/ music
The Dance
When King David brought the ark of God up to the shrine he had prepared for it in Jerusalem, we read that the procession was enlivened with songs and dancing. I want to speak to you about David and how to the horror of his young wife and in a blare of strange, wild music the ancient king got the rhythm of God under his skin and danced away himself with all his might and became what he became.
I want to set David dancing before you now, and in your mind’s eye I want you to try to see him dancing way off through the dimness of three thousand years. The music he’s dancing to, if we could hear it, would be an offense to our ears I suppose — the harps and castanets, the tambourines and cymbals — but we can’t hear it, of course. We can only see that he hears it, or hears something through it, beyond it, because it is plain even at the distance of thirty centuries that more than just his body is caught up in more than just the music, his whole being is caught up and he abandons himself to the dancing. That is why his wife, who is the daughter of a king as well as the wife of a king, is so horrified, because the king her husband has forgotten himself. He has forgotten himself and his kingly dignity, and to make matters worse he has done it in the presence of the servants. That is why the queen, who in no sense forgets herself, despises him in her heart.
She wants him to be a king not so much for his sake as for her own sake, so she can be a queen. But instead he becomes a dancer, and his body glistens with the fury and the joy of it, and his bare feet beat the wild rhythms of it into the earth in front of the Holy Ark where Yahweh the King of Glory dwells. David is not interested in being what Michal wants him to be, and when she berates him afterwards he answers her out of the fury that is still upon him with, “I will make myself more contemptible than this and I will be abased in your eyes.” David isn’t primarily interested in the music the musicians are playing. What really interests him, what he is really dancing to, comes out when he says, “I will make merry before the Lord.”
He is not dancing simply to the music that comes from without. He is dancing to the music of his wild gladness that wells up from within him in the presence of the ark. He is dancing his religion. He forgets himself, forgets to be a king, forgets to live up to the image that his wife has of him or his servants have of him. But in forgetting himself, he happens also to become himself.
I don’t know what it’s like to be inside your skin, but I am the world’s leading authority on what it’s like to be inside my skin, so let me generalize from my experience and if it doesn’t match yours there’s no great harm done.
I think that for people like us, it can be hard to forget ourselves and to be ourselves at a dance. And of course it’s especially hard to be yourself if you’re not quite sure who you are. This explains why you and I were uncomfortable at the middle school dances and at the prom. A young person, and to some extent, every person, is a person who is still looking for a self to be. When you are looking for a self to be, the temptation is always very great to be a self that you think other people are going to like.
David had his Queen Michal with her own ideas of what a king should be and at a dance you have someone like her too, the partner you’re dancing with and the friends who are there dancing, and they all have their ideas of the kind of person you should be. So very often that’s the person you try to be. You put on the face you think they will find admissible and dance their way not only because you want their approval and want to be popular with them but because in a real way you need their approval as something to give you security in a world where God knows there is much cause to be insecure, just as they need your approval and are wearing a face to please you.
When I say you I mean me too because to some degree for all of us life is a masked ball. To some degree for all of us life consists of trying on many masks until at last, by God’s grace, we find the one that fits who we really are and it becomes our face so that the whole process turns out to have been a process of self-discovery. But unfortunately it can also be a process of self-concealment and self-deceit and eventual self-loss whereby in our efforts to endear ourselves to each other we wear masks so foreign to our natures that when we meet, we meet not on the basis of who we are but instead we meet solely on the basis of who we want others to think that we are. And when that is true we don’t really meet each other at all.
The sound of a dance, the sound of our society in general, is often the sound not of human beings meeting other human beings, but the sound of masks clattering up against masks. And this is so because just as we were afraid at dances when we were young, we’re afraid still. You’re afraid to open yourself to another’s knowing for fear that in knowing you the other will reject you. You don’t speak your mind truly for fear that you’ll sound like a fool, and beneath that fear is the darker fear that maybe you are a fool. You’re afraid the world will dish out more to you than you are able to take. You’re afraid that someone very important will ask more of you than you feel you have in you to give.
