Dance with God

Holy Trinity Sunday
The Gospel of John 3:1-17
Romans 8:12-17
Preached at St. John’s Christopher Street, NYC
Meditation based off a memory of Queer Contra Chicago
May 30, 2021

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Grace and peace to you from God the Creator, Christ the Liberator, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Holy Trinity Sunday is a fairly unique Sunday in the church year, where the focus of our attention is on the doctrine, or philosophy, of the Trinity. What does it mean, in the words of the Athanasian Creed, to “worship one God in Trinity and the Trinity in unity, neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence”?

If you came to worship today hoping for an easy, straightforward answer to that question, you will be disappointed. And I say that with so much love – it is human to want to categorize things in order to understand them, to explain and label and break into digestible chunks.

But trying to distill the Trinity into something we can fully comprehend is falling into the flesh, as Paul warns us against. Whenever Paul’s writing on flesh and Spirit comes up, it is important to remember that he isn’t talking about a mind-body dualism – flesh and Spirit are not things we can separate out within our bodies, instead, he’s writing about where we place our energy, and our focus – on human things, or on the Divine?

And today is a day in the church year to embrace the Divine mystery. To explore relationship. To dance with the Holy Trinity. To dance with God. 

And with that framework, I’d like to invite you into a place of embodied imagination. Keeping with the image of the Trinity as a dance, the rest of this sermon is going to be closer to a guided meditation, a guided memory. As you are comfortable, settle into a posture of prayer, being open to where the Spirit of God might be leading you in your own heart. During this time, you might reach towards memories of times where you felt the presence of God, or you might simply immerse yourself in this memory of a night of contra dancing, which is a line dance. You can close your eyes, or hold this image in your mind.

Take a breath with me. Take a moment to center into your body, into how you are feeling right now, at this moment. And imagine with me.

It’s a warm summer evening. The slight humidity in the air, as you breathe in, feels like a cocoon wrapping around you. Ahead, you can see the church you are heading towards, an older building. Inside, you know that the pews are cleared away, and a night of contra dancing awaits. You’re a little nervous – it’s been so many years since you danced in public, and you’re not sure how much your body will remember.

As soon as you open the door, your senses are overwhelmed. You see people, all sizes, all races, all genders, dressed joyfully, dressed in clothes they can move in. You hear the music, and the step-caller, watching as the dancers come together and move apart, dancing in a pattern that you can’t quite grasp. You smell sweat, and deodorant, and floor polish. You can feel the rhythm of the music moving through your body, through your chest.

You take all of this in in the blink of an eye. As soon as you step through the door, someone radiant comes up to you, extends a hand. You grasp it, and are pulled into the dance. There’s no time to think – you are swept into the music, guided by your partner, who clearly knows the steps, knows the pattern. Missteps are laughed away, and you move between partners gracefully, always caught by someone who guides you. The feeling of welcome floods your body, and as sweat flicks off of you, you suddenly know that you are affirming your baptism in this dance.

This movement, this dance, leaves no room for the forces that defy God. God themself has caught you up in this whirlwind of movement and color and music. God is the pattern of the dance, but also you can see Creator God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus weaving throughout the dance, moving between partners, pulling people in, grabbing their hands. They each have a slightly different style to their dancing – right now Creator God is moving like a connector, making sure people get to their next dance partner safely. The Holy Spirit is spinning and laughing and her energy is contagious. You notice Jesus breaking off to talk to one of the people who is in the rotation of callers – the people who’s words carry over the dance, shaping it, teaching.

Needing to take a breath yourself, you excuse yourself from the dance (although can you, really, with the music still thrumming in your veins?), grab a cup of water, and wander over to listen to their conversation. You realize that Jesus is also in the rotation of callers, and you recognize that it’s Nicodemus talking with Jesus.

Nicodemus is holding a book of contra dance patterns, and it’s clear that he knows the theory behind them. But you notice that while Jesus is glistening and slightly out-of-breath, Nicodemus seems like he hasn’t been on the dance floor. And now that you think about it, you can’t remember seeing him in the whirlwind of people. He’s asking Jesus to explain one of the dances, and Jesus seems to be asking back – incredulous – ‘how have you not experienced what you are teaching and leading? Yes, Nicodemus, knowing the steps is important, but they aren’t always literal. What if you need to adjust for someone’s mobility or comfort level? You have to trust the dance. Don’t you know that everything here is done for love?’

