Sermon preached by The Rev’d Neil Fernyhough, 6th Sunday After Pentecost (July 12, 2009).
Readings: 2 Samuel 6: 1-5, 12-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1: 3-14; Mark 6: 14-29.
“David danced before the Lord with all his might.” – 2 Sam 6:14
Can you recall the first time you danced? Chances are that you probably can’t, especially since the question itself invites another: What is dance? Is the kind of hopping back and forth that toddlers do when music is played dancing? Certainly my marching around the house to The Teddy Bears’ Picnic must have qualified – and no, I’m not talking about last week!
Dancing is a form of expression and communication. Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, to quote the old song. And humans do it. No one quite knows how long we’ve been at it – but artistic depictions of dancers dating back 9000 years have been found. My guess is that our species has been dancing for almost as long as we’ve been walking. And something that embedded in our identity can’t be trivial – it must in some way be essential.
The forms of dance are almost as varied as forms of speech. Marching is as different from ballet as the minuet is from a breakdance or a freeform tribal ritual dance is from the tango. As a type of nonverbal communication, dance is undertaken in a variety of contexts – as performance, as a component of courtship, as an expression of lament or ecstatic praise, as a prelude to war, or as a prelude to sex. It expresses spirituality, delight, determination, bonding, even anger. It occurs in bars, in churches, in homes, and on the street. Anywhere there are human beings, there is dancing.
In our Old Testament reading today, we have a singularly vivid account of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. By the description, David’s dancing is rapturous, filled with unrestrained spiritual joy. Indeed, all the Israelites, like David, are characterized as leaping and dancing with all their might, accompanied by lyres, harps, tambourines, castanets, and cymbals. This unrepressed physical display of divine adoration, accompanied by David’s appearance in a rather skimpy loincloth, inspires loathing on the part of his wife, Michal.
Michal’s reaction reminds us that, like all communication, dancing invites a response. And that response is often visceral, like Michal’s. My own theory is that the more rhythmic a human expression is, the deeper and more profoundly it touches us, whether we are responding to the cadence or pitch of speech, the metre of poetry, the time signature of music, or the flow and symmetry of the visual arts. I think the reason for this is a spiritual and natural one. Rhythm is an ordering of time and space evoking the rhythms of tides, seasons, or the 24-hour circadian rhythm of living things. In other words, rhythm reflects the flow, movement, and equilibrium of creation itself, the choreography by which God makes the universes move. And dance is a powerful way of giving voice and interpretation to that choreography.
The power of dance is eloquently and chillingly exposed in our Gospel reading – the dance of Herodias for the death of John the Baptist. In it we see that the flip from the light of divine beauty to the darkness of evil intent is as subtle as a turn of the heel. Desire melts into destruction; skill and talent transforms into manipulation; the straightforward natural loveliness of God’s rhythms are marshalled into the service of the devil. It is an amazing story. After Herodias entrances her audience with movement; the king, in an unguarded moment, offers up to half his kingdom to his daughter. Upon consulting with her mother, she asks her father, without so much as batting an eyelash, “to give me at once the head of John the baptizer on a platter.” And, just as remarkably, Herod does so – for no better reason than to avoid dishonour and embarrassment in front of his court.
I’m sure that many of you will have your own stories of the evocative potency of dance. I find it strange that while we sing, speak, and play music in church, and celebrate the visual, liturgical, and textile arts in church, we don’t dance in church. I have danced the hora at a bar mitzvah, and seen a Sufi dervish spin upon the labyrinth at St. Paul’s Church, and have even participated in a neopagan solstice dance, but I’ve only once seen dancing in church. It was a dancing out of the Gospel reading while I was at seminary, considered very avant garde at the time. I want to put a plug in for Christian dancing. Many people cringe at the thought, thinking that if they can’t do something creative perfectly, they should avoid doing it at all in order to escape the disapproval of others. This is immensely sad. Creativity is a gift of the Spirit and so what is produced from it has, to quote Ecclesiastes, already been approved by God.
But perhaps we already are dancing. Perhaps our lives are a dance – an interplay of movement between you and God, you and others, you and creation. It has been said that the impulse to dance originates in the womb, rhythmically enacting the comfort of the rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat. The completeness we feel when we allow ourselves to be lost in the dance is therefore simply an extension of the completeness of our being in a creation filled with rhythm.
Given all this, I invite you to consider a new way of viewing the world – namely, that your movement through life is a dance. It can be a dance of praise, or a dance of despair. It can be a triumphal march, a ballet of skill and delicate restraint, or simply letting yourself go to move to the beat. It can be the dance of David, or the dance of Herodias. Better yet, it can be your own dance, hand-in-hand with God, twirling, pulsing, shimmering to your twinned heartbeats. The choice, as always, is yours.
We are all creatures of rhythm, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. We sleep, we rise, we eat, we make love, we age, all according to the rhythms of the universe. If we tune our movements to God, we can make our walk through this life into a dance, combining playfulness with skill in a way that expresses the finest attributes of creation. And so I invite you to make some time this week to dance, in whatever way your mobility and skill will allow – even if it is a gentle rolling of the head. For in it, I promise, you will discover a prayerful pathway to God, attuning yourself to the rhythms of the divine dance of being. Amen.
© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.
