Matthew 28:16 - 20
I’ve always been interested in other religions. I think that’s because my grandmother was. She had many friends who were of different faiths -- one was a Jehovah’s Witness and would constantly bombard her with tracts about that religion and why other religions were wrong, especially Catholicism. In retrospect I admire the fact that she could maintain a friendship with someone like that and yet never seem to be shaken in her own faith. But I digress. In medical school I had a friend who was kind of a mainstream Jew, but like me, was interested in what other people believed. He talked me into attending a Quaker meeting one time, which basically consisted of people sitting in silence waiting for the Holy Spirit to speak through them. The few times the Spirit did so, he didn’t seem to have anything earth-shaking to say. But one time my friend invited me to a lecture by an Hassidic rabbi who was quite famous in Jewish circles. Now Hasidism is really different from mainstream Judaism. Hasidim seek to be united with God in a mystical way. So I was curious and went to the lecture.
The old rabbi came out and told a few stories from the Talmud. I don’t remember them, but they were humorous and we laughed. And then he began singing, a simple repetitive song, and invited us to join in. As we gathered steam and became more familiar with the melody and rhythm, he came down off the stage and started dancing, and got other people to dance behind him, like a conga line. Soon the audience of about 100 Stanford students were all dancing and chanting and I could sense a little bit of the ecstasy that some people must experience in this kind of activity. It was energizing; it seemed like all barriers between us dancers had come down as we all shed our inhibitions and entered into that simple unifying dance.
Today we celebrate a doctrine, the doctrine that there is only one God, and God is three persons equal in every respect except relationship. And most of us don’t pay much attention to this doctrine. Back in the eleventh century some bishops proposed that a universal feast be declared to honor the Holy Trinity. The pope at that time, it is said, responded that we honor the Holy Trinity every Sunday, but if we had a special feast heresy would be spread from every pulpit as preachers tried to explain the Trinity. Despite this warning, it became a universal feast in the thirteenth century, and sure enough, anytime we try to explain the Trinity, we come dangerously close to heresy. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, said that all Christians had to believe in the Trinity, but trying to explain how three could be one, or one could be three was a waste of time.
But it is an important teaching about God. It tells us that God is in a sense a community of persons, united in love. A singular God like Allah has no reason to create, or for that matter, to save. Allah is perfect and complete in himself. But our God is never at rest, and being love itself, is always seeking to draw in other beings to love, even creating them for that purpose. The vision of the Eastern Church fathers was that the persons of the Trinity were in a sort of eternal dance, as they moved in and out of each other, and like the Hasidic dance I described and participated in, they do something similar, continually inviting all those they have created who are capable of love to enter into this dance. Saint Athanasuis even described this process as “Theosis” =-- becoming God.
Many years ago there was a fringe group of Catholics whose purpose was to pressure the Pope into declaring Mary as a fourth person in the Trinity. Of course that would mean we’d have to call it a Quaternity, which doesn’t really roll off the tongue, or maybe the Holy Foursome, which sounds like something from golf. Most people didn’t pay much attention to the group, but I think they had a point, maybe the same one Athanasius was trying to make. God wants us to be part of himself. God created us so that we would be complete when God lived in us. God wants you and I in the heart of the trinity, and the Father created us, the Son gives us the means to do this, and the Holy Spirit constantly pushes and prods us with his gifts. Mary, and indeed all the blessed ones in heaven, are already part of the Trinity.
In our gospel Jesus tells us to make disciples of all nations. Just as God is constantly inviting us to join the dance of the Trinity, we are to invite others, so that Love will flow through all of us for all eternity, so that in the end, there will be only love, as Saint Paul said.
On this Trinity Sunday, let us think about whom we might invite into the dance which someone else invited us?
