to understand itself are attempts at understanding the movement of the trinitarian history of God’s dealings with the world; and its attempts to understand this movement are attempts at understanding itself.”

[3] Cf. Moltmann, Church in the Power, 56: “A Christian doctrine of the Trinity which is bound to the history of Christ and the history of the Spirit must conceive the Trinity as the Trinity of the sending and seeking love of God which is open from its very origin. The triune God is the God who is open to man [sic], open to the world and open to time.”

[4] cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 208. He quotes Cyril of Jerusalem as saying “On the cross, God stretched out his hands to embrace the ends of the earth.” In fact, Cyril was speaking of Jesus (“He stretched out His hands on the Cross, that He might embrace the ends of the world”), and it would seem that Moltmann is giving his statement a trinitarian interpretation. Cf. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, 13.28 (NPNF 2.7, 89).

[5] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 174-75. He quotes John of Damascus, a 7^th century Greek Father, who said that the unity between the Father, Son, and Spirit is the relationship of love that they share with each other. His term for it was perichorēsis, a Greek term that literally means “rotation,” to describe the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Moltmann (ibid.) interprets it this way, “The Father exists in the Son, the Son in the Father, and both of them in the Spirit, just as the Spirit exists in both the Father and the Son. By virtue of their eternal love they live in one another to such an extent, and dwell in one another to such an extent, that they are one.”