Inviting Evangelism: Singing in a New Key

I stood in my father’s bathroom trying to help him stand after falling while getting out of the shower. The blood thinner meds he had taken for a dozen years was causing the small scrapes on his leg and elbow to bleed profusely, and in falling he had hyper-extended his left knee, his good knee, though both knees were actually titanium replacements. What does this have to do with the Trinity?

The next morning I took a walk along the beach; my father’s condo being mere yards away from the white, “sugar sand” of Florida’s Gulf Coast. As I rooted the soles of my bare feet into Mother Earth, in mountain pose for those of you who do yoga, I listened to the wind, the gulls, and my own heart. “It is good to be here,” I thought to myself. What does this have to do with the Trinity?

Upon my return to Arizona, I spoke with one pastor recently diagnosed with cancer and another whose spouse needs organ transplantation. I prayed with a gathering of pastors and elders whose hearts grieved after making a decision a colleague did not want to hear. And I rejoiced at the airport upon seeing my wife, Laura, and Ange, the refugee whom we have welcomed into our home. What does this have to do with the Trinity?

To many folks, the Trinity is some sort of math problem: does 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 or does 1 + 1 + 1 = 1? I get it; really, I do. The doctrine that God is one in three persons, separate but not distinct, translates rather naturally into the language and conundrum of numbers. But what if we understand God as Trinity not as a math problem but rather as an expression of a beautiful mystery?

For Christians to say that God is Trinity is to confess the eternal nature of God is relational; that at the core of the universe is love. God exists for all time in relationship with Godself – eternally, necessarily, intrinsically, and organically. This is who God is!

The early Christian fathers and mothers coined a new, Greek word in their attempts to describe this ineffable mystery: perichoresis, which is a combination of the Greek words that literally mean “with dancing.” God is the One whose nature is with dancing; the Three whose harmony is a unity and whose rhythm expresses infinite diversity.

And we are created in the image of this Trinitarian God. We are created to live our lives with dancing – to express our humanity in harmony, to find our rhythm in relationship, to allow the nature of God to be reflected in who we are and in how we are together, in such a manner that 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + N = the Church, the one Body of Christ.

It is the Trinity that calls me to care for my father, to ground myself in our shared humanity on this planet, to pray for you as you pray for me, to grieve with those who grieve and to rejoice with those who rejoice. What do these things have to do with the Trinity? My life – our lives – have everything to do with the Trinity, for God is not a math problem. Thanks be….

Grace and peace,

Brad Munroe