Dancing in the Presence

 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Mark 6:14-29

Many of the preachers and scholars whose work I read or skimmed while reflecting on today’s story of David seemed eager to speculate about why we – ordinary American Sunday morning churchgoers – don’t dance ecstatically like David every time we get together in the presence of God.

This is not a thing I wonder very often myself. 

How about you?

But we could. We could wonder about what it would be like to be so full of joy in the presence of God that our bodies just move. That we find ourselves dancing in the aisles. Dancing in the streets.

And David’s story, today – as he goes dancing along the roads of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, inviting the whole world to see and share his joy in the nearness of God, felt and seen in the ark of the covenant – David’s story could make us think more intentionally about what it is like for us to respond to the presence of God.

For some of us, it might be a sense of awe and wonder that makes our minds and bodies go still – or that sparks curiosity and energy to discover more. For others, the experience of God’s closeness, presence, and power finds expression in singing, or making music with our hands, our whole bodies. Some of us find that the nearness of God changes our behavior – that we just begin to treat others and ourselves with more compassion, or we begin to speak up where we used to be silent, be silent where we used to speak. Some of us experience the presence of God and begin to pray in new ways, or laugh, or cry for what seems like no reason at all.

Several of you have commented to me how much it helps you sense God’s presence to worship here, in this building, with others around you. Others have reported your surprise at discovering God’s active, full presence in some new way of praying in the last year or so – by phone, or online, or in private prayer. 

Others of you have talked to me about how experiencing the presence of God is often harder than it looks – not just when we want it and don’t feel it, but even more when we feel it, and respond, and things get… complicated.

Take David, for one example. His ecstatic dancing is a direct response to the powerful joy of being near God’s presence manifested in the ark of the covenant. And it gets him in trouble with his wife, who finds it disgraceful and inappropriate for him to be abandoning his royal dignity.
(Michal seems to have been upset about what David was – or wasn’t – wearing in the dance, but it’s also possible David’s dancing was so enthusiastically bad as to be embarrassing in and of itself. Their already troubled marriage basically ends that day.)

Or take Herod, for another example. Herod (the son of the Herod you know from the Christmas story), is drawn to John the Baptist, and the way John manifests the presence of God. Herod, Mark tells us, felt a sense of wonder and uncertainty as he listened to John – a sense of God’s presence and work which Herod liked, and sought out. But his treating the captive John like a personal prophet and teacher irritates his wife, who doesn’t like being called out as a danger to Herod’s righteousness (for a situation that wasn't entirely up to her in the first place). And then it gets him in trouble with himself.

You or I might also find that the power of the experience of God is…awkward. Challenging.

Maybe a family member suggests your singing is embarrassing, or your tears of joy or relief at God’s presence are weird.
Maybe a friend gets uncomfortable (or makes you uncomfortable) with your desire to pray more, your choice to be at church instead of brunch.
Maybe the compassion stirred in your heart - or the passion for justice or generosity or creativity that’s stirred in your soul - by a close encounter with the presence of God makes it difficult for you to find common ground with old friends.

It’s not at all unusual that people react to the power of God’s presence by wanting to shut it down, or look away. 

Because God’s presence – that sense of the nearness of eternity and unlimited power, right among us as an act of unbounded love, demands a lot of us.
To fully experience the nearness of God requires a vast openness of heart, being wide open and vulnerable to God’s love, increasing our compassion for and love of others.
The experience of God’s eternity in our ordinary world and lives changes us.
To embrace the sense of God’s awesome presence with us often demands costly sacrifices – of our pride, our belief that we can control our own destiny, our desire to manage our environment and our own lives, and sometimes of our reputation, self-image, or the success we desire.

For Herod to keep the sense of wonder and possibility in God’s presence that he got from listening to John would have required him to sacrifice his reputation, self-image, or some political power. To admit in the presence of his political allies and enemies he’d made a foolish promise. And to publicly declare that God’s values – and the protection of an innocent life – were more important than what people would think of him.

To stay in the presence and love of God, David will have to give up the desire to build a temple that would be a monument to David’s own success.

God’s presence is everywhere, all the time – we know that, we’ve been taught it. But we may only experience it sometimes because the fullness of God’s presence is a big demand on our hearts and lives.

And sin – manifesting as the human instinct for self-preservation, and the preservation of our self-image – gets in the way of our fully experiencing and responding to the presence of God.

It interrupts, or limits, or even prevents the ecstatic joy and compelling wonder that God wants us to have as God comes close to us.

Herod’s story is a tragic example of that, today. David’s story – in just the dancing bits we read today –  is an almost comic example of the same. And many of us here have felt some loss at what we sacrifice as we open ourselves to the presence of God, or felt the loss of that powerful presence when the pressures of self-preservation and self-image pull us away.

I’m convinced, though, that God keeps coming close to us, constantly, over and over, because God wants us to experience the compelling wonder, the ecstatic joy, the expansion of ourselves in the nearness of God, that Herod and David model, briefly, in these stories. 

That God wants us to choose, over and over, to immerse ourselves in joy, in raw and uninhibited delight in God’s power and love. That God wants us to enrich ourselves, always, with the sense of wonder and awe, the mystery and challenge of God’s work and will, that expand our senses and our hearts.

So, in honor of David, and those moments in his flawed and complicated human life where he was purely filled with the ecstasy of God’s presence, maybe sing like nobody is listening. Pray as if everything is possible. Dance, if you want to. Laugh and cry and love without restraint. Risk letting go of control.

In honor of Herod, who came close to redemption in spite of himself, and of John the Baptist who was the presence of God for him, believe in miracles, and expect the unexpected. Seek out people who bring you closer to God, who can help you be more like Jesus. And risk being that person for someone else.

Because I know God wants that wonder and growth and joy for you and me.

We may never dance in the aisles here in the middle of the Eucharist, but we can be that full of the presence of God. We can accept the courage that God demands of us and gives us, dance into God’s presence, and invite others to share the wondrous joy.