When American composer Leonard Bernstein gave his six famous Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University in 1973, he mused, “When God said ‘Let there be light’ (”Y’hi orr”) I doubt God said it like he was ordering lunch. I’m sure God sang creation into being.”

Bernstein’s whimsical understanding of God as creator perhaps can set the tone for our reflection on the Holy Trinity on this festival day celebrating pure mystery.

Perhaps you found your head spinning from the get-go this morning, as the prayer of the day ushered us into the scripture readings: “we worship your glory, eternal Three-in-One, and we praise your power, majestic One-in-Three.” Three-in-One and One-in-Three. All we have is language and most of the time our words for God, our logoi theoi, our theology, our words don’t quite measure up.

But before we prayed that prayer of the day, there was the gathering hymn which seems to have captured the same sort of playful, whimsical notion of the Triune God as Bernstein used in his Harvard talks as he described the Creator. Hymn writer Richard Leach uses imagery of a dance to describe the relationship between the three persons of the Trinity: “Come, join the dance of Trinity, before all worlds begun — the interweaving of the Three, the Father, Spirit, Son. The universe of space and time did not arise by chance, but as the Three, in love and hope made room within their dance.” © 2001 Selah Publishing Co. Inc.

But our hymnwriter isn’t the first one to imagine the Trinity as the interplay, interweaving, intertwining of the 3 in a divine dance. In a few moments, we will use the ancient words of the Nicene Creed in our communal attempt, feeble as it may be, to ascribe some verbiage to our belief in the Triune One who transcends all language and all thought. Those words, written in 325 of the Common Era, say in part, “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son…”

The Greek word used in the Nicene Creed for this word “proceeds from” is perichoresis which can literally be translated “to dance around, or in a circle.” So one could argue that, since the earliest centuries of the church, the notion of a God-in-Three-Persons-Blessed Trinity, so layered and laden and encumbered with words over the centuries-turned-millennia, has really been confessed all along as a circular dance.

Now that can either be something of a relief, or perhaps be even more disturbing to us. Do we have a God who suffers from multiple personality disorder and dances alone in a circle with two other self-manifestations? Or can we, with holy imaginations sparked by the Spirit, envision a triad relationship which moves and flows and, yes, dances in and through and among one identity? Such words and such a dance still invite us into mystery. God is beyond our descriptions and yet we believe God has given us the capacity to wonder and to adore, though as yet — in the words of St. Paul - “we see in a mirror dimly.” (1 Cor. 13:12)

Our own identities can be rather complicated, so perhaps we should permit God’s identity to dwell in that realm as well. To our parents, we are ever the child — adult or no. To those who experience us through our career, we are what we do: administrator, manager, legal expert, medical professional. To our children, we are mother or father, the parent. To our spouse, we are partner, lover, friend. We are the same person and yet we function in different roles according to our relationships in the dance of life. And, at times, that dance can get very complicated!

As Jesus was preparing his disciples for his departure on the night before his death, we hear his words to them in the opening lines of today’s Gospel: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear to hear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, the Spirit will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:12) That same Spirit — the Spirit of truth whose wind filled the disciples on the Day of Pentecost with the very breath of God, is the Spirit of wisdom and truth and understanding who speaks to us from the proverbial words of the first reading: “When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth — when God established the heavens, I was there, when God drew a circle on the face of the deep… then I was beside God… and I was daily God’s delight, rejoicing before God always, rejoicing in God’s inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”

Sisters and brothers, this Spirit of wisdom which accompanied God in creating the heavens and the earth, the Spirit of the Risen Jesus whose powerful presence we celebrated in community last week, this same Spirit so also now delights in creation and so delights in us, that we cannot help but be drawn into the delight of the divine dance ourselves.

And yet, as the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico becomes increasingly drenched and darkened by the BP oil spill on this day 41, and as all attempts to repair the leak systematically fail, we must acknowledge that the mystery deepens further and the plot thickens all-the-more as humanity destroys the creation in which the Divine Dance takes such delight. As we continue to be drawn into the dance, may the Spirit of wisdom show us the way to wholeness and restoration of all creation whose primordial groans are increasing in volume.

God did not create the world in isolation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And the Word who was and is God sent forth the Spirit to renew the face of the earth.
May that Spirit — the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of Jesus crucified and risen, the Spirit of the creative God of all — may that Spirit of the Holy Trio sing us into the dance of all things now living — so that we, in relationship with the Thrice-Holy, may continue (in the words of Bernstein) to sing into being the renewal of all creation. Amen.