July 16, 2006                         Scripture- 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19                                     Mark 6:14-29

            When Joseph Campbell was in Japan for a conference on religion, he overheard an American delegate say to a Shinto priest, “We’ve been now to a number of ceremonies and seen many of your shrines. But I don’t get your ideology.  I don’t get your theology.”

            The Shinto priest paused as if in deep thought, and then slowly shook his head.  “I don’t think we have an ideology.  I don’t think we have a theology.  We dance.”

            Our lectionary readings today are both about dance.  They are opposites in the intentions of the dance, though.  One is a dance of deception, of seduction, and one certainly done with murderous intent and revenge.  Salome, (who interestingly is never so named in the bible, being referred to only as the daughter of Herodias) wants revenge on John the Baptist for saying that her mother’s marriage to her brother in law was not legal.  Her dance is pre-meditated and focused on her personal agenda only.

            What David is doing in the passage from 2 Samuel is a reflection of what Campbell overheard the Shinto priest say.  This is the dance with God.  In this scripture, the lost Ark of the Covenant has been restored to its people, led by David.  The Philistines had defeated Israel and took that ark from them, and now David had defeated them, and it came back rolling on a cart before everyone; the presence of God was in their midst, and God would once again sit on High within the temple and be with them. 

            David is a great king.  He could have organized a procession for the ark and led it in all of his richest clothes, followed by his retinue with all due pomp and dignity.  But instead, he does an unexpected thing.  In front of both men and women, David removes his clothing and wears nothing but a small apron normally associated with the priesthood and religious functions.  This is the linen ephod, and it barely covers his nakedness in front of all of his people.

And David starts to dance.  To the sound of music all around him, because David was a musician, he begins a dance before the ark, before the presence of God.  His dance becomes ecstatic, and we hear that he danced with all of his might.  His dancing brings the people out to watch as the ark is led through all of the House of Israel behind a king who does not come in glory wearing fine robes, but who dances into the city like a court entertainer.  And his ecstatic dance causes the House of Israel to shout, and I would imagine that they too, joined in the dance or at least had their spirits lifted by the sight of this king who danced like a child in the presence of God coming back into their midst. 

While David is leaping and dancing before the Lord, his wife Michal, the daughter of former king Saul, looks out of her window in her tower and sees him behaving like a child and not as a king.  She looks down on him and the Bible says that she “despised him in her heart.”  Michal has been brought up as a royal person.  She knows that there are ways that people of her class are expected to behave in order to separate them from the common people, and what she sees David doing is not one of them. 

David places the ark in a simple tent so all of the people might feel the presence of God, and he blesses the people.  Then they all sit around and eat raisins and go home.  Afterwards, he goes to his house where Michal is holding a rolling pin.  (I’m speaking figuratively now, don’t look for this in the Bible.)  She’s more than a little sarcastic, saying “How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself before the eyes of the servant women, as some vulgar man shamelessly uncovers himself!” 

David’s reply is straightforward.  “God chose me.  God chose me, and I will be merry before God.  If you don’t like what you’ve seen so far, let me tell you, it’s only going to get worse!  You may be too important, too elegant to like me for what I’ve become in God’s presence, but the servants and the others will hold me in honor.  They get it, you don’t.”

This is King David, the best loved ruler of Israel, from whose line came Jesus, and this was a fellow who knew the importance of joy.  David danced before God; and Jesus danced with God in partnership.

How do we take this metaphor forward today?   From the 18^th century to the middle of this century, the Shakers flourished.  They believed in full partnership with God.  God was neither male nor female to them; they were all made in God’s image.  They had no intimate relations with anyone, giving themselves to God, and living together holding everything in community.  Their work was an expression of their relationship to God, and their craftsmanship became known for its simplicity, complete lack of ornamentation, and excellent workmanship.  But most of all, their belief in the presence of God was known through their dance, and this is why they were called “Shakers.”  In their formal dance, male and female members showed that they were members of one body and were necessarily equal to its existence as a divine community.  In the actual dance, all barriers between this world and the next were dissolved, as they moved in harmonic rhythms, continuing on into the night, growing more and more ecstatic until the formal dance of human structure broke down and they began to shake and jerk, and whirl themselves into an ecstasy, a union between themselves and the rhythm of God’s universe.

This was dancing with God, like David did before them.  This was the sense of the rhythms in nature to which we are attuned that connect us all in our relationships to each other, to the cosmos, and to God.  And in a sense, this is what we all metaphorically do in our own lives in terms of these relationships.

Even as we explore our own faith—the sureties and the uncertainties, the historical Jesus vs. the traditional religious claims, what Paul did or did not write, our “living the questions”—this is all a part of the dance.  We come here every week because we want to have faith, and we are willing to ask questions that lead to other questions, and ultimately try to find a stronger sense of our spiritual connection to what all of this means.  We want a sense of recognition of that spiritual connection to the movement of that which we call God.

