Year A
 Genesis 1:1-2:4a
 Canticle 13 (BCP)
 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
 Matthew 28:16-20

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

In 1963…  Sydney Carter wrote the lyrics to the Lord of the Dance…  he was at least partly inspired by Jesus when he wrote… “I don’t know whether Jesus ever leaped in Galilee… to the rhythm of a pipe or drum… but we’re told that David danced… and as an act of worship too… the fact that many Christians have regarded dancing as a bit ungodly… in a church, at any rate… doesn’t mean that Jesus regarded it that way.” And Carter also offered a tribute to Shaker music… he used the tune from It’s a Gift to be Simple…

But Carter was also inspired by a statue of the Hindu God Shiva which sat on his desk…  posing as the Lord of the Dance… he later said: “I didn’t think the churches would like the hymn at all… I thought many people would find it pretty far flown… probably heretical… and anyway… dubiously Christian… but in fact people did sing it… and unknown to me… it touched a chord… anyway… it’s the sort of Christianity I believe in…”

On Trinity Sunday… some Christian theologians… talk about the perichoresis of the Holy Trinity… I won’t try to explain the eternal mystery of the Three in One… and thank goodness we’re not reading the Athanasian Creed…  which can be found on pp. 864-865 of the BCP…  and was in the Lutheran Book of Worship…  but is not in the current prayer book…  the ELW…  but the Greek word perichoresis simply means rotation… and so the word evokes images of dancers spinning and twirling around each other on the dance floor…

When we think about dancing…  some of us may think of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing to Cole Porter’s Night and Day…  we may think of perfectly choreographed tango or salsa movements as part of a competition…  but how many times have you heard someone say: Oh… I can’t dance… and what if someone trips… or falls… which you can see on Dancing with the Stars fails…  on YouTube…  but usually…  mostly…  when they say… I can’t dance… they’re just expressing doubt…

When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came… and said to them anyway… “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”

Go therefore…  Jesus didn’t conduct auditions… didn’t invite in only the top four finalists… didn’t ask to see a diagram of feet on paper… like in the Rocky Horror Picture Show…  even to the doubters… even to those who didn’t think they could dance… he said Go… baptize in the name of the Father… the Son… and the Holy Spirit… and teach them…

Maybe those who doubted… didn’t think they could hear the divine music… but even those who can’t hear any music can still dance…  deaf students at Gallaudet University…  can dance by feeling the vibrations on the floor… but even when they’re dancing on something like concrete that doesn’t vibrate…  they look to each other for visual and other cues… they teach each other… and can remain in the kind of sync… that Fred and Ginger had…

Sometimes… we doubt too… that we won’t be able to hear… or feel the music… we may wonder if it even exists… but there are more dances than we can imagine that move to a more transcendent melody…  and some of them even involve dancing… there are avian mating dances…  like what the Bird of Paradise does…  in relationships… maybe through counseling… when one person starts to get healthier… they say their partner needs to learn new dance steps… there’s the melody of gravity and momentum…  of moons dancing around planets… planets dancing around the sun… and stars and galaxies dancing around each other…  in some ways…  Two Churches and Holy Trinty…  even after about twenty months…   remain in a new kind of dance… some are well choreographed…  like this month’s White Caps game…  and while we may…  possibly…  occasionally step on each other’s feet…  no one gets disqualified…

If…  since…  because we are created in the image of God…  then that also means that we were created to create…  and just as the first person was the Adam…  the earth creature… we too toil over our own figurative lumps of clay…  creating new things…  new ideas…  new ways of healing…  and new ways of being…  and each new genesis echoes the dance of the Trinity…  Father…  Son…  and Holy Spirit…  ]  Creator…  Redeemer…  and Sustainer… and with Sydney Carter’s statue of Shiva in mind…  rishi… devata… and chandas… the knower… the known… and the knowing which connects them in an ever expanding communion of love…  ] and the coming of the Spirit…  is like love hitting the cosmic fan…  it’s God’s unrestrained and riotous giving that we just heard about in Genesis…  and so remember…  if you see love…  you see the Holy Trinity…

We take many of our experiences for granted…  even without fully understanding them…  we don’t understand where and how many of our foods are manufactured or processed…  our pets don’t understand where and how their food comes from…  we don’t understand how a seed sprouts and grows…  how forgiveness works…  how love covers a multitude of sins…  some of these experiences transcend words…  we may not have any interest in the eternal mystery of the Three in One… we may not want to understand the intricacies of systematic theology… but we are sustained by the Trinity’s dance of love… composer and singer… Leonard Cohen wrote a song called Dance Me to the End of Love…  it’s heartbreakingly poignant… and the first stanza is:

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me… to the end of love…

We may also doubt that we can dance…  it may simply be more comfortable to let the Freds and Gingers of the world do the dancing… but Jesus said to all the disciples… Go… but Jesus didn’t say Go alone…

Matthew’s Gospel ends with Jesus’ promise to be with us always…  and when we hear these words… “I am with you always… to the end of the age…” we tend to understand them as “to the end of time…” but in the original Greek… the meaning is deeper and more profound… what Jesus is really saying… is that “I am with you always, until the completion of eternity.” This completion of eternity is also expressed in St. Augustine’s words “Thou hast made us, O Lord… for thyself… and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Jesus remains with us… until the end of the age…  until all love is perfected…  until our sometimes imperfect bodily dances are danced perfectly in our hearts…  the Lord of the Dance knows us so well… that even with our imperfections… invites us in to the dance… until the fulfillment of love…