Invitation to the Dance
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Trinity Sunday – May 22, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Genesis 1:1-2:4a / Psalm 8 / Matthew 28:16-20]

Patrick Dennis’ “Auntie Mame” said that, “Life is a banquet!” I think so, too. But I also agree with those who see life as a dance, and that’s no small thing for someone who has real trouble keeping the steps and the rhythm at the same time! The image of the dance is a powerful one and when one considers the world in which we live, we can liken so much of it to a dance. Even the jockeying of politicians in Washington or the negotiations of diplomats reflects the give-and-take, the movement that is intrinsic to dance. When someone is being evasive we say, “Ah, he’s dancing around the point!” And so it is; sometimes the movements are stately and formal, like the waltz. Other times the steps are exuberant, though ordered, like a polka or a schottische. Still other times, the steps just happen, like most of the dancing you’ll see at ‘Summer Fest,’ or at least so it appears.

As I thought about the Scriptures today and the great Christian teaching that we celebrate on this Sunday, the dance came to mind. Sometimes the liturgy is called the “dance of God,” especially in the Christian East. And I think there’s something to seeing creation and our experience of it as expressions like that of the dance. As I researched the sermon this week three different works, one each of music, art, and poetry came across my desk and helped to confirm my thinking. Let me share them with you and then I’ll show you why I think that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is an invitation to the dance of life and faith.

Carl Maria von Weber wrote a beautiful piece for piano, later orchestrated by Hector Berlioz, entitled ‘Invitation to the Dance.’ He offers a musical dialogue designed to evoke a gentleman inviting a lady to waltz. Then the dance unfolds and we hear the music, and their delight, swell. Finally, it draws to a close and there’s a little coda, just a little something there, and we can almost see the gentleman bow to the lady and offer thanks for a lovely exchange.

Now to the painting; the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, who is primarily known to us for his painting called ‘The Scream,’ painted a series of works which he called ‘The Frieze of Life.’ Munch wrote: "Through them all there winds the curving shore line, and beyond it the sea, while under the trees, life, with all its complexities of grief and joy, carries on" [this and following are quoted in Roman Jaster, “The Dance of Life”]. Art critic Roman Jaster has said of the painting, “The three major themes of the Frieze of Life, love, anxiety and death are clearly expressed in The Dance of Life. Thus, this painting can be seen as one of the centerpieces in the series.” The painting shows a man and three women on a summer’s night. The women, who some interpret to be the same person, are shown from youth, to middle age, to old age indicating the cycle of life from birth to death. Munch’s thought was, "life and death, day and night go hand in hand" and are thus expressed in the painting for, ultimately, death is the birth of life. The dance of life is, in the artist’s mind, that ongoing and never-ending cycle that draws us in and pulls us together, as the woman and man are pulled together in the intimacy of the dance in the prime of life.

Now we’ll consider the poem, which is by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, entitled ‘Reciprocal Invitation to the Dance.’  It is a dialogue between ‘the indifferent’ and ‘the tender,’ let’s see how it turns out, shall we?

THE INDIFFERENT. 

COME to the dance with me, come with me, fair one! 

Dances a feast-day like this may well crown.
If thou my sweetheart art not, thou canst be so, 

But if thou wilt not, we still will dance on.
Come to the dance with me, come with me, fair one! 

Dances a feast-day like this may well crown. 

THE TENDER.

Loved one, without thee, what then would all feast be? 

Sweet one, without thee, what then were the dance?
If thou my sweetheart wert not, I would dance not. 

If thou art still so, all life is one feast.
Loved one, without thee, what then would all feasts be? 

Sweet one, without thee, what then were the dance? 

THE INDIFFERENT.

Let them but love, then, and leave us the dancing! 

Languishing love cannot bear the glad dance.
Let us whirl round in the waltz's gay measure,

And let them steal to the dim-lighted wood.
Let them but love, then, and leave us the dancing! 

Languishing love cannot bear the glad dance. 

