Sermons from St Faith's
Divine Choreography
Revd Sue Lucas, Sunday, June 15th, 2014
I have a confession to make – yes, another! I am addicted to
‘Strictly Come Dancing’. Maybe it’s the feathers and fake
tan…but come September, requirement to eat at the table is suspended
on Saturday tea time as the Lucases gather with a TV dinner to watch
Brucie, Tess and the gang. My favourite year was the one Pamela
Stephenson almost won – just to show that being a lady of a certain
age is no bar to the odd pirouette or fleckle or being cheek to
cheek with a handsome man half your age!
I mention this, because the Greek word that attempts to characterise
the mystery of God as Trinity is perichoresis – which as a sense of
‘around’, ‘space’ – and – albeit stretching a point a bit –
choreography. To understand God as Holy Trinity, then, is to
understand that God’s own very nature is loving relationship; loving
relationship between three persons, perfectly equal, perfectly
balanced, perfectly interconnecting and yet distinct; moving around
one another, yet giving and having space – and we get a sense of
this balance, equality, dynamism and mutuality when we watch
dancers; the Trinity, God’s very self, is not a static, fixed thing,
but an eternal dance of mutuality and loving relationship.
But in the Christian tradition, we are said to be ‘made in the image
of God.’ Now, of course, there is much dispute about what that
little phrase might mean; does it mean free will and moral
choice? Does it mean the language and speech – through which
God creates the world and we go on recreating it? If we take
seriously the core of Christian doctrine though – the Trinity – to
be made in the image of God is to be made for, and in loving
relationship; to be most ourselves when we are around one another,
yet giving one another the space to be. Here, then, is a truth about
our human nature; we are not made to be alone; and we are most
ourselves, at our best, in relation to one another – whether as
sister, brother, parent, child, friend, husband, wife, partner,
friend, student – our relationships, at their best, bring out the
best in us.
So you and I too are ‘three in one’; I am your parish priest,
and I am also a wife and mother, and a daughter – and in the past I
have been, to a couple of generations of students, a teacher. And
I’m sure you can think of examples like those for yourself.
And in those relationships, though we are the same person, we
express that person-hood slightly differently.
Of course, it isn’t always so in human relationships; our
solidarities with one another can be toxic as well as redemptive and
fulfilling. It’s expressed most pessimistically by the French
existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘hell is other people.’ That might
sound rather cool when wearing a black roll-neck and beret in a café
thick with Gauloise smoke; but there is a truth here, of course; we
humans can wound one another terribly, in our relationships to one
another; we see some of the worst of this in the news, yet all of us
are capable of meanness, of gossip, of biting one another instead of
building one another up. And in society we create social and
economic relations that, far from reflecting our equality and
mutuality divide us from one another and exclude. ‘We have
wounded your love, and marred your image in us,’ are the words in
one form of the confession. We have – but that Trinitarian
image of loving relationship is in us nevertheless; and with God,
there are no last chances; because it is the image in which we were
made in the beginning, and in which God, our loving Father and
creator is constantly remaking us; it is the image renewed in us
through Jesus, the Son, God with us, in whom God’s love is made
visible in the most direct and concrete way; and it is the image
into which the Spirit is constantly stirring and prompting us to
grow; for we are invited into that dance of the Trinity, not once,
but over and over again; we are remade in the image of God, over and
over again; and we are called constantly to live in the truth of
God’s love and equality and mutuality with one another – in the
image of the God who is love – one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit
– who was, and is, and is to come. Amen.
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