The God Dance: Theology

Perichoresis by Peter Cahill

At the end of the last post, I asked who could bring about a spiritual and cultural transformation necessary to address our environmental crisis rooted in our greed, apathy, and selfishness, and I promised a Christian response. As we think about South Hills and seeking a commonly shared story for so many diverse people to identify this place as home, we have no easy answers.

Great love is the only force that can overcome greed, apathy, selfishness—those human traits that cause ecological destruction and divide ‘us’ into ‘us and them.’ Experiencing love invariably changes us, especially a love which willingly sacrifices and suffers. Great love willing to suffer is the only force which can re-unite us and transform our greed into generosity, our apathy to compassion, and our selfishness into selflessness.

There are no short cuts. There is no systemic solution to the problem of the human heart. Great love and suffering is the only way, so who can love enough and suffer enough for us to transform our spiritual and cultural situation? Only Jesus can.

We can only participate in the love revolution Jesus started 2000 years ago, first letting Jesus transform our own hearts. We are invited into the social order held not by power and fear but by love, servanthood, and sacrifice. We are invited into the kingdom of God, to participate in what God has been up to before the world began.

What does this look like? Jesus prayed this prayer as he ate with his disciples for the last time, before he was betrayed to his death.

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:

“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. ² For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. ³ Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. ⁴ I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. ⁵ And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. (John 17:1-5)

My friend Peter sketched the painting above while learning about the Trinity and Perichoresis—the theological concepts that this passage suggests.  Perichoresis refers to the way in which the members of the Trinity relate to one another, constantly making space for one another in service and praise. Perichoresis suggests an eternal God-Dance in which members of the Trinity continually love one another. Jesus shows how this love involves willingly giving up power and suffering rejection and even death. As I study South Hills and consider the ecology, the economy, and the development efforts in this place, I have these images in my mind about who God is. He is a diverse unity, three in one, a united community.

Such a concept of God has big implications for how we relate to one another and the world. Jesus explains it in his prayer. God the Father glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father. They have what we refer to in Christian ABCD parlance as Dignified Interdependence. Both receive from one another and are dependent on one another. Both give to one another. In this relationship, Jesus obeys the Father and the Father honors Jesus. The three persons of God celebrate one another, and because they are so busy celebrating each other, there is no room for fear or shame or apathy in God. Instead, the celebration flows over. Out of that abundant love, God created the cosmos.

Take a moment to look outside at your small corner of this grand work of delight, and you will see what kind of God we serve. The ecological patterns, the geological foundations, and the spinning of the cosmic spheres speak back the celebration with which they were made.

God also created us as he created the cosmos, glorifying us so that we could glorify God. He made us as part of the God Dance, participants in a community of trust and mutual celebration. Our calling as created beings is to play our part in this cosmic love movement, to be a people who give glory back to God in who we are.

You may also notice out the window some destruction: an excessive amount of concrete and asphalt, road kill, a big box store, or some other sign that doesn’t seem to fit a universal pattern of sacrificial love.

Unfortunately, we stepped out and continue to step out of this community of trust. God had the knowledge of good and evil covered, but we still wanted it for ourselves—to be the judges of right and wrong. We take the gifts that God has given us and try to store them up and to hoard them. We fail to give glory back to God. We are afraid that he will stop giving. We are afraid of each other. We are afraid of dying.

The reality is that people have hurt us, and we have experienced the need to defend ourselves. Often people in the church and people closest to us hurt us the most. Or perhaps it is those people destroying the environment with their greed and apathy. Perhaps it is those racists or those gentrifiers. Perhaps it is those Muslims or those rich people. Or perhaps it is those immoral poor people. Perhaps it is everyone else’s fault that this world is so dangerous, so we keep others out of our lives and live out our faith alone.

We even say that with all this hurt and suffering in the world, perhaps it is God’s fault. Many people judge God, punishing him with exile from our little lives. Having exiled God, we find ourselves alone. We may either feel that we have everything together by ourselves or reality confronts us with a strong sense of an abyss.

In our pride, our apathy, our greed, and our shame, we have broken the harmony of God’s world.  The result is our own isolation. The ecological destruction and economic inequality are physical manifestations of our spiritual condition.

God has every right to leave us there, destitute. But what does our maker do? He gives to us again even in the face of our hostility. He loved us so much that he became one of us and accepted our punishment, letting us drag him out of the city of peace to crucify him for threatening our sense of order and our own plan for salvation. He lets us do this again and again, but death cannot hold God.

By accepting our punishment, Jesus welcomes us back into the divine community and reconnects us to the God-Dance. His unearned suffering is redemptive, by which I mean, pride quickly crumbles before someone willingly dying for you. We can no longer be apathetic, but when we see how much has been given, we care very much. We no longer need to keep so much for ourselves. Where we have condemned ourselves, we see that God himself does not condemn us but rather would die for us. We are reconciled to God and to the whole God-Dance of loving, giving, and receiving.

This is good news, and because of it, we are free to love and to welcome others as God loved and welcomed us. We know we can trust God, so we can risk the suffering that comes along with love. If we allow Jesus to change us to look more like him, this should have social, ecological, economic, and geographical implications as he redraws the dividing lines. As we seek to get to know Jesus and follow him in South Hills, these are the implications we are seeking to understand so that God's will might be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Let’s refer back to the first story I told when I started talking about participation and the God-Dance. A seminary student, an ex-felon, and a community connector enjoyed a fellowship to create a garden. We experienced a literally creative fellowship of different people, and this may be the most important implication about who God is and what he has done for us. No matter what social systems or ecological realities come and go, no matter what powers oppress or disasters fall, we are invited to participate in a communion which continually creates and celebrates to give glory back to God. Jesus said that eternal life is in knowing him, and in knowing him, we are joined to a communion stronger than death. 

The distant, judgmental God becomes our father. The convicted God-man becomes a brother. The imagined Spirit becomes a felt presence. We participate. 

Jesus finished his prayer like this:

²⁰ “My prayer is not for [my disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, ²¹ that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. ²² I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— ²³ I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
²⁴ “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

²⁵ “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. ²⁶ I have made you^[e] known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” (John 17: 20-26)