THE TENDER.

Let them whirl round, then, and leave us to wander! 

Wand'ring to love is a heavenly dance.
Cupid, the near one, o'erhears their deriding,

Vengeance takes suddenly, vengeance takes soon.
Let them whirl round, then, and leave us to wander! 

Wand'ring to love is a heavenly dance.

It appears that tenderness can overcome indifference in the movement of the dance!

Now, what do we see in these three works of art? In each one dance is portrayed as an interaction – there is “give-and-take” which allows the dance to begin and to proceed. We see dance as a relationship. And, we see dance as movement. In each case this speaks to the Christian understanding of God as ‘Trinity,’ Because there is the drawing into relationship and the act of exchange not only in the Divine Persons, but in their relationship to us, as well.

From the patristic period forward – the time of the great teachers or ‘fathers’ of the early church -- perichoresis has been used to describe the interrelations of the Persons of the Trinity. The noun comes from a Greek verb (perichorein) that means "to contain" or "to penetrate," and describes the three Persons of the Trinity as mutually "indwelling," "permeating," or "interpenetrating" one another. Each person both wholly envelops and is wholly enveloped by the others. A similar Greek word, perichoreuein, which means "to dance around," has been used as a metaphor for the relation of the Persons. In the Western Church, using Latin, the term was translated as circumincessio ("moving around") or circuminsessio ("sitting around"). Notice, though how both words describe relationship that is dynamic, not static; that moves and grows, rather than stands still.

The term perichoresis has also been used historically to describe God's relationship to the world, as a way of expressing God’s immanence (meaning to remain or operate within a domain of discourse, to be close) and transcendence (meaning beyond, or exceeding our ability to understand or to comprehend). It is important to understand, on the one hand, that God is contained by nothing, and is instead the One in whom we live and move and have our being — i.e., everything is contained by Him. Yet at the same time God is within all things, "omnipresent." This leads to the Christian notion of panentheism, that God is in everything and that everything is in God. As one of the early teachers of the church, Hilary of Poitiers put it, the Father is both "without" and "within" all things. This mutual indwelling and containment is a created extension of the mutual indwelling and containment of the Triune Persons. And this is part of the dance, the tension within One who is at once immanent and transcendent. Augustine pointed out in his book On the Trinity that we reflect the same tension within ourselves because we are at once spiritual and physical beings. Thus, we have yet another sign that we are made in the “image and likeness of God,” “little less than God.”

From the beginning God has been inviting creation, and humanity in particular, to the dance of relationship. As we heard from the creation account from Genesis chapter one God utters ten words and order emerged from chaos. In the same way God would later utter ten words to the Exodus community that would bring order and civility out of the chaos of human relationships. I referenced Augustine a moment ago because when he tried to understand the Trinity he ended up looking at humanity. I think he was on to something because there are ways that we can still see the evidence of perichoresis in the created world and in ourselves in particular.

First, there is the realm of personal identity. We can well ask, “How can I be a distinct person, and at the same time be the product of all these influences from people who are other than me?” Don’t people say this about children, "I see his father in him"?  I know in my own case that this goes beyond physical resemblance, because the older I get the more I see and hear my father! Another way of seeing this personal identity point is when we speak of someone who is a son, a husband, and a father or a daughter, a wife, and a mother. What we’re talking about here is an economy of relationship. As contemporary theologian Peter Leithart has said, “We ‘indwell’ one another in a way that palely reflects the reality of the full indwelling of the divine persons within each other. The Father and the Son are ‘mutually constitutive’: there is no Father except that He has a Son, and no Son except that He has a Father. So also, our identities are constituted by relations with others, by their ‘dwelling in’ us and we ‘dwelling in’ them.”

