Kendall's Notebook page 12
Sermon: "The Trinity"
By: Kendall Brown
June 15, 2003
Trinity Sunday
Last Sunday was Pentecost with the very difficult theme to treat in the pulpit, namely the work of the Holy Spirit. There is only one Sunday each year with a liturgical theme more challenging than Pentecost. That Sunday is today, which celebrates the Trinity.
Many Christians simply accept the Trinity as one of the givens of the faith and decide there is little point in taking on the headaches that seem to be ahead if we try to figure out the idea. “It’s a mystery – one of the mysteries of the faith,” we say, and shrug off any further investigation into the meaning of the concept.
Much of the confusion about the Trinity finds its roots in the way the Latin language has impacted our own language and understandings. From the Latin, we inherit our word, ‘person.’ In Latin, the word is, ‘persona’ and means much the same thing as it does in English. In particular, the word person means in both languages a distinct and unique individual – an entity in and of its self and separate from other selves.
From the Latin, we have inherited the expression, “God in three persons (persona).” Therein begins our stalemate of intellect to which we can only throw up our arms and proclaim, “It’s a mystery!” It is the ultimate impossibility to explain how one person can also be three persons.
It is the Latin that has gotten us into this mess. Christian thinkers used Greek before Latin got the upper hand. Remember the story of Paul. Paul took the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome. Rome was always Paul’s heart’s desire. But in spite of his affection for Rome, Paul’s language was Greek, not Latin. He wrote all his letters in Greek. And Greek was the language of many other early church thinkers.
Those early church thinkers and writers struggled to convey to others their triune experience of God. In the early church the Greek word, translated into the Latin, ‘persona’ was ‘prosopone.’ Things frequently manage to get lost in translation and here we are talking about two translations: first from the Greek to the Latin and then the Latin to the English.
The word, ‘prosopone,’ was used by the early church writers and thinkers to describe their threefold experience of God. They borrowed that word from the Greek theatre, the stage. Prosopone was the mask that ancient Greek actors used to symbolize the role they were presenting. Often in one act, one actor might have more than one mask, or roles or prosopone.
In translating ‘prosopone’ to Latin, the best that could be done was to use the word ‘persona’ which also conveys in the Latin the idea of one’s role. By the time the Latin ‘persona’ became ‘person’ in English, all of this was lost.
It was natural for the early church leaders to borrow from the Greek theatre the idea of different roles played by one Actor, which is summed up with the word, ‘prosopone.’ The church was also talking about one actor, far greater than Charlton Heston or George Burns, and the three roles that God played conveyed by a variety of Trinitarian formulae such as Father, Son and Holy Spirit or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer in another formula.
One of the fascinating frustrations of theology is that the discovery of one solution almost always points to the next riddle or problem or challenge. Sure enough, this is true in the story that I have been telling. The early church leader’s use of persopone as an image to convey the meaning of the trinity answered one set of questions only to ask another set.
Here is the new set of questions, which you would have figured out for yourselves if I stopped here and sent you home with only the information put forth thus far. When god is in one role or wearing one mask (persopone) what happens to the other roles? Do they disappear? Do they get put on hold? Is there some ‘press pause’ button somewhere that freezes the other two? We claim that God was in Christ and that in Jesus God became flesh and dwelt among us? When Jesus was on earth, did God disappear from God’s throne? When the Holy Spirit attends our prayers here, how can the prayers of another congregation on the other side of the earth also be attended by the Spirit at the same time?
The early church leaders had some head scratching to do as these questions plagued them. It was important to them to maintain that the activation of one persopone doesn’t mean the hibernation of the other two. All three are together and always at work.
Again the early church leaders turned to the Greek stage to find words to express their understandings and their experience of God. They borrowed a theatrical word namely, ‘perichoresis,’ to help them. Perichoresis was a theatrical word used to clarify the relationship of different roles that one actor might be playing. Perichoresis meant that when one role was the dominant role, the other roles were still present and a part of the dominant role, even if not immediately obvious or visible. The actor could only wear one mask at a time, but even as that mask was worn, the other roles were still with him and in him, perichoresis.
