which dance?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

ORDINARY SUNDAY 15 (July 15th) 2018

READINGS:

2 Samuel 6.1-5, 12b-19

Psalm 24

Ephesians 1.3-14

Mark 6: 14-29

I’m not sure that a person walking into our church today, armed with no prior knowledge of the scriptures of our faith, would feel enticed by the gospel we attempt to proclaim. Two readings depict cynical and destructive human nature with such eloquence that we might feel nothing more than reinforcement of the despair, or near-despair, that emanates from almost every daily news-cast.

For when the great Jewish peasant-king David dances in ecstasy before the Ark of God, Princess Micah, who once loved David deeply, now responds only with cynicism and loathing. Strangely she had good reason.

Let’s not make this a gender-based scene. It is so easy to loathe, so easy and tragic to allow love to turn to hate. It should be said, in fairness to this all but unknown Hebrew woman, that she has good reason to hate the man she once loved, for his treatment of her is at best ordinary, at worst abhorrent. But hatred kills the human soul.

We learn in the passage that follows ours that the dance of David in our strange scene was so ecstatic and manic that he forgot the limited power of robes to conceal the graphic details of the human form (he says, discretely!). Princess Michal had good reason to look on and scorn the man whose life she once saved, the man she once loved (1 Sam 18.20). He treated her badly. Love is a risk.  

But for the purposes of our story we might just recognize that in this moment David was so ecstatic, so manic in his love for God, that all propriety is lost. Perhaps we should dwell somewhere in the balance between propriety and ecstasy, but for a moment let us just be reminded that it is possible to be so awed, so overwhelmed by the experience of God that we lose sight of proportionality. Perhaps, if only for a moment, let us forget the back-story of Princess Michal’s wounded heart, and see only that she has seen something she does not understand, and shut down her heart contemptuously.

For the risk is that we too can do that too easily, seeing and scorning and “dissing” the views and enthusiasms and ecstasies of others. Too easily we make our own experience the criterion, the normative, by which all else is judged. When we do this we shut ourselves off from the learning experiences we might gain from seeing the art and love of God at work in people and cultures and even faiths that we do not understand.

But we have a second dancer. The obscene dance of Herodias’ daughter Salome has been powerfully depicted in the arts, especially, as some of you will know, by Richard Strauss, by Gustave Flaubert, and especially by Oscar Wilde. It is a brutal twist on the theme of honey trap, a cruel reminder that sexuality and seduction are among the Achilles heels of humanity. It is a deeply disturbing New Testament scene.

Yet sometimes we need to be disturbed – as we reminded ourselves at Pentecost when we sang in praise of the disturbing Spirit of God, the “enemy of apathy” who hovers over the waters of creation. As we watch the extent to which some forms of Christianity have been seduced by power and privilege, dancing with programmes of hatred and exclusion, we might pause to realize how easy it is to become Herod. He wrings his hands pathetically as he is seduced to immeasurable evil by the machinations of his enraged and vengeful wife (and let’s remember to rise above gender stereotypes, here, too.)

Trump’s supporters remind us that it is far too easy to distort the gospel to a dance of self-interested privilege. Too easily we create a white pseudo-Jesus, false-Jesus. To easily we condemn those we don’t like to live in poverty, exposing them to receive brutal racist attacks, or turning a blind eye, as Europe’s Christians did in the 1930s, as the vulnerable are taken away by brown-shirts or their modern equivalents in the night.

It can all seem so far away. Yet though we live on the other side of the world we need to make sure our attitudes or even our complacencies don’t subscribe to an evil dance. To make sure we don’t, we need to look again and again at the attitudes and teachings and actions of the real Jesus. The real Jesus constantly reaches across divisions of hatred and exclusion, walks with and talks with and heals the underprivileged and the powerless and the broken and the outsider.

It’s not too much of a distortion of our texts to remind ourselves that the author of Ephesians gives us a strong hint, a clue as to how we can be bearers of real Jesus. For the relationship with Jesus begins with grace, an undeserved gift, not privilege.

It begins, continues, and ends with our not being good enough. It begins and continues and ends with the knowledge that we too can be callous Davids. That great king of the Jews is to say the least an ambivalent servant of God. We can be hurting Michals, scheming Herodiases. We can be seducing Salomes, dancing a honey trap (or, in the interests of equality, let’s remember too, the predators who have used power imbalance as their trap). We can be hand-wringing Herod Antipas, who leaves the prophet that he admires hung out to dry and die.  

Our challenge is to reach, as Jesus did, and always with the help of the Spirit of Jesus, to reach across the abyss, with actions and with words, to those who are hurting, broken, excluded.  Who are they? Even in Queenstown they are all around us. We might even risk asking God to show us.

If we do enough as individuals, as church, as servants (as we will shortly sing in Richard Gillard’s “Servant Song”), if by the Spirit of God we reach out with Christ-light in the night-time of human fear, then we will be dancing the dance of God. There is no guarantee that there will not be the cynical glares of those we have hurt in the past, as Princess Michal was hurt, but our dance of faith may rumour resurrection hope in empty lives. 

That’s the dance that we are called to perform. Can we even envisage being so ecstatic, so manic in love for God, that all propriety is lost? Yet this our God is the God whose promise, far beyond our small ken, is eternity. Perhaps we can learn to dance God’s “yes” to all that God made, all that God pronounced good, all that is. Perhaps we can learn to dance with God.

TLBWY