Kendall's Notebook, Page 53TTitle: “Dance”
July 16, 2006
2 Samuel 6: 1-19
Kendall Brown
When the mother and father of the bride finally took the dance floor at one wedding, the show no longer belonged to the bride and the groom. The wedding was that of their youngest daughter. All five of her siblings, their spouses and children stopped everything to watch the maternal parents dance together. They didn’t miss a beat. Their bodies moved as one in perfect harmony with the music. Their enjoyment of each other and the dance moved from the visible display on the dance floor to an invisible spirit that touched all in the room. Delight, appreciation, love, respect and grace whirled around in the spirit as wondrously as the couple on the floor.
The children watched their parents with awe. Tears were rolling down many cheeks, as the dance called forth many wonderful family memories to roll through the mind. One of the children said, “There has never been anything that we like doing more than just watching Dad and Mom dance together.”
Dance was and is a religious activity in many religions and has been for countless centuries. It has been an expression of religion for our Christian ancestors in the Jewish faith. When King David danced before the Lord he was doing nothing particularly extraordinary. Without a doubt dance came into human life as worship and religious expression in the first place.
More than any other culture on earth, our culture has removed dance from our worship and spiritual life. We have relegated this wondrous art form and prayer form to the arena of entertainment. My mother’s upbringing in the Methodist Church is an example of this. Dance along with card playing, going to the movies and chewing gum were forbidden on Sundays. Nevertheless, my mother and her brother and sister, who were all very musical, formed a dance band with some of their friends. They played Saturday nights at old country dance halls. I imagine they had to cut off at midnight.
It is hard to believe that we have done such a good job of fencing dance out of our worship and abdicating this particular expression of spirituality to the world of entertainment. Somehow, we are awfully good at compartmentalization. Work, play, worship – have nothing to do with each other as we separate them for different times and places. But this is not the way it has been for all times; not even in the formative days of our own religious tradition. In Christian theology, dance was a part of the picture in the very earliest days of our church. The early Christians had experienced the presence and power of God in three different ways. They knew God as the Creator, they had experience God’s presence in Jesus of Nazareth who was personally know by many of them, and finally they experienced the power and presence of God through the Holy Spirit.
It was one thing to experience this. It was another to take this experience into the realm of theological-philosophical reflection and explain it. Every time one question would be answered, two more would pop up. In particular, thinkers struggled with questions like how could one part of the trinity be in a particular time and place without the other parts also being there. Is it possible for one part of the trinity to be in one place and not be in all other places at same time?
Dance provided the answer. The Christian theologians borrowed a word from the world of Greek theatre. That word was perichoresis. The first part of that word is “peri” which in Greek means around or surround. Think “perimeter” or “pericardium.” The other word is “choresis.” This word means to dance. Think choreography.
Greek actors often held more than one role. The different face masks that the actors used indicated these roles; thus the symbol for theatre and Thespians ever since the days of Greek stage. The Greek actor on stage would have one face mask on a stick held up in front of his face and the other two masks in his other hand. Only one role at a time were presented to the audience, but all three roles were present in the actor and in the masks on stage and before the audience. This particular dimension of acting was called perichoresis - one actor dancing around several different roles.
It was a short hop from the stage to the pulpit for the early church . Perichoresis (so easily understood on stage) could also easily be understood as the activity of the trinity.
Creator, redeemer, comforter dance around each other.
At the mysterious heart of our faith, there is a dance.
It is natural for people to dance in the presence of the sacred. Today’s Scripture takes us to a incredibly sacred time in the history of Israel. Under King David a confederation of the twelve tribes of Israel became a nation. A capital was founded in what is now known as Jerusalem. The ark containing the covenant of Moses was moved from its place in Hebron to the new capital. And David danced before the Lord. He did not dance alone. All the houses of Israel were also dancing with him as the ark was carried into the city.
The word translated for dance in 2 Samuel 6:5 is “sachaq.” In verses 14 and 16 there is found another word for dance. Here the Hebrew word is “Karar,” which is quite correctly translated into the English word dance.
Sachaq has another meaning and the translators took a little liberty when they also translated this word to also mean dance. More accurately, Sachaq means to play.
So David and all the houses of Israel were playing before the Lord.
Now if dancing is not bad enough for those who believe that the proper decorum for sacred times is silence and long, stony faces, then the idea of playing is probably just too much stress to handle in one sitting of translating a little scripture. But let us look a little more. Let us if you will play for a moment with the text.
The word Sachaq also appears in Psalm 104: 26.
Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
creeping things innumerable are there,
living things both small and great.
There go the ships,
and Leviathan that you formed to (Play) sport in it.
Leviathan is a mythical monster of the sea. One commentator, taking very seriously the idea of play in this verse, depicts Leviathan as God’s bath tub toy, the rubber ducky of the Old Testament. In both of these places play or dance is an expression of the creatures’ joy and praise.
Play like dance is something that we have separated out and removed from that which we think of as sacred. We have cut ourselves off from our own playfulness and ability to dance with such notions as “Get your work done first.” and connect that thought to the basic Calvinistic assumption that work is never done.
With that disconnect we also disconnect ourselves from the holy that we might find in many more moments of our days. Play can be much more than heading off for a day a 6 flags or a week at Disney Land.
I know a monk who delights in washing the pots and pans every day after the brothers and their guests finish their meal. It is his play. The banging of the pots against the stainless steel sink is music in his ears. The camaraderie of the brothers coming in and out of the kitchen as they bring out the dishes, clear the tables and in the moment exemplify all the best of monastic community uplifts him. And he delights in the sense of job well done after every washing. He looses himself in the rhythm of scrubbing. And rinsing and drying.
Perhaps all of us in more moments of the day can find that same sense of rhythm and playfulness and dance. Maybe it is in preparing a meal, or taking a shower, or tending the garden, or mowing a lawn. Life is filled with moments of rhythm to loose ourselves in. When we do that we are experiencing as David was celebrating that there is something in life that is larger than life – larger than ourselves. That is what dance is all about. That is what worship is really all about. Remembering and living in that praise is what being a creature is all about – David, Leviathan or us.
And many moments can be times to praise. That is experiencing the extraordinary in the ordinary. That is living with an awareness of the divine in the material, the holy in the now.
This may seem far fetched but it is the stuff of good health, reduced stress, better blood pressure readings, and less cholesterol, fewer trips to the hospital, quicker departures from the hospital when in them, less recovery time when sick and longer and better life in general. Now does that sound like non-sense. We need to take seriously play and what good it brings to us.
Instead of being in the moment when preparing a meal or taking a shower what are we doing - worrying about an upcoming meeting, fussing and fuming about how the neighbor has changed the color of the fence. There is no end to the list of preoccupa-tions. They are not what we are made for. We are creatures and creatures like Leviathan and David are made to dance and play for in doing that the creature is dancing with the creator. In that dance, we become one in harmony with God and also with others.