The word perichoresis has two Greek words in it, both of which are familiar to all of us. First, there is the word peri. Peri is found in words like perimeter or pericardium. It means around or surround. The perimeter is the outer edge of the area the surrounds us.
Pericardium is the tissue that surrounds our hearts inside our chests. Choresis is another word that you have heard many times before.
You have heard the word in our words, choreograph or choreography. Choresis means to dance.
The early church leaders used these two words from the stage and theatre to convey the idea that the creator, redeemer, comforter are three persopone that dance around each other and dance around us.
At the mysterious heart of our faith is a dance, a dance of love.
So far this morning, my thoughts have been put forth in a very wordy fashion, lots of head stuff, requiring thinking to follow.
Now, I want to change gears and move towards something more visual and physical. The idea of the dance and the trinity are still very much with me, but for the rest of my time this morning, I want to move towards something more visual, a picture. Since this, morning, words are all that I have to use, it will have to be a word picture.
The picture starts with a picture that was given to me by Rowan Williams as I was reading his book, “A Ray of Darkness.” In one chapter, he writes about a breath-taking dance performance that had taken place in the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The beautiful dance had been performed by a troupe of mentally and physically disabled 20 and 30 year-olds. In everyday life, all of the dancers live with all the discomfort with their bodies, all the jerky hand motions, with all the dislocated words and throaty noises that you can imagine in a severely disabled person. On the stage, these same troupers performed with incredible beauty and grace. Their bodies were trained to be one with the music and to flow with the music.
Their teacher was an incredibly gifted young woman from Chile, who had taught them using a mirror image technique. She gave them their movements, by slowly and steadily teaching them to mirror her movements. As she would raise her hand, her students would raise theirs and so forth.
Rowan wrote of this performance:
“We watched people blossom into unpredictable beauty by being taken seriously. If you’re made to feel all the time that your body is graceless, it will indeed be a lump of messy fat. And, who normally cares to inform the “Mongol” or the “spastic” or the “retarded” that they are physically alive in any more than an animal sense? Who’s going to awaken the “grace of sense” (in Eliot’s words) that transforms fat and bone and hair into achieved, assured dignity?
“But put grace and your will find grace. Invite the unlovely partner to sit opposite you, breathing slowly and deeply, and to mirror your gestures: the slow circling of an arm, the opening of a hand, that’s how our Chilean teacher began. That’s how dancing begins.
Sit and watch. I’ll give you grace and you can give it back. You can answer me because you are like me. You are alive, too. Here are the signs of my life, the patterns I make, the beauty I create, and so can you. As we sit like this, my life makes yours more alive. Listen to this invitation.”
Rowan Williams: “A Ray of Darkness,” p. 62
As I was reading these words by Rowan Williams, the thought came to me, this is one Sunday when I wish I had some interpretive dancers in my congregation ready to assist now and then with worship. Maybe some of you will put this together for us for some future worship. The image is powerful enough to last. Lacking the visual, all I can do is present a word picture.
Picture two dancers before the table of grace this morning. One is God. And one is you – disabled as all humans are, handicapped by grudge or suspicion, feet stuck in the mud of mediocrity and boredom, hands folded across the chest in defense against a multitude of mostly imagined enemies, a prisoner of your own narcissism and ego. God is all grace and beauty. You are all ugliness and loneliness.
Then the dance begins. And the hand of God reaches out to you, picture Michelangelo’s hand of God, full of grace and beauty. The dance begins. You mirror the movements of God. A magnificent picture of beauty emerges. You are transformed.
The early church leaders turned to the language of the theatre to convey their experience because they had been in this dance with God and with a triune God who dances all around them with grace and draws them in to the dance to be transformed by it.
Everyone in this room and has a dance card. No matter how mature or wise or spiritually advanced you may consider yourself, there is still a place on your card to dance again the dance of grace, and as you mirror God’s grace, be transformed by the dance.