Go Forth in the Dance!

Jeremiah 31:1-6

April 20, 2014

How many times have you laughed or rolled your eyes at the notion of liturgical dance? Go ahead. You can admit it.

Many of us, maybe even most of us, snicker a bit at the notion of dancing in worship. Heck, I’ve been a “church professional” for a long time, so I’ve been in more than my fair share of worship services over the years. I’ve seen liturgical dancing done poorly. I’ve seen it done very well; and I still count myself among the eye rollers most of the time.

I’m sure that to excellent dancers and to those who attend to dance with care and passion, dance makes some kind of sense, but I can’t pin that down. I can enjoy dancing itself, though I certainly don’t do it well. But I can’t make sense of it. I can appreciate excellent dancing when I see it, but I still can’t make sense of it. I can watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; I can watch Michael Jackson; I can watch Baryshnikov and appreciate them all without making sense of it.

Perhaps that’s why Jeremiah’s vision grabs me so as a reading for Easter Sunday: “take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers!” It makes no sense to me – especially not as a word to a people who have suffered defeat and exile. “Go forth in the dance?”

“Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!”

That makes no sense, either – especially not as a word to a people who have lost their beloved friend, nor to us – 2,000 years later on, who live in a world where death certainly seems to get the final word.

People are not “raised from the dead.” Dead is dead. The end. Sign the certificate, turn the page, and move on because there is nothing more to see here.

Last week I read one of those New Yorker articles. You know the kind: a long reflection on something that you don’t really care about at all, but the piece is so well written that you plow through the whole thing. This one[1] was on death certificates, and it turned, ultimately, on what those bureaucratic forms try, and in the end, fail to capture: why we die. The writer quotes a Bernard Malamud short story in which a census-taker named Davidov asks a man named Rosen how an acquaintance died:

“How did he die?” Davidov spoke impatiently, “Say in one word.”

“From what he died? – he died, that’s all.”

“Answer, please, this question.”

“Broke in him something. That’s how.”

“Broke what?”

“Broke what breaks.”

Ah, yes. Broke what breaks. Why did Jesus die? Do you want a proximate cause? A final cause? A clinical cause? An ultimate cause?

“Broke what breaks.”

Let me tell you what breaks. Lots of things break. News breaks. Machines break. Bones break. Look at the headlines on any given day: pretty much the whole world breaks.

What breaks in the story of Jesus is the heart, and what breaks first is the heart of God.

That’s what this story of Holy Week and its culmination in Easter is all about: the rending and mending of the heart of God.

In fact, the entirety of scripture can be read as a long meditation on this rhythm in the heartbeat of God: the breaking and restoration of the divine heart.

God’s heart fills with wonder at creation, and is broken by the acts of creatures. Only to be restored again, and broken again, and so on over and again:

·      Creation. Evil. Flood. Rainbow.

·      Abraham. Israel. Enslavement. Exodus.

·      Exodus. Faithlessness. Wilderness. Canaan.

The pattern repeats again and again in the stories of the kings and the prophets, and, in Christian scripture, it culminates in the story of Jesus where it can be summed up in these four words:

·      Love. Betrayal. Death. Resurrection.

The dance looks like this: the Creator invites; the creature rejects; hearts are broken; the Creator mends them.

Except that it has four steps, I’d think of this as a waltz because, to me, waltzes always have a touch of sadness amidst the gentle whirl of joy.

But, as I said earlier, no matter how much I may try to think about a dance, in the end, the dance escapes reason – much like God.

The early church fathers, in struggling to articulate their understanding of the heart of God, came to describe the Trinity with the Greek word, perichoresis. One could literally translate the term as “circle dance.” It combines two words: peri, which mean “around,” as in perimeter; and chorea, which means “dance.”

The heart of God is a divine dance.

Bryan McLaren describes it like this: “The Trinity was an eternal dance of the Father, Son and Spirit sharing mutual love, honor, happiness, joy and respect. […] God’s act of creation means that God is inviting more and more beings into the eternal dance of joy.” As McLaren suggests, in our brokenness and separation from each other and from God, we step out of the dance, we stomp on each other’s feet, we lose all grace and rhythm and beauty.

