I hear voices. Well, it’s actually me who’s talking. I tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.  Apologizing to the table when I bump into it. Imagining my books coughing from the dust I’ve let settle on them. I think it’s the Disney effect. Too many dancing tea pots and talking mice from my youth.

And I’m not alone in this. Seems we have always liked fashioning God in our image or an image we prefer. In fact, the very reason Moses calls the people “stiff-necked” in today’s first reading is because in the previous chapter, while Moses was lost in deep conversation with God on Mt. Sinai, the people got a bit worried. “Let’s craft God in our own image,” some suggested. “Good idea” others affirmed. And even Moses’ brother, Aaron, got caught up in it. They fashioned a golden calf to serve as their God-stand in.

But despite their sin, in today’s reading, Moses again ascends Sinai. For a second time he petitions God on their behalf, “yet pardon our wickedness and sins, and receive us as your own.”

How does God respond?

God speaks self-referentially:  “The LORD, the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity."

In Exodus Chapter 3, when Moses had asked for God’s name, the response was literally a form of the verb “to be”—“I am who I am.” And in this passage, God adds adjectives to God’s verbal identity, “I am merciful, gracious, slow to anger, rich in kindness and fidelity.” God is always beyond our capacity to name, imagine, or limit the essence of God.

Yet, as Barbara Bowe wrote, “our finite minds still strain to know this mystery. We want both to know and to name God, but in this pursuit our language falters, words fail us, and our naming falls short of the mark.”

In one of our earliest trinitarian doxologies, the Apostle Paul seems to intuit this. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

Paul distinguishes divine attributes—grace, love, and fellowship, each proceeding from a different person of the Godhead.

Grace—charis—also means loving-kindness, good-will, favor.

Love—agapē—is the type of love that is sacrificial, desiring the best for the beloved.

And fellowship—koinonia—is quite literally participation, communion.    

This grace, love, fellowship triad which we call the Trinity has given theologians no little challenge over the centuries. How do we envision one God but three persons? And why do we do so? Like our naming of God, we are left with only metaphor and analogy.

The Cappadocian Fathers described the Trinity as perichoresis, a dance of relationship and mutual indwelling.

St. John of Damascus used the analogy of God as the sun, Jesus as the rays, and the Holy Spirit as the heat.

Whether adjectives, descriptors, dances, or sunshine, all are encompassed within the oneness of God.

In the first reading, Moses interceded for the people’s sin. In the second, Paul chastised the people for their behavior. In the Gospel, the evangelist states clearly that God’s love has not abated, despite human mistakes. “For God so loved the world…”

The passage is part of a conversation between Jesus and a would-be disciple, Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus at night. Nicodemus doesn’t understand Jesus’ invitation to be born again.

So, Jesus explains more fully “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Later in John, Jesus will promise the aid of the advocate or Holy Spirit. But that Spirit is experienced only after the Passion.

The Trinity isn’t just a theological expression. It is a way of understanding God’s presence in and for the world.

As Elizabeth Johnson noted, “If God is creating and nurturing the world within the divine being—transcendently, incarnately, and immanently—then God must be conceived as experiencing the world’s suffering within Godself, rather than outside Godself. Pregnant with an evolving yet suffering cosmos, God can heal and transform suffering through the love and creativity that characterize the Trinity.”  

Instead of trying to make God in our image, perhaps we could take a cue from the Trinity, and allow love, grace, and fellowship to remake us in God’s image.

Let’s start by hearing voices—the voices of people in need, the hurting, the forgotten, and the quaking and crying Earth. Then at the invitation and inspiration of the Trinity, let’s join the dance!

‍