Not all of the truth, thank God, and not all of the time, but part of the truth at least part of the time is that we are afraid of each other, you and I, and afraid of our lives. A sadder truth still is that the way this world works, part of the time our fears are not unwarranted. So it is that the dance we end up going to with our lives is not really a dance after all, but a masquerade.
But Christ calls us to the Dance, as the poet T. S. Eliot called it. At the still point of the turning world / There the Dance is / And there is only the Dance. It is why Saint John’s has been here for 126 years, and why you are here this morning. You believe it. Some Christians do not associate Christ with dancing, but the primitive Christians, Christians of the earliest Christian centuries, in the clumsy art of the catacombs, depicted Christ as Orpheus, the fabulous musician of Greek mythology whose rhythm none could resist, who danced the fawns out of the forest and the fir trees down from the hills. And they had warrant for it, after all, for what else did Jesus say of himself? Speaking of the unresponsiveness of the Jews to his mission, and to that of John the Baptist before him, “You are like children,” he said, “sitting in the street complaining to one another: we have piped to you and you have not danced, we have mourned and you have not lamented.” Mourned, that was John calling to repentance. Piped, that was Jesus dancing them into the kingdom of God with the music of everlasting joy.
A little over a year ago at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles, there was great merriment and dancing for the wedding reception of Evan and Kristin Ellsworth. What is it that released us — that set us off? Music played by The Cowling Band, one of the best bands in the City of Angels. That is what released us: songs to dance to. But what was it that controlled us? The same thing: we danced to the music. The control is the release. The music held us. The music let us go.
This is why the lyres and cymbals that David dances to in our text and writes about in the Psalms are illuminating parables of true religion. For the whole mystery of Christian faith comes down to a phrase of one of the great collects in the Book of Common Prayer: “whose service is perfect freedom.” God our control and God our release. Listen to what John Milton says of his Lycidas in heaven: “There entertain him all the saints above / in solemn troops and sweet societies / that sing, and singing in their glory move / and wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.”
Let me end where I began, with the young King David dancing. For as long at least as the moment lasted he was not afraid to be himself no matter what the queen might think or the servants or all Israel. The reason he wasn’t afraid to be himself was that he was dancing in the presence of the Most High by whom he found himself not rejected but accepted, not threatened but blessed. David wasn’t afraid to be himself because he found himself in the presence of the King of Glory with whom he felt not fear finally but a gladness and oneness that rose up in him like music. He wasn’t afraid of life because the source of life itself had gotten under his skin, calling forth his true self in all its nakedness, setting it free to be made whole and real.
When you come right down to it, what I stand here in the name of the King of Glory to do is to invite you to join this strange dance, to invite you to listen to the music that Jesus of Nazareth heard who in this sense was indeed the Son of David. In the rhythm and pattern of Jesus’ life you can see what human life was made to be, a life where we meet one another not as strangers of whom we are afraid, but as friends in whom we delight. A life where we meet God not as an unappeasable tyrant but as the leader of the Dance, the Lord in whose service is the freedom to become fully human and fully alive. Amen.
On the birthday of Victoria, the cantus firmus of the Ellsworth family, the fun theory. It’s there in Holy Writ, the most recent public example being the appointed lectionary reading of a couple Sundays ago, the howler from the eleventh chapter of the Book of Numbers of all things. It was all I could do not to fall off my prayer desk.
The rabble among them had a strong craving; and the Israelites also wept again, and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.”
Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, all at the entrances of their tents. Then the LORD became very angry, and Moses was displeased. So Moses said to the LORD, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they come weeping to me and say, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery.”
So the LORD said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tent of meeting, and have them take their place there with you.”
So Moses went out and told the people the words of the LORD; and he gathered seventy elders of the people, and placed them all around the tent. Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.