As the horror and violence of Holy Week make starkly clear – or, as the news of any given week does as well, we do a whole lot worse than stomp on each other’s feet. Take a moment. Think about your own life. What are the places that feel broken and bereft, the places that feel as dark as the tomb, and that could use the bright light of a new day?

Lots of life feels that way. Nevertheless, God does not give up on us. God calls us, again and again and again and again and again, to rejoin the dance. This makes no sense. Easter makes no sense.
Broke what breaks? Yes. What breaks gets broken. But that is not the end. The story isn’t over; there is something beyond the certificate of death. The women who went to the tomb understood this first, and they heard a voice that invited them to something entirely new in their experience. I like to imagine that voice said, “shall we dance!”

Easter invites us to something entirely new, something that makes no sense, something beyond the certificate of death, something akin to a dance.

Easter is God’s great “yes” to the “no” of humankind.

Easter is God’s infinite love acting against all that stands in the way of love.

Easter is God, gazing through divine tears, at a stumbling, bumbling, broken creation and saying, “come, dance with me.”

Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed! Come and join the dance. Amen.

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[1] “Final Forms,” by Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, April 7, 2014, 37.

Passion Faith

Matthew 21:1-11; Isaiah 50:4-9

April 13, 2014

The other week on the book of faces there was a Louis C.K. quote floating around. Something to the effect of, “we didn’t grant women the vote until 1920. That means American democracy is 94 years old. There are three people in my building who are older than American democracy.”

I chuckled and wondered what George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have thought about that … and then I wondered what their slaves would have thought.

It’s pretty easy to judge the past by the present. The present occupies a lofty perch from which to cast our eyes back. It doesn’t take even an above-average historian to look back with a modicum of clarity and judgment.

It takes even less insight to judge the present in terms of the past. That is the work, mostly, of nostalgia and sentimentality.

On the other hand, it takes a prophet with clarity and discernment to judge the present by the terms of the future.

Palm Sunday often brings to my mind reflections on time and perspective. It’s easy to judge the palm-waving celebrants marking Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem through the lens of Good Friday when those songs of “hosannas” turned so quickly to shouts of “crucify him!”

But in the midst of that triumphal entry I don’t doubt that the sentiments were mostly genuine and authentic. It’s clear that lots of people loved Jesus. After all, thousands of folks turned out to hear him preach.

By the measure of their enthusiasm, in the midst of a day that only retrospectively became celebrated as the beginning of Holy Week, I suspect most people thought they were simply part of a joyous demonstration that was poking some gentle jabs at the powers that be.

Riding into town on a donkey! That’s classic street theater turning upside down the grand entrances of the imperial powers on their fine war horses. The scene brings to my mind the many demonstrations and marches I’ve been in over the years with their giant puppets and signs and songs.

Most of the people who turn out for such things do so out of real commitment to the purpose, and I am not going to cast retrospective suspicion on those crowds in Matthew’s gospel.

No. Palm Sunday’s enthusiasm is real! Hosanna in the highest!

Sing it back to me:

Glory to God! Glory to God! Glory in the highest!

To God be glory for ever!

Hallelujah, amen!

That’s right! That’s perfectly appropriate! That’s genuine!

That’s also easy.

It’s almost as easy as judging the present by the terms of the past. Our songs can so easily slip into sentimental nostalgia.

Or, they can bring us into equally easy judgment. After all, we know those Palm Sunday crowds turned quickly on Jesus, and their songs had barely faded before being replaced by angry shouts. We know that. And so we like to believe better of ourselves.

I think that’s why we’re so prone to skipping, in terms of our liturgical observances, straight from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. That way we miss all the messiness of the week: the challenges of the Last Supper, the bewilderment of betrayal, the deep sadness of the garden, the horror of the cross, the silence of the tomb.

We’d prefer to go from “hosannas!” to “hallelujahs!” without pausing for the passion.

