"The Dance of God"
Christianity is the only world faith that teaches that God is triune. The trinity means that God is, in essence, relational. The gospels say that the Spirit glorifies the Son, and the Son glorifies the Father and that this has been going on for all eternity. The term "glorify" means to praise, enjoy, and delight in something. When something is useful, you are attracted to it for what it can bring you or do for you. But if it is beautiful, then you enjoy it simply for what it is. Just being in its presence is its own reward. To glorify someone is also to serve or defer to him or her. Instead of sacrificing their interests to make yourself happy, you sacrifice your interests to make them happy. Why? Your ultimate joy is to see them in joy. In self-centeredness we demand that others orbit around us. We will do things and give affection to others, as long as it helps us meet our personal goals and fulfills us.
The triune God however, is very different. The trinity is characterized by self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her; we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are two or three persons. This is how the trinity operates. Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. God is not unipersonal. If God were unipersonal, then love did not exist until he created, because love is something shared between people. A unipersonal God would have power, greatness, sovereignty from all eternity, but not love. With a unipersonal God, power would be at his essence.
When Jesus said you must lose yourself in service, he was recounting what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity. You will never get a sense of self by standing still and making every one else revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to experience the loss of options and the individual limitation that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature.
The world was not created by a God who was only an individual, nor was it created by an impersonal force. It is not the product of power struggles between personal deities nor of random, violent, accidental natural forces. We as Christians reject these creation accounts because they do not give love primacy. We believe the world was made by God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. We were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made! That's what went wrong in the Garden of Eden. We became self-centered, wanting to fulfill our own desires. And thus we have the disintegration of relationships between nations, races, classes, individuals. But Jesus died for us. He centered upon us, loving us without benefit to Himself. And that is what He is calling us back to. Jesus mission here was an infinitely costly rescue operation to restore justice to the oppressed, physical wholeness to the diseased and dying, community to the isolated and lonely, and spiritual joy and connection to those alienated from God. To be a Christian today is to become part of that same operation. We have assurance of eventual success. We labor in expectation of a perfect world in which: "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of thing is passed away." Revelation 21:4
Heather's son Ben and my daughter Kate enjoying some quality pumpkin time...
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