Sermon: Sixth Sunday after Trinity

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 15th July 2012

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

Readings:

Mark 6:14-29

Let them praise his Name in the dance:
let them sing praises unto him with the tabret and harp.
(Psalm 149.3)

Dance is not something that many Anglican churchgoers associate with holiness and a worshipful experience. Don’t panic, I’m not going to ask you to! After all, at a party or wedding reception when the lights dim and start flashing, the beat thumps out across the dance floor, I have to confess that I am not going to be one of the first to start grooving: and that would come as a great relief to my children, because we know that there are few things more embarrassing than watching your parents dance.

I am not a natural dancer. This would preclude me from being a priest in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church where ancient dance is at the heart of liturgical worship and priests are expected to lead the people in dance: and when one dances all dance.  Unlike Herodias’ dance that we heard about in our gospel reading it is not a spectator, but a participant event.

Dance is a rich theme to explore The classic is David in front of the Ark of the Covenant as the Ark, the very presence of God, is brought in procession. We read in 2 Samuel,

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.
(2 Samuel 6.5)

Another biblical dancer is John the Baptist. His dour image is bellied by his associations with dance. As we read in St Luke’s gospel, ‘When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting , the child leaped, in her womb.’ (Luke 1.41). David danced in front of the Ark of the Covenant; John danced in front of the Ark of the New Covenant, the pregnant Mary with Jesus, the very presence of God, in her womb. John’s is a dance of joy in the incarnation, and John’s dance ties in with the dances of the psalms of David:

Praise the LORD in the cymbals and dances.
(Psalm 150.4)

Lord, you have turned my mourning into dancing
(Psalm 30.11a)

Let them praise his Name in the dance:
let them sing praises unto him with the tabret and harp.
(Psalm 149.3)

David dances with all the house of Israel and John’s dance invites us together onto the dance floor of praise to God.

One of the most moving dances I have ever witnessed was in a town square in the Pyrenean Principality of Andorra, where a band struck up and the old men and women first, rapidly joined by children, began to dance. It looked a bit like a mixture of barn dancing and the hokey, kokey. But within minutes the whole square, reticent Brits included, were swept up in an apparently unchoreographed but profoundly transformative and binding dance. John’s invitation throughout his public ministry was to join in a dance that turns us back to God: the Repentance Ceilidh, you could say.

The teacher in Ecclesiastes tells us,

There is a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.
(Ecclesiastes 3.4)

Dance should be the expression of joy, of togetherness, of community in step with one another, albeit treading on a few toes along the way. This is why liturgy, the worship that we are engaged in now, has been described as ‘a complex and solemn form of communal dance’ (Kavanagh 1993, 33). Together we are invited into a dance of offering and joy, of taking one another by the hand and dancing together, and from here our dance goes on into God’s world bringing a dance of joy and inviting others to the fullness of life that John tells us to prepare for in the incarnate Christ.

And there’s more to John the Baptist and dance. In both St Matthew and St Luke’s gospel there is a mysterious little riddle that Jesus refers to in the context of Jesus praising John:

‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
We wailed, and you did not mourn.’
(Matthew 11. 17; Luke 7.32)

There is something unsettling in that. It is a call to participation: the playing flute calls us to dance and the wailing tells us to mourn, but we did not. There is a darkness to John’s relationship with dancing; there is something of the Danse Macabre, that peculiarly medieval form that recalls everyone to their mortality, a dance to the grave.

The final dance associated with John is the dance not danced by him but a dance that seduced Herod into a rash promise, but more than that, it turned his eye further from God and into murder. That dance is a parody of the dance of life, and even of the Danse Macabre, because it is a murderous dance.

So then, through dance, John’s death foreshadows Jesus’ death, just as John’s birth heralds Jesus’ birth.

The dance of Christian liturgy gathers us: what a thought, that we danced our way here this morning, drawn from different directions and places. The dance of liturgy forms us: we pause in the dance to hear God’s word, and to pray, and then the dance takes us on to the altar, to the broken body of Jesus. And the dance of our liturgy sends us: our dance becoming a dance of the whole mystery of Christ spilling out into the world; dancing with Mary Magdalene who left the tomb on Easter Day dancing and rejoicing that her Lord was risen; dancing with shepherds who left the stable knowing the God dwelt among us; dancing with those in the gospels who could not even walk yet meeting Jesus go away dancing and rejoicing.

Let us praise his Name in the dance:
let us sing praises unto him with the tabret and harp,
for he turns our mourning into dancing.