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June 11, 2006 by Jim McCrea John 3:1-17 A few years back, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ran into a bit of trouble when he tried to explain to the press the limitations of intelligence reports. What he said was absolutely true, but the way it was stated was so confusing that - on the face of it - it seemed to be almost nonsensical. Here's what he said: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.." If you gave some thought to what he said - perhaps helped by having a copy of his words in your hand - you'll understand that he's completely correct. In fact, what he says almost has to be true simply by definition. But that fact doesn't change the reality that his comment simply sounds odd on the face of it. The same thing is true of the Christian theology of the Trinity. On the face of it, the Trinity makes it seem as if Christians are simply bad at math. After all, your average kindergartner knows that one plus one plus one does not equal one. Nevertheless the admittedly-odd doctrine of the Trinity does tell us something that's fundamentally true about God. To paraphrase Mr. Rumsfeld: there are known knowns about God - that is, things that we know we know. There are also known unknowns about God - things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns about God - things that we don't know we don't know. And doesn't it have to be that way as a matter of course? After all, if God were small enough for us to completely understand, wouldn't that necessarily mean that God would have to be somehow less than we are? But as Will Willimon puts it, "Our God is large, living, uncontainable. You can't define this God, put this God in your pocket, or on a leash and drag God around with you. Life with this God is an adventure, a journey, a leap into the unknown. I think we therefore ought to cultivate among ourselves a love for the unknown, an expectation that, among even the most regular [church] attendees among us, there will be surprises, jolts, shocks." I don't know if any of you have ever had the opportunity to discuss the Trinity with a Jehovah's Witness before. I have. It was an interesting conversation. When the topic came up, the person I was talking with simply said the word Trinity isn't anywhere in the Bible and that was that. They said that as if that were all there were to say on the subject. Conversion over. The fact of the matter is that, as far as that comment goes, they were absolutely right. Neither the words "Trinity" nor "Triune" ever appears in the Bible. But that doesn't mean that those concepts aren't in the Bible. If fact, if they hadn't been there, no one in their right mind would have been foolish enough to invent them. Anne Le Bas says it this way, "It seems to me, then, that either the early Christians were bonkers, or they were trying to say something which they felt was so important that even if they couldn't explain or express it they still wanted to hang onto [it] somehow. "This doctrine has been fundamental to the Church's understanding of God from very early on in its history. It was an idea that developed over the first few centuries of the Church's life, long before Christianity became a recognized religion in the Roman Empire. The Christians were still being thrown to the lions, so you'd have thought they had enough to worry about without tying themselves in knots over ideas that seemed completely daft. But the idea of the Trinity seems to have been very important to them even at this stage. There was something about God being three, and yet one, that helped them deal with their lives, which were lived under such threat and pressure. And if it was important to them then there's just a chance that if we could understand it, we might find it was important to us as well. But it is understanding it that is the difficult bit." And the key to doing that may come from an unexpected angle. The past month or so, I have been working on digitalizing our old record albums in my spare time. Given that we no longer have a record player, we haven't been able to listen to any of those albums for a long, long time. So I borrowed a record player from Delight's parents and have been knocking them off a few albums a week. In the process of listening to my digitalized results, I was reminded once again of how music really speaks to our emotions rather than our intellect. It's really more of a right brain than left brain experience. For those of you who may not be familiar with that term, researchers tell us that the left side of the brain responses to the world in a different manner than the right side of the brain. To simplify things somewhat, the left side is in control of logical approach to the world, while the right side is in control of a more artistic, non-linear approach. All of us use both aspects of our brains, although we each tend to prefer one side over the other. Added together, those two approaches give us a more well-rounded view of the world. Music, of course, appeals to our artistic right-brain side, giving us experiences that we can't always express in a logical fashion. The best way to illustrate that truth is to remind those of us who are of a certain age of those old American Bandstand shows in which Dick Clark would play some new record and then ask various teenagers to rate it. They would have no trouble giving it a number between zero and ten, but when he would ask them what they liked about it, they would almost inevitably get a blank look on their faces and then say something inane like, "It has a beat and you can dance to it." That phrase eventually became a standing joke since the truth was that you could say that about any of the songs played on that show - good, bad or indifferent. Although those teenagers would never have used these terms, they got those blank expressions on their faces because they were being asked to explain a right-brain experience using left-brain terms, something that is very difficult to do. In the same way, Mozart was once asked what he was trying to say with his music and he famously replied, "If I could say it in words, I wouldn't have to use music." You see the same left-brain/right-brain clash in our gospel lesson