Another of my pics from last night’s concert. The stage awash in green lights, U2 sang “Sunday Bloody Sunday” dedicating their Irish anthem to the Iranian Green Revolutionaries. Bono invited on stage to sing with him a red-turbaned flag-bearing Sikh who happened to be at hand (hey, it’s a show). The duet belted the final stanza. “The real battle yet begun / To claim the victory Jesus won.” Only in America.
The latter part of U2’s finale at FedEx Field, sending a message of encouragement to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi with Walk On (All That You Can’t Leave Behind). Aaron, Victoria and I loved the show.
Phillips Craig & Dean sing How Deep the Father’s Love for Us. I was with Gillian while she was visiting a college when I first heard this song. Heading for Wheaton College, tomorrow the daughter leaves home.
It’s not Handel, Mozart, or The Victors, but it’s the best song ever written in a car by a man on his way to comfort a boy whose parents were about to divorce. The song’s power rests not in its heartfelt lyric — John Lennon, the boy’s father, thought the song was about him — but in its chord structure and harmonies.
Elaine Funero plays a piece composed by the great Tom Robin Harris. Tom’s harpsichord compositions have been performed around the world, most frequently in Japan (where Gabriel will be as of Monday). I could tell you that Tom trained at Syracuse University and the University of Michigan. I could mention that he’s performed in New York City at St. Thomas Church and the Metropolitan Museum, and here in DC at the Library of Congress concert hall, etc. But the sweetest thing to know about Tom is that he loves the Lord and plays for the glory of His Name. I’m looking forward to working with him at Saint John’s next month in Harbor Springs.
Old 100th sung Thursday, 28 May, in the Church of Saint Anne, Jerusalem by the Wheaton in the Holy Lands cohort. My niece Abigail Ellsworth, wearing a blue shirt and tan shorts, is sitting at the very base of the column on the right, visible in the first twenty-some seconds.
Built in the 12-century, Saint Anne’s is located over the traditional birthplace of Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. The church’s acoustic is exquisite intentionally: it was designed for Gregorian chant. My niece thus, like all these Wheaties, is singing under the long liturgical arm of Alcuin (20 May 804), Deacon, Scholar, and Abbot of Tours, whom we commemorated at Saint Francis on May 20 in the service of Holy Eucharist. Alcuin is a great figure (greatly neglected) in the history of education. Here’s the collect for Alcuin.
Almighty God, who in a rude and barbarous age raised up your deacon Alcuin to rekindle the light of learning: Illumine our minds, we pray, that amid the uncertainties and confusions of our own time we may show forth your eternal truth, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
I wonder. A thousand years from now, if a collect were written about a figure among us, how would our age be characterized? I am reading a book my sister gave me, Miroslav Volf’s Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. In its forward, the Archbishop of Canterbury describes our age as “sour and anxious.”
Word from her doctor is that my Great Aunt Wilhemina Haskins Hartvigh is expected to die soon. She loved her sisters, her family, her country, her Upper Peninsula, her Northern Michigan University Wildcats, and her Messiah Lutheran Church, but my Great Aunt Mena was a woman singing the Lord’s songs in a foreign land for as long as I can remember. What a figure in my family. What a witness. She had no enemies but one, and that one doomed beneath the waters of her baptism. So through tears of sadness and great laughter we see and hail from afar the New Jerusalem she’s been walking toward every day of her life.
Jerusalem, my happy home,
when shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end?
Thy joys when shall I see?
Thy saints are crowned with glory great;
they see God face to face;
they triumph still, they still rejoice
most happy is their case.
There David stands with harp in hand
as master of the choir:
ten thousand times that man were blessed
that might this music hear.
Our Lady sings Magnificat
with tune surpassing sweet,
and all the virgins bear their part,
sitting around her feet.
There Magdalen hath left her moan,
and cheerfully doth sing
with blessèd saints, whose harmony
in every street doth ring.
Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
God grant that I may see
thine endless joy, and of the same
partaker ever be!