When I am in midtown Manhattan and looked up at some large glass windows one the second floor of a building on 40^th Street.  Today it is an electronics store.  Twenty-five years ago, it was the dance studio where I took jazz classes five days a week.  I was never going to be a pro, but for an hour and twenty minutes a day, I went through a class that consisted of floor-work followed by a combination.  For the last half-hour we moved in unison to the new combination we learned.  The mirror in front of us reflected Times Square and our own look of collected concentration as we moved across that floor as one body to the music of Irene Cara, Diana Ross, and other current upbeat songs that would propel us into triple turns, sharp Bob-Fosse-like movements in place, then long glides across the floor.  By the time we were warmed up in an un-air-conditioned studio, each person was glistening, radiating warmth, concentration, dedication, a desire to move in perfect harmony with the whole universe, let alone the assembled bodies in black dance gear.  I can hear some of that music today, and I am right back in that room and others like it, remembering how it feels to have every muscle and sense react in unison with others in response to the music, and to move in a way I no longer can, feeling that the whole city and the spheres beyond it, are moving together to the collective heart-beat that pulses from the center of life.

The Shinto priest said, “I don’t think we have an ideology.  I don’t think we have a theology.  We dance.”  How do we come to the dance that is life?  First, do we recognize that it is a dance?  Can we let go and embrace it as we move in the rhythms of life eternal?

It is said that at any given time one out of ten people is in crisis.  Right now some people in this room are recognizing that they are entering a crisis, working through one, or re-emerging into a new phase of life that the crisis has pushed you to explore.  Where are you right now?

The experience then shifts.  Others enter into a crisis, or some life-changing event that makes you very aware that some rhythm in your life has changed.  Everyone enters and leaves the crisis mode.  Some stay longer than others.  Who you were before you began is not necessarily who you are when re-emerge.

Our dance is the movement through the phases of life trying to be in the here and now.  Some call it the search for meaning.  Joseph Campbell believes that we are not actually searching for meaning, as much as we are desirous of achieving a one-ness with the here and now.  We move in a dance with the universe in our relationship to God, knowing we bring nothing into the world and can take out nothing with us.  We aim at what David had; righteousness, faith, love, steadfastness, and gentleness in our dance with God that leads into the eternal.

David was a psalmist and he wrote songs of praise to God.  David knew to dance with God, just as Jesus taught what a partnership with the realm of God was all about.  David knew that joy and praise were the feelings that arose from knowing that you are in the ever-present “now” with the Creator.

We move in grace across the room with like minded partners, or awkwardly with those who challenge us.  We engage with each other in that dance a Shinto priest once described as the core of faith, a dance with God. 

To be like the Shakers—letting go to be ecstatic in our movement through the world is a powerful metaphor.  David was right to see communion with God in terms of a dance, as we turn not only in our dance with each other, but as we rotate on the axis of this planet every 24 hours, and spin the 93 million miles around the sun in concert with at least eight other planets, in a solar system that is rushing light years throughout a vast cosmos in a movement too vast to even comprehend.  The dance of God’s universe is beyond our control and infinitely larger than our cares, our joys, and our griefs.  David danced in the recognition of God‘s presence.  There is nothing to do but engage in it.  Be fully a part of it.  Just be. 

Selected Sources:

            RSV

            The Interpreter’s Bible, New York: Abingdon Cokesbury Press.  1953

            America: Religions and Religion, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co.  1992

(Pp. 241-244)

            The Power of Myth, Video Series, Bill Moyer, ed., with Joseph Campbell.  1988

Scripture, July 16, 2000

“The Dance” Year ‘B’, 5^th Sunday after Pentecost

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19

David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, thirty thousand.  David and all the people with him set out and went from Baale-judah, to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the LORD of hosts who is enthroned on the cherubim.  They carried the ark of God on a new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were driving the new cart with the ark of God; and Ahio went in front of the ark.  David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the LORD with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals.

So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom to the city of David with rejoicing; and when those who bore the ark of the LORD had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling.  David danced before the LORD with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod.  So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.

As the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.  They brought in the ark of the LORD, and set it in its place, inside the tent that David had pitched for it; and David offered burnt offerings and offerings of well-being before the LORD.  When David had finished offering the burnt offerings and the offerings of well-being, he blessed the people in the name of the LORD of hosts, and distributed food among all the people, the whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, to each a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins.  Then all the people went back to their homes.

Mark 6:14-29

King Herod heard of it, for Jesus' name had become known.  Some were saying, "John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him."  But others said, "It is Elijah." And others said, "It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old."  But when Herod heard of it, he said, "John, whom I beheaded, has been raised."  For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, because Herod had married her.  For John had been telling Herod, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife."  And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him.  But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him.  When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.  But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee.

When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, "Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it."

And he solemnly swore to her, "Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom."  She went out and said to her mother, "What should I ask for?" She replied, "The head of John the baptizer."  Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, "I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter."  The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her.  Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John's head.  He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl.  Then the girl gave it to her mother.

When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.