Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
July 16, 2006
Let’s Dance
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Two of our lessons for this morning have within them the mention of dance. In our reading from the 2nd book of Samuel, we hear about God’s chosen one, King David, dancing before the Ark of the Covenant with great exuberance. This act causes Michal, his wife, to “despise (David) in her heart” and to accuse her him of making a “vulgar display” of himself before others. In response to this, David lets her have it, insisting that it is his prerogative to, as he says, “make merry before the Lord.” This is apparently something the Biblical writer approves of in that we have almost no more mention of Michal after this incident.
In our Gospel that takes place at Herod’s birthday party, the daughter of Herod’s new wife, Herodias, dances before the ruler. So pleased is Herod by what he sees, that, in front of all his guests, he promises to give her whatever she desires. Coached by Herodias who has a grudge against John the Baptist, the girl returns to the party and demands the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Though grieved, Herod gives in to her request and the forerunner, alone in his cell is offered up.
Now while neither of these passages is about dancing per se, taken together and in the current church context, they do raise some interesting questions about images of the Christian life and their implications for our theology and our practice. For dancing has become a popular way to talk about life lived with God and before God. And it has taken on this significance for some very good reasons.
In Israel’s history, dancing was a central part of expressing the joy and exuberance of a relationship with God. After Moses leads the people through the waters and out of their bondage in Egypt, Miriam fills the air with music and leads the people in a dance. David and others danced in the presence of the ark, ancient Israel’s concrete sign of God’s presence in their midst. And in the contemporary festival of Simchat Torah, meaning “a rejoicing of the Torah” Jewish people march and dance with the Torah scroll in the synagogue in celebration of the gift of the Torah and the life of the Torah that God gives to the people.
Christians have not been as clear about dance, its place in worship and its fitness as an image for life with God. While ancient Christian worship was rooted in Jewish practice, some later Christians, especially during the middle ages, were suspicious of it because it was bodily and could too easily distract people from the adoration of God. However, other Christians embraced dance as a way to worship and as an image for our life with God.
One such person was a Victorian Anglo-Catholic named Steward Headlam. Headlam believed that the ceremony of Anglo-Catholic worship and the dance found in the scandalous working class music halls of his age both expressed the beauty and grace of the incarnate God who died to redeem society and to bring his people, all his people, into the joy of bodily life. For Headlam, the incarnation, the human form in movement and Anglo-Catholic patterns of worship were deeply connected.
In our own time preachers have extolled the Trinity as a dance between the three persons of God, churches have experimented with liturgical dance, and parishes have adopted communal liturgical movement as a way to express the Christian life in community. Contemporary authors have used dance as a way to talk about patterns of behavior in the home that reflect a lively relationship with God and have offered the image of dance as a way to think about the life of prayer. And of course, today as in times past, parishes like us continue the tradition of ceremony as a kind of dance before God and with one another as way to take our prayer into ourselves and to express what is inexpressible in language or song alone.
All of this is true, it seems to me. All of this is right.
But there’s something else, not what I would call a pervasive use of the idea of dance and the spiritual life, but one that allows me to trace my steps (notice I did not say dance) my way back to the gospel story and to make a distinction about the life of exuberant dance and the deadly turn of events in that story.
From the contemporary hymn entitled “The Lord of the Dance:”
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he
This is the chorus of a hymn written by Sydney Carter in 1963. Its tune is a variation on the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts.” The hymn’s lyrics describe Christ as the Lord of Dance in all moments of both his life and, therefore, in the life of Christians.
And so the hymn speaks of Jesus as the Lord of the dance of creation, Jesus dancing at his own birth, Jesus dancing in his clash with the scribes and the Pharisees, Jesus dancing in the calling of the disciples, Jesus dancing in his pronouncements about and practices of healing on the Sabbath, Jesus dancing with the devil on his back at his crucifixion on Good Friday and, of course, Jesus becoming the dance and the Lord of the dance at his resurrection. Out of this, we are all invited to dance all the moments of our lives, as the hymn says: “wherever we may be.”
We have never sung this hymn at St. Paul’s, but I have at diocesan gatherings or retreats sung this hymn. It has usually come after spending a lot of time together with other Christians, and so we are all exuberant about the joy of community and of Christ as experience there.
But I have to say that every time I’ve sung this hymn while feeling a certain kind of exuberance, I’ve also felt profoundly ambivalent, and this is what my ambivalence is about. As exuberant as I can be about spiritual life (and you know I can be exuberant), as much as I rely on the triumph of the resurrection, I could never characterize all of life’s moments as the kind of dance the hymn suggests. In fact, it seems to me crucial that I do not do this, that I do not make of Christ one who is dancing at every moment and that I do not try to make of my ragged life or your ragged life an exuberant dance at every moment. For to do so runs the risk of obscuring the scandal of the cross and the distance our God traverses to meet us in the place where no one else would go.
And this is the great contradiction. Our exuberance of spirit about this God, whether we express this exuberance outside ourselves or keep it within ourselves, comes as a result of having been met when we had no exuberance, when we could not put one foot in front of another much less dance. We were met there not by a dancing God but by the crucified one. You and I and many of the saints have been in this place: John the Baptist looking up from where he sat in a lonely cell, knowing perhaps that they had come for him, the sad vigil that Catharine, her family and friends are keeping, the beleaguered lives of the working poor of Headlam’s Victorian England, the Iraqi or the American family receiving news that a son or daughter or father or mother had died a violent death.
And so let’s dance—let’s bow and bend the knee and stand. Let’s hold our hands out in prayer and cross ourselves to seal the Trinity on our bodies. Let’s move to the rhythms of the life lived by an incarnate God who knew what it was to feel the breeze on his skin, the sun on his face and the touch of another at his arm, who knew what it was to hunger and to thirst, eat and to drink, to grow tired and to sleep. And let’s give ourselves to exuberance when it calls to us, for we have much to be thankful for in the simple gifts of life itself. But when we cannot dance, when we cannot move, God grant us the grace to sense the companionship of the one who emptied himself of every exuberance and gave himself up to death on the cross, finding it to be the way to freedom and life.
