This week, I saw Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the musical. It was a local production, but staged in the enormous theatre at Crown Casino. Many of you will have seen the 1994 musical on which the musical is based, so you’ll remember the three main characters. Tick is still technically married and has an eight year old son. His wife now lives in Alice Springs and he’s never met Benji his son. Bernadette is an aging trans woman who was once part of Les Girls. And Felicia is a young, energetic up and coming performer, full of sass and naivete. The three of them appear in glamorous drag shows, and they travel on Priscilla (the bus) to Alice Springs with adventures along the way.
Now you may be thinking ‘this is Trinity Sunday, is he really going to propose that the trio of Tick, Bernadette and Felicia are somehow an icon of the Trinity?’. The answer is no, because of course while there are three drag queens, and each is a distinct person, they don’t share the same substance. So the analogy would fall down.
But the truth is, that when it comes to talking about God as Holy Trinity - three distinct persons with one common substance - every analogy falls down. So the Holy Trinity is not like water, ice and steam. It just isn’t. The Holy Trinity is not like a shamrock. And, as beautiful as the picture is, the Rublev icon, with three travellers sitting around a table, is a limited analogy as well.
The rule of thumb when it comes to images, analogies and comparisons about the Trinity, is that they are all wrong. The three creeds are fumbling attempts at language to get it right, and they too present a limited perspective on God as three persons. Whenever we talk about God as three persons with one substance, we do so knowing that we are trying to speak of a great mystery, and that the words or images are not themselves the mystery, but only, sometimes, serve to point at the mystery.
But even if the three camp lead characters of a piece of Perth musical theatre were not an icon of the Holy Trinity, I still glimpsed the presence of the triune God in the performance. To be fair, I had set myself a goal this week, to be on the lookout for hints of the Holy Trinity. Spoiler Alert, I’m going to invite you to do the same thing in the coming week. I’m going to ask you to ‘notice what you notice’ when seeking to view your daily experiences through the lens of the Trinity.
Here’s what I noticed.
The character of Bernadette, unlike Tick and Felicia, is a woman. She lives as a woman all the time, and her dead name is not used. In fact, when Felicia does use her former name, Bernadette is deeply wounded. Yet despite having a woman’s name and identifying herself as a woman, she doesn’t ‘pass’ as they say. Most people recognise that she is a Trans person and, as such, she occupies a different place in the community – whether she likes it or not. In 1994, we hadn’t really started to use the term ‘non-binary’ or ‘gender fluid, and the character quite clearly identifies as a woman. But there have always been trans and non-binary people in our communities. People who don’t fully identify with either their sex assigned at birth, or with either of the two gender roles that their society offers.
Bernadette challenges our binary system. When we want everyone to be A or B, or this or that – someone who is both or neither can be unsettling.
Jesus, too, unsettles our binary thinking. Christianity has maintained, as an article of faith, that Jesus is neither fully human nor fully divine, but both fully human and fully divine. Jesus occupies this middle space between humanity and divinity, and in so doing acts as a kind of bridge or window between the two. So how might we, how might I, see the non-binary nature of Christ and the presence of Christ in the non-binary person?
After a terrific song and dance session down the local pub in Broken Hill, the trio arrive back to find Priscilla painted with the F word in pink paint. Not the fun F word, the nasty one. The youngest, Felicia, is particularly hurt by this experience, and can’t believe that the same community who appreciated their performance would also engage in an act of violence and oppression. Tick and Bernadette are much more circumspect. They’ve seen it all before. In a poignant moment, they try to explain to Felicia that few people understand how much their community has sacrificed to get to where they are. It remains unsaid in the bubblegum musical, but we all know about the police violence and the young people kicked out of their homes, about the assaults that went uninvestigated and the vile slurs shouted in the streets, about the AIDS crisis, and the slow, disinterested response of governments.
Sacrifice for the greater good is part of the character of the triune God. The son giving up divine power and authority to be executed by human power is at the heart of our faith. The loving parent watching their child suffer and die. The Spirit walking alongside the sentenced person, all the way to death. This sacrifice exposes violence, and unmasks oppression, it sets in train a pathway to liberation – but in the process, an innocent person has to die.
Then, of course, there’s Dolly Parton and Pat Benatar and the Village People and John Denver. There’s garish and remarkable fashions, energetic dance steps, the sassy humour, the irony and the whimsy. Does God love the nightlife? Does God want to boogie? Does God say go west, life is peaceful there, lots of open air? Does God colour my world with sunshine yellow each day? Does God just wanna have fun?
Might we see, in a dress made of thongs or a wig made of polystyrene, the presence of a God who is playful, the God who laughs – who is not sour and dour but relishes the stupid, the weird and the quirky? Might we see, in the delightful sheer bonkers-ness of the world, a sign of God who not only dances to the beat of their own drum, but creates new rhythms every day, and invites us to dance along too. Might it be that God is always good, but not always well-behaved?
Doctrine and dogma and creed are human attempts to put language around the lived experience of God. But the starting point is not that ‘the bible tells me so’. We do not simply trust and obey the teachings of the church out of some misguided sense of obedience or compliance. The dry language of doctrine is trying to describe the God of our experience. And my experience is - and I hope that sometimes your experience can be - that God breaks into our lives both as Almighty Creator of all things, awesome and majestic, and as the still, quiet voice, nearer than my own breath. God gets in to this world, whether it is Christ in the scriptures, Christ in the sacraments, Christ in the gathered community of faith, or Christ in the poor. God sneaks in. And God the Holy Spirit, just when we think we’ve got God under control, breaks all the rules, breaks down the barriers, and shamelessly gets in our face like a drag queen at midnight.
So this week, I invite you. Look for the presence of the Triune God everywhere, everywhere you go, and everything you do, whether mundane – or fabulous.
The Lord be with you