We’d rather not go there. Indeed, we’d prefer to think that we’d never go there. After all, we’re not like that. We don’t do those sorts of things.

Jon Stewart had a riff on this last week regarding, in particular, the release of CIA torture memos and the notion that, after all, we don’t do those sorts of things. Jon said, it’s “like with your internment camps and your, what do you call it there, uh, slavery, America has a history of doing a tremendous amount of stuff that ‘we don’t do.’”

“We are a moral people. In hindsight.”

I don’t think that’s uniquely American. Rather, I think it’s distinctively human. We are all moral people, in hindsight.

It’s only in the rare clarity of the present moment that we sometimes confront our own deep complicity in the brokenness of the world. Like when I sit back in great self-satisfaction in my “made in the U.S.A.” New Balance running shoes, and get to work on my Macbook, without pausing for even an instant to wonder about the hands that put my laptop together and the conditions of work and life of the child of God who put it together for me.

We cannot escape our own deep complicity in the brokenness of the world, any more than we can skip from parades and waving palms straight on over to “hallelujahs” and an empty tomb. If our faith is genuine, our journey will take us from palms to passion.

Oh, to be sure, we can choose to ignore all of that, but if we say we are followers of Jesus, then we must confess that we worship a crucified God made known to us in the life and the death of the suffering servant. In addition to the songs of genuine joy, we must attend to that song of deep sorrow, as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhX6cZGxRPU&feature=share  

As we move today steadily more distant from “hosannas” and waving palms, and draw closer this Holy Week to the reality of betrayal, denial, and cross, we move in a wondrous contradiction – knowing already that we are loved and forgiven, but asking of ourselves about our own responsibility for that broken reality and about our own responses to that love.

What tombs are we stuck in? Personally? As a community? As a nation?

Where do we desperately need a little light?

What would we choose to forget?

What must we remember?

How do we sing the Lord’s song in a broken land?

Whatever else it may sound like, I think that song begins like this: Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.

Expect to be Surprised

1 Samuel 16:1-13

March 30, 2014

Let’s preach this one together, shall we? What strikes you about this wonderfully rich little story about the call of David?

*****

As I described it a moment ago, this is a wonderfully rich story, and it’s rich with preaching possibilities. I like a lot of them:

Start with the opening lines. Here’s a scene of fascinating confrontation. The elders of the little town of Bethlehem wondering in fear why this visit from the great Samuel, who had judged over all the land, who had selected and anointed Saul as the first king of Israel. His showing up brought way more in the way of threat than promise. Yet in this moment begins, Biblically, the importance of this small village.

That’s a fine beginning, and then we’ve got God saying, on the one hand, “do not look at his appearance,” and then, so soon thereafter, on the other hand falling head over heels in love with David, whose sole qualifications seems to be that “he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome.” Seriously, what’s up with that, God?

We all know David, and we know a lot about where his story is going to go. But what about the other sons who are paraded before Samuel? What about Eliab? His name means, “God is father,” or “God is my father,” so you’d think he would be important enough to get to be the next king. Not only that, he’s the first-born son, so the honor, by rights, should fall to him. Moreover, Eliab was apparently a strong, tall man who followed King Saul into war.

It’s really no wonder that Samuel looks upon him and thinks, “this is the guy.” When he loses out to his baby brother, it’s no wonder that the only other thing we learn about Eliab is that, later on when David starts talking tough about taking on Goliath, Eliab will be quite jealous and mean-spirited about the whole thing. Given his circumstance, that seems a pretty normal response to me, and reminds me a bit of the elder brother in the Jesus’ story about the prodigal son.

What about Abinadab, whose name meant literally, “my father is willing,” as in, perhaps, “my father is willing to give me up to take on King Saul, but do I have any say in the matter?” Well, we’ll never know because Abinadab is one of the characters who appear for one moment and then follow the king off to war before shuffling off the stage of Biblical history altogether. 

Then there’s the third brother, Shammah, whose name means loss, desolation, or astonishment. He appears later on as the father of Jonadab, who, let’s be honest here, sets up the rape of Tamar.