today when Nicodemus visits Jesus in the middle of the night, expecting to have a reasoned discourse on the nature of divinity, only to have Jesus immediately lead him into a poetic riff on the need to embrace the God who is beyond our ability to understand. The more Jesus talks, the further he moves beyond Nicodemus who simply isn't expecting this onslot of images. Finally, Nicodemus simply disappears from the picture altogether and Jesus seems to be alone, speaking a soliloquy into the night air. To be honest, I feel a bit sorry for Nicodemus here. He starts out with what seems to be a sincere compliment for Jesus and from that moment on, he begins to scratch his head, shift nervously from foot to foot, and feel quite completely out to sea. At first glance, it seems as if Jesus is purposely trying to make Nicodemus feel uncomfortable. But the truth is that Jesus is really trying to stretch Nicodemus' thinking well beyond the constraints of the accepted wisdom within which he has operated his whole life. That's not at all what Nicodemus was looking for when he first approached Jesus, but to Nicodemus' credit, he eventually catches on to what Jesus has been trying to tell him, because we're told that, after the crucifixion, Nicodemus joined Joseph of Arimathea in taking Jesus' body down from the cross and preparing it for burial. Clearly, if he was willing to do that for a criminal condemned by both the Roman governor and the Sanhedrin - the religious governing council that both Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea sat on - then he was no longer totally focused on left-brain thinking, because that definitely was not a logical thing to do. In fact, it was something quite dangerous. But Jesus had a way of making people see the world in new ways and then being willing to take chances to act on those new perspectives. You see that over and over again in the New Testament. Perhaps the most obvious example lies in the disciples who had totally abandoned Jesus at this arrest and run for their lives, only to be found several weeks later boldly and publicly proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead and was offering forgiveness and eternal life to all who believed in him. Jesus also caused his followers to develop a radical new understand-ing of God. All of the initial disciples were faithful Jews. That is, they were followers of a religion whose most distinctive element was the worship of just one God. And yet, there was something about Jesus that caused those same faithful Jews - including national religious leaders like Nicodemus - to come to believe that in Jesus they were seeing God in human flesh. Later, at Pentecost, the disciples experienced the coming of the Holy Spirit, something that felt like the power of God acting within and through them. It was the same God experienced in yet another way. And so, in a totally right-brained experiential way, those passionate monotheists were forced to accept the quirky theology of the Trinity in order to be true to the various ways they had experienced God in their own lives - one God, yes, but a God who had been felt and known in three different ways. Phil Nevard describes those ways as being "God without, God within, [and] God alongside (or God beyond me, God within me, God beside me)." And the one thing that unites all three aspects of God is an unshakeable, unstoppable self-giving love. The earliest church developed a word to describe the way they imagined the life of the Trinity to be. It was a good Greek word - and I know you've all been anxiously awaiting the time when I would teach you an ancient Greek word. Now's that time. The word perichoresis. That doesn't sound like something you might hear every day and yet you do hear derivative words from the two part of perichoresis on a regular basis. Peri is a prefix that means "around." You can see that used in English words like perimeter and periphery. The other part of the word - choresis - comes from the Greek verb choreo, which means "to dance." The English words choreography and chorus line derive from that. So one author writes, "[...] perichoresis - this word that describes the relationship of the Trinity, literally means to dance around and about. Father, Son and Holy Spirit were in an endless dance, they thought - weaving in and out of each other. It's a dynamic relationship, this word says. They aren't just sitting there talking endless dull theology to each other. They are on the move, they're active, they're joyful. Unlike the gods of ancient Rome and Greece, they aren't in competition with each other. They're not rivals - a dance has to be cooperative if it's going to work. Their dance is a dance of love." What a wonderful image that is. I'm not one of the world's most graceful dancers. Instead, I have a gift for finding the toes of my partner is sudden and sometimes painful ways. Perhaps some of you can relate to that. But imagine for a moment a world in which every couple was able to dance as gracefully as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers - a world where everyone without exception could dance as well backwards and in high heels as they could forward and in tux and tails. Now imagine that those dancers are spirits that are not held back by the limitations of flesh and bone. Those spirit dancers would be able to move together so gracefully that they could literally fuse into and out of each other. That's the idea of perichoresis. And yet, the perichoresis dance isn't just limited to the Godhead. Because the Trinity is centered on love, you and I are located right at the center of that dance - with God moving in and out of each of us - enticing, inspiring, supporting and sustaining us in a joyous dance of love. That's what the Trinity is all about. You can't plot it on a chart; you can't prove it with a mathematical theorem. But you can feel it in a deep-seated, undeniable right-brain way as a experience beyond words, beyond logic and beyond your greatest hope. Because right there in the heart of God - surrounded by a ceaseless dance of joy - are you and me. So why don't we join in the dance and move as close as we can to the heart of God? Amen.
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