Trinity: Shall We Dance?

A sermon on Proverbs 8:1-4,22-31 for Trinity, 2025, Preached at St Paul's, Ashgrove

According to Proverbs 8:

• Before the creation of the world there was love.

• Before the first human smile there was laughter.

• Before there was air there was art.

• Before there was light there was delight.

• And all that love and laughter and art and delight danced our universe into being and inspired the birth of humanity.

And that is what we celebrate on Trinity Sunday – not the mathematical gymnastics of trying to make sense of one being three and three being one – though that has its place. What we celebrate on Trinity Sunday is:

God who from eternity is in loving, exuberant relationship,

God who gives and receives,

God who designs and measures and creates,

God who plays,

God who has fun.

God who dances and keeps inviting us to join the dance.

This part of Proverbs we read earlier speaks in the voice of a woman who is wisdom. Readers sometimes give her a name, Sophia, which comes from the Greek word for wisdom. She has been from before the beginning with God, delightedly involved with every aspect of creation.

Granted that this is poetry, it is possible to see her simply as a personification of an aspect of God’s character – the personification of God’s wisdom - poetically, metaphorically spoken about as a woman. It is entirely possible to read this passage that way, and even if that is how we read it we can might be surprised how comfortable the authors were with conceiving of wisdom as a womanly attribute and also with seeing God as having womanly attributes.

Jews and Christians have never believed God to be male or female. Genesis 1 makes it clear that, of course, God is beyond gender – neither male nor female - since humanity as a whole – male and female – is created in God’s image.

We usually speak of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, because that is the tradition, and it is the tradition because Jesus was a male human who spoke of God as his Father. When we use that language we need to remember that the words Father and Son are metaphors for two persons in a close, loving relationship.

A lot of Christians no longer find the words Father and Son useful and seek other names to use. That is not only because so many people have grown up with abusive or absent fathers. It is an attempt to find more accurate names for God who has no gender. It is also because it is hard for women to see themselves as the image of a God who is named using only male words.

You might notice I use a range of Trinitarian titles in our liturgy.

Proverbs 8 makes it very clear that God can be understood as female as well as male and so gives us freedom to find language that more accurately reflects our relationship with God.

Having said all that, when we pick up the writings of early Christians, we see that they did not read the character of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 as a metaphorical aspect of God’s character. They read Proverbs 8 much more specifically as the voice of the second person of the Trinity – God the Son who took on humanity in Jesus. John 1 talks about the Word that was with God and was God in the beginning, and became flesh in Jesus: John describes the Word in language borrowed from Proverbs 8. For the earliest Christians, Sophia was not just a personification of an aspect of God’s character. Sophia was the identity of one of the persons of the Trinity – the one who took on flesh as Jesus of Nazareth.

Even earlier than John, Paul, in 1 Corinthians, called Jesus the Wisdom of God. And beyond the New Testament we can find reems of essays and sermons by early Christian theologians applying Proverbs 8 to God the Son and using this passage to develop their understanding of the Trinity. In fact, Proverbs 8 is the Scripture passage most used to understand the eternal identity of Jesus.

And that adds poignancy to the verse that speaks of Sophia delighting in the human race.

I was daily delight,
playing before God always,
³¹ playing in God’s inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

Sophia, The Word, the Christ, delighted in the human race so much as to become one with us – to live our joys and sorrows, to know the triumphs and the tragedies of human relationships, to embrace our existence from ecstatic conception to agonising death.

That is delight that gets up close and personal. That is love that will not stand at a distance. That is what we celebrate on Trinity Sunday.

That is how the early Christians came to understand that God is one but can be understood as two persons in loving unity, and in loving engagement with humanity. But they had also experienced the love of God poured into their hearts through the Holy Spirit, as we celebrated last week:

God alongside us.

God in our experience, guiding us, revealing truth to us.

God, holding the hand of the infant church as it took its first steps.

So, they understood God to be three persons in complete, loving agreement of will and purpose. Eternally giving honour to each other. Eternally giving way to each other in a dance of love and delight.

God in loving, exuberant relationship from all eternity to all eternity.

And as Proverbs 8 describes, that love is not closed off or self-contained. It is a dance that constantly reaches out for new partners. Sophia delights in the human race. Sophia calls out to people, inviting them to walk with her. To join the dance of wisdom and delight.

We read in John 16 that the Holy Spirit takes what belongs to the Father and Son and declares it to the followers of Jesus. That harmony, that respect, that love, that delight, that playful wisdom is not guarded away from human interaction, but is freely offered, as we are all invited to participate in the life of God.

Having joined that dance we, as the people of God, are called to be creative and playful like Sophia as we dance through our own time and place and culture, as we continue to hold out our hands inviting new partners. Creative and playful, while remaining faithful to the rhythm of God’s dance - harmony, respect, love, delight, wisdom.

Over the past 70 years or so Christian people have become really muddled about what we call evangelism – about convincing people to become Christians. So many aspects of what became the usual approach have left Christians anxious and have given people outside the church reason to ridicule us. Most of us have been exposed to things like:

1. Frightening people with the threat of eternal torture in hell.

2. Convincing people they are hopeless, worthless sinners before they can be surprised by God’s grace.

3. Reducing people to the status of potential converts rather than full, beautiful human beings.

And as numbers of people in church on Sundays declines, we feel an anxious need to perpetuate those unhealthy practices and attitudes. This becomes a cycle that leaves us feeling guilty and depleted. And it has the potential to further sour our relationships with people outside the church.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

If God has been in a dance of love and delight from all eternity, playfully weaving creation and warmly inviting us to join in, then surely that is how we are to be as the church, as we dance through our own time, place and culture with steps that are consistent with God’s eternal dance.

Our life together as a parish and all our interactions with each other will be moving in the direction of the harmony, respect, love, delight, and wisdom of the God we worship. There will be play, creativity and joy in our life together. And we will hold out our hands in invitation for others to join us, to play with us, to dance with us. And we will invite others in, not because we feel guilty or under pressure to increase our numbers but because we have learned from Sophia to delight in the human race – to be fascinated and intrigued by our neighbours – to want to get to know them rather than needing the church to be full so we can feel better about ourselves. If we are really people of the Trinity, we will invite our friends and neighbours to join us because we love the life God has called us into and want more and more people to enjoy the dance.

At our Visioning Morning in a couple of weeks I’m looking forward to finding practical ways to make this more of a reality in our life together.

Our God is eternal love, dancing in creation, delighting in us so passionately as to become one with us and to keep inviting us into the playful heart of all reality.

And as God says to each of us this morning, “Shall we dance?” may we each give God one hand and hold the other out in invitation to the delightful people around us.

Amen

Let’s pray:

May you hear the call of God
 who from eternity is loving, exuberant relationship. 
 May you take the hand of God who gives and receives, 
 Who plays and delights and creates,
 And as you join this dance 
 May all around you hear the music
 And be drawn toward the heart of 
 God who calls
 God who serves
 And God who indwells
 All dancing, all creativity and all love. Amen.

With Love from Rev Margaret

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Rev Margaret is the Parish Priest at St Paul’s Ashgrove in Brisbane, Australia. Like most Anglican churches, St Paul’s struggles to make ends meet while holding on to our calling to generously reach out with the love of God. If you are in a position to contribute to our ministry, please use these bank details: Name: Ithaca-Ashgrove Anglican Parish; BSB: 704901; Acc No: 00004420. Every contribution makes a difference. Thank you!