Anyone who ever calls for a return to Bible-based family values really ought to be required to read the entirety of the David saga. The family of David could provide all the fodder necessary for a show called “Premodern Family.”

Their story is as messed up as it is fascinating, yet as I read the passage over again in recent days, they did not strike me as the most interesting piece of the textual puzzle.

The fascinating character, to me, is Samuel. He is the character of remarkable faithfulness. Consider his position for a moment. God calls him to identify the new king even while the old king, Saul, still sits on the throne. Samuel is treading on dangerous ground here, and he knows it. Not only that, God tells him to bypass the culturally accepted norms for picking from among a line of sons. Everything in the culture of ancient Israel says, “pick the firstborn.” When Samuel lays eyes on him, he sees a tall, strong man – the image of authority, and naturally thinks he’s found his man. But God says, “no, not that one, nor the next, nor the next, nor the one after that. In fact, I’ve got my eyes on number seven!”

Samuel looks at number seven, at David, and probably thinks, in accordance with cultural expectations, “this one is too pretty to be a ruler.”

The late, great Molly Ivins famously observed that to be president of the United States all you really need is “a good head of hair, and a good line of talk.” The expectations in ancient Israel were a bit different. You needed to be big enough and strong enough to take on the Goliaths of the surrounding armies. King Saul, while said to be quite handsome, was noted first for standing head and shoulders taller than any other man in Israel. David had lovely pink cheeks and beautiful eyes, but it doesn’t sound like he could stand in the same line of tough guys as his eldest brother, much less in the line with King Saul.

So Samuel must be left to wonder, “what in the world is God thinking? What does God see that I don’t see? And, for this pretty boy I’m out here risking my life? This will not end well for me.”

Samuel could easily have said to Jesse, “thanks so much for letting me meet all the boys. Now, Eliab, come with me. You’re going to be the next king of Israel.”

No one would have known any different. Clearly Eliab looked the part, and would have been the one of Jesse’s sons that everyone would expect to be tapped. But Samuel does not disobey the inward voice of God.

That’s the fascinating part, to me, and it simply continues the arc of Samuel’s long and faithful life. Recall the beginning of his story – serving in the temple to the elderly Eli, the boy Samuel is called by God to give Eli the bad news that the time of his family’s power has come to an end. Samuel delivers that news.

Here, he delivers what can only come as bad news to Eliab, and as shocking news to everyone else who hears it, including David.

Samuel, while certainly not the perfect man, is, nonetheless, a compelling figure of obedience, and his story underscores that challenging aspect of the life of faith. As Bonhoeffer observed, for many of us it is never a question of faith, but always one of obedience. Obedience is show much more difficult than mere belief.

In fact, a great deal of the time we let our doubts about creeds and orthodoxies – about belief systems – grow so thick that we never even get around to questions of obedience. Doubt becomes an excuse for inaction.

That’s why I love Samuel. He is filled with doubts – you can see them throughout his story. Yet nevertheless, Samuel does what he knows God is calling him to do: speak the truth as he has been given to understand it to the powers that be in his time. Speak the truth to power, even when power doesn’t want to hear it.

It’s instructive to hear, again, another part of Bonhoeffer’s observation about obeying the call of Christ. He famously said, “when Christ calls us he bids us come and die.” Yeah, speaking truth to power can get you in an incredible amount of trouble. Indeed, it can get you dead.

I like to think that David, as complicated a figure as could be, learned some simple truths from Samuel, and that those simple truths shaped and informed some of the songs David would compose.

Yes, speaking truth to power, being utterly obedient to God, obedient to the point of a cross, can lead you deep into the valley of the shadow of death. David would surely come to know that. The life of faith can leave you feeling as if enemies are encamped all around you, and David certainly would come to know that.

But I like to think that David learned from Samuel that even in the darkest valley, goodness and mercy would follow, and a dwelling place in the house of the Lord would be there forever and ever. May each of us find that in our own lives of faithful obedience to the always new and challenging call of God. Amen.