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.