The music changes, the caller changes, and now Jesus is calling the steps. Someone beckons you to be their partner, and you set down your water, moving back onto the dance floor. They are teaching a new step, a new pattern. You see Nicodemus on the edge of the dancers, seeming self-conscious but determined, trying to learn the new step.

When you first got here, it seemed so effortless to be swept up into the dance, guided by experienced dancers. But now you find yourself overthinking this new step, becoming frustrated that you keep turning on the wrong foot, so focused on your feet that you miss the moment of connection and relationship with your dance partner. The Holy Spirit cuts in, and suddenly you see the room from above.

The dance is made up of relationships – two people dancing together for a moment before breaking off to their next partner, connected to the musicians, the floorboards, the caller, the people taking a breath, the people watching and resting. The patterns of the steps and conversations and interactions are building a web across the room, building a root system.

Understanding again comes over you like a wave. Creation is patterned in relationships. With each other, with God, with ourselves. You can’t understand yourself separate from God or separate from other people. The Holy Spirit winks at you, and you realize your body knows this new step, which maybe wasn’t new at all, and you find yourself smiling in welcome, inviting, as partners change again, building the root system.

The music stops. Everyone’s attention is drawn towards Creator God, who is at the center of a spiral dance. In this moment, your heart breaks with wonder, tears leaking from your eyes, mingling with sweat, as an all-vulnerable Creator God pulls the dance towards Godself in the silence. All of the beauty, all of the pain, all of the relationships are held by Creator God for only a moment, until the fiddle picks up again, but all of time is held in that moment.

God is the dancers and the dance. You know that can’t make perfectly logical sense but you also know that it’s true, and that you have caught a glimpse of something so Divine, so overflowing with Love, that you are content with simply being a dancer, caught up in the music, caught up in God. As the dances continue to change, you keep finding your place, again and again.

You take another break, to see what snacks people have brought to share. As you bite into a cookie, you laugh a little to yourself – if your sweat is a reminder of your baptism, this cookie tastes like communion. Nourishing your body to continue dancing, to continue to form relationships, to continue to move. Still laughing, not remembering the last time you felt such joy, you are whirled back into the dance.

The dance continues. You’re not sure for how long, but too soon the caller announces the close of the evening. As people begin to gather their water bottles, their backpacks, cleaning up the remaining snacks, and packing away instruments, you turn again to the dance floor. The Trinity are together again, their music the murmur of conversations, trash bags, and hummed snippets of music. As your heart takes in this image, you know that there was never a time before these three were dancing together, and you know that, despite the caller closing the evening, that they will continue to dance and be in relationship with each other, and with Creation.

You shake your head slightly. Something Jesus said to Nicodemus crosses your mind – “we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony.” And you wonder how to carry this night, this dance, into your daily life in a way that people will understand. In a way that you will remember. These relationships crossed race, and class, and gender, and ability. You know that you danced with people you might never encounter on a typical day, and with people you might never see again – and yet the moments of relationship and connection you experienced carry deep meaning, and deep mystery.

As you leave the room, the summer evening now feeling cooler than the church, your heart is at once at rest in God and expanding outward. You’re not quite sure how that is, but you feel your heartbeat beating alongside the other people walking towards the subway, alongside the trees and summer weeds, alongside the wind and the stars. You find yourself walking in rhythm, music still entwined with your thoughts.

You take a deep breath in. And as you exhale, you imprint this memory into your body, knowing that you can return to it, that your body will remember this night of dancing, and that you are perhaps more open to knowing and trusting where the Spirit of God is leading you next.

Beloveds of God, we are constantly being swept into the dance that is Creation, that is God. This image of the Holy Trinity as dance and dancers is at once complete and incomplete. It is one way for us to fit ourselves into the mystery and the radiance that is God, the Three-in-One. It is not the only image, or the only way. God is both brilliantly beyond our comprehension, and found in all relationships – no matter how ordinary-seeming.

What we know for certain is that we are loved and claimed by the Triune God, who constantly makes room for us in their eternal dance. We are sent into the world to be in relationship with each other, and with God. To be pulled in and to find our way. To love and be loved. To dance together.

And I mean that in a very real way – figuring out how to live together in Creation, honoring differences, honoring our bodies and our experiences – is a dance. The ebb and flow of relationships, the policies and laws that we make and uphold, how we treat strangers – these are the steps. Our heartbeats and our breath and the wind is the music. And through it all – our joy, our grief, our pain, our violence, our songs – God pulls us in and loves us and holds us in God’s own heart. It’s all for the sake of love. Let yourself be swept into the dance of the Trinity, today and all days. Amen.