We can see reflected in Leithart both the “psychological analogies” of Augustine (the human qualities of mind, knowledge and love relating to the Divine persons) and that of later medieval theologians, like Richard of Saint Victor and Bonaventure who emphasized that the Divine Trinity is reflected in humans and their ability to relate and live in community. All analogies limp, especially when we’re trying to get our mind around God who is “uncreated” and according to Anselm, “greater than that which can be thought.” Yet, it’s important for us to talk and explore. I find it fascinating and encouraging that there are a whole raft of new studies being done on the doctrine of the Trinity, not only because it is a great excuse to visit the bookstore, but because it shows that we’re continuing to enter into the dance of life, of faith, and of understanding.

Another way we can see God’s “imprint” (the Latin term used by Augustine is vestigium) on us and our world is the use of metaphor. When we look at it, creation contains objects that are really distinct and separate from one another. Day is not night, waters above are not waters below, water is not land, birds are not fish, I think you get the point. That said, the Scripture still indicates that one thing can stand for, represent, or symbolize other things. Things in creation indwell other things. The Psalmist can say that a "righteous man is like a tree" not because we invent similarity between two essentially unlike things. Rather, there is a real mutual relation between them. So, the Son is the express image of the Father, and yet is not the Father. This perichoretic "is/is not" (man is/is not tree) structure is inherent in God, and is the very nature of metaphor.  And, ultimately, it is through metaphor that we can even try to talk about the Maker of All, the Source of All That Is, and the Ground of Being.

What’s the point? The point is that we talk about how God relates to us, how God has acted toward us and we have perceived that action. We can really only talk about the Trinity as the Divine economy, the manner in which God works and orders God’s affairs. God is inviting us into the dance of life, the dance of relationship and drawing us into the community that Creates, Redeems, and Sustains us and the world in which we live. I like what Brian McLaren writes in his book A Generous Orthodoxy, where he talks about the development of Trinitarian thought.

. . .the experience of God in Jesus was so powerful it forever transformed what followers of Jesus meant when they said the word God. What was God like? What was God about? When they thought about what they had learned, seen, and experienced in Jesus, their understanding was revolutionized. Eventually, after a few centuries of reflecting on God as revealed and experienced through Jesus (in the context of some major controversies with varied forms of Greek philosophy) the church began to describe God as Father-Son-Spirit in Tri-unity or the Trinity. For them, God could no longer be conceived as “God A,” a single, solitary, dominant Power, Mind, or Will, but as “God B,” a unified, eternal, mysterious, relational, community/family/society/entity of saving Love.

Think of the kind of universe you would expect if God A created it: a universe of dominance, control, limitation, submission, uniformity, coercion. Think of the kind of universe you would expect if God B created it: a universe of interdependence, relationship, possibility, responsibility, becoming, novelty, mutuality, freedom. I’m not sure which comes first – the kind of universe you see or the kind of God you believe in, but as a Christian who believes in Jesus as the Son of God, I find myself in universe B, getting to know God B. [p. 76]

I agree with McLaren.  The world in which I want to live, the world I want to help to create is the one where we find interdependence, relationship, possibility, responsibility, becoming, novelty, mutuality, freedom, and I would add intentionality. I believe that this is the kind of world God created. I believe that this is the kind of world God wanted to heal and restore by becoming one of us in Jesus the Christ. I believe that is the kind of world God wants to continue by sending the Holy Spirit among us to be our companion, our advocate, and our teacher.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not some out-dated construct born of musty and abstruse philosophy and theology. The Trinity is about the dance of life, the dance of relationship, and the experience that each of us can have with the living God. It is an invitation to the dance, an invitation to move beyond ourselves and our narrow view of our world and our day-to-day experience and see the possibility, the hope, and the difference than can be made when we start to dance with God.

Pray with me, please: “Holy God, who created all things through the Son, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit; Holy Mighty, through whom we knew the Father and the Holy Spirit dwelt in the world; Holy Immortal, the Spirit Comforter, who proceeds from the Father abides in the Son, Holy Trinity, glory to You!”  Amen. [Pentecost Hymn attributed to Emperor Leo VI (886-912) in John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, pg. 184.]