What does our culture, our society, tell us about dancing? Does it celebrate it? Does it embrace and expand upon it, helping it to infuse our movements through the world? Or have we been taught to inhabit the expressive potential of our bodies, coordinated and rhythmic?
How passionate is our worship, how exuberant is our praise, how deep is our awe at what God is doing in our lives and in the life of the world? Do we really know what it feels like to rejoice "with all our might" because God is present in our lives? Have we ever felt so full of exultation about Who God Is that we want to dance without inhibition? Or are we closer to being the "frozen chosen" who sit almost immobile in our chairs?
As children, we all dance; we all embody the sounds of the world in a very physical way. Some of us rock spastically in our high chairs while others sway gracefully. Some of us shake our little fists energetically, or beat the ground like a drum, while others jump on any accessible piece of furniture. When we were children we danced uninhibited by our own self awareness and that of society’s.
When we think of David in the Hebrew Scriptures we remember him as hero and king, and his memory was indeed a bright, sustaining source of hope for the people of Israel . This week's reading portrays a very human, very joy-filled, dancing David, undoubtedly pleasing in God's sight.
The ark had been returned by the Philistines and for a while it rested in the house of Abinadab. David, in establishing Jerusalem as his seat of power, wanted to restore the ark to the center of the people's shared life, and he went to fetch it from its temporary home. In a sense, the ark had always had a temporary home, moving with the people in their journeys and resting only for a time in Shiloh . Perhaps David felt the ark was truly coming home, even though that home was new.
The procession that brought the ark into Jerusalem was ecstatic with singing, playing instruments, and dancing. David lost himself in the feeling of approaching God and sensing the power of God.
Psalm 24 describes in liturgical form how the power of God must be seen. Our path toward God must be ethically sound, which involves three things: first, purity of outward deeds or having clean hands; second, purity of thought and inward truthfulness, having a pure heart; and finally purity of religious practice or unadulterated faith, not pledging to falsehood or swearing by what is fraud. Being close to the power of God, being prophetic, and being truth-telling advocates for the Gospel message can be a euphoric experience. As it says in Ephesians 3, God’s power “working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
This week's reading from 2 Samuel, in one sense, book-ends the reading from two weeks ago (2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27) when David was full of grief over the deaths of Jonathan and Saul. The man who, tradition says, composed the psalms was obviously a person of deep feeling, and today's passage about his joy gives us another side of his passion, his profound gratitude and praise for God's work in the life of the Israel, bringing the people together, uniting the kingdom, strengthening them in common cause against the enemy Philistines, establishing the people and their land and the Davidic dynasty to the glory of God, fulfilling the promises of God right before their eyes, in their own lifetime.
Today, however, David’s dance is not the only one we hear about. In our Gospel reading there is another dance. This second dance takes on a different character. Herod’s daughter dances to entertain. It is the ruler’s birthday celebration. And all the leaders of Galilee gather to be amused, while John the Baptist sits locked in a cell because he called upon Herod to emerge from his sinfulness. Herod had married his brother, Philip’s wife. The daughter is apparently a talented dancer. Imagine her graceful and perhaps provocative movements. Her dance enrapturing and exciting a room full of powerful men. Her self-expression drives them to distraction and foolishness – a dance worth half a kingdom. This dance too ends in a banquet of sorts: a head served on a silver platter, a banquet of enslavement to desire, hubris, pride, arrogance, and revenge.
The contrast is striking: David’s dance of life, the banquet of heaven, and the daughter’s dance and banquet of death. The tales of two dancers in two very different times, dancing two very different dances.
We gather today to dance. Foolishly, unapologetically, and beautifully we dance. We sing to each other ballads of our common history, punctuated by gestures of stillness, of standing, and sitting, of clasping our hands and bowing our heads. Our bodies, our voices, and our movements become vehicles for expressing our relationship with the divine. And at those times when we come forward to the table, we present those gifts, gifts of ourselves, to God and to one another – a feast, a banquet set open to all who would come.
But the beauty and the challenge of these readings, paired as they are, is that they point to the fact that the dance, and the banquet that flows out of it, can be an instrument both of life and death, with potential both to sanctify and desecrate.
How are we as individuals transformed by our dance, transformed by our liturgy? By our gathering? By our faith? How are we, like David, expressing what we know of God, what we have seen of God, and God’s relationship to us, in this moment of dancing.
William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who died at the age of 81, was an honored scholar, civil rights leader, antiwar activist, and a prophet. He summed up his faith by saying, “The Christian church is called to respond to Biblical mandates like truth-telling, confronting injustice, and pursuing peace.”
The world we live in is a place where power and authority are often thought of in terms of personal privilege and gain. Are the choices we make to live our lives seen as authentic demonstrations of Biblical mandates or do these choices simply challenge authority and invite criticism? And what if we are criticized? Should we let that deter our actions and cause us to forsake the Gospel mandate?
Evident in our readings today is the complex and often volatile relationship between the rule of God and the rule of humanity. Those who recognize the power of God as ultimate, speak the truth, and those who speak genuinely prophetic words are often judged as dangerous and threaten the established political and religious institutions. We can name many prophets of our time who have demonstrated a true understanding of God’s power and have spoken out, telling the truth about injustices and pointing us toward understanding the Gospel in spite of the cost: Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero, and Desmond Tutu. Their stories inspire our lives and challenge us to ask how privilege and power blind us to prophetic words and their demand for justice. Does our desire for privilege and power (even for benevolent purposes) lead us to feel exempt from living according to the Gospel?
What we do may often look like a ridiculous dance in the eyes of the world, amidst so much modern complexity. But by the grace of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the ardent pursuit of the example of Jesus Christ, it is a dance that can transform the world.
It is a dance that will feed the world when it is for us truly a dance of life, a dance of offering. Like David, our dance must be done with all our might. It must be a dance that acknowledges the unique, limited, often uncoordinated way in which each of us tries to embody and express anew the music and breath of the spirit moving in us. It must acknowledge that the dance we do is an expression of our humanity, and it must be a dance that “with all its might” seeks to draw together instead of dividing, to empower instead of belittling, to interpret rather than dictate. It must be a dance that is shared by all in the human family.
The prophets of the Old and New Testaments and the prophets of modern day demand justice and a life lived according to the Gospel. Their witness exposes those who misuse power and privilege for their own glory. Their witness exposes the use of power to control and oppress others. Their witness assures us that it is possible to recognize God’s power as the only authority. We must strive to live lives that are evidence of the power of God as we become truth-telling advocates for justice and peace. And, when this brings us close to God, let us dance as ourselves, as humans, as community. Let us be moved to celebrate ecstatically with our whole selves. Thanks be to God.