Rev. Elizabeth Denham Thompson
We’ve come to the final Sunday of the sabbatical time frame when Rev. Nicole is away from CUCC. Rev. Jackie will be leading in worship next week, and Nicole will be here but without worship responsibilities. Then she fully returns to the pulpit on September 8th with festivities ensuring afterwards.
So today we conclude the summer series that has focused on Mary Magdalene, the Divine Feminine, and the call to Eat, Pray, and Play. Today is supposed to be about PLAY. I have taken the liberty to think about dance as a way to “play” and am using that as the theme for today … if you haven’t already figured that out with all our songs and readings.
For some people it’s challenging to think about dancing as a spiritual, and religiously approved thing. Many, if not most of us, have watched the movie Footloose, where the ongoing tension is between a faithful, loving father who is also a biblical preacher, and the new boy in the high school who attends the church but is also promoting an end-of-school dance for the students. Both are vying for the daughter’s attention and loyalty. She is caught between her love and respect for her father, and her boyfriend’s widening view where a dance is not evil, but joyful, and even, a religiously approved experience. Spoiler alert - in the end - joy, love, and a broader view of where God is to be experienced - wins the day.
I remember a similar, although less Hollywood-worthy, experience of my own. I grew up in a larger, theologically progressive, but still Baptist, church in Austin, Texas, where my father was the Senior Minister. He had grown up as a preacher’s kid as well, but with a much stricter understanding of what was or wasn’t acceptable if you were to be a good Christian example to others. He sometimes had an internal conflict between what his ministerial father (my grandfather) had believed and taught, and what had become my father’s increasing realization of how restrictive and, at times problematic, that view was.
You see, my father had grown and developed over the years, becoming more progressive socially and theologically. Being in Austin – hippie capital of the world – had probably helped somewhat with this modulation.
Our church was part of a group of moderate/progressive Baptist churches across the state of Texas, who came together each summer to have both a junior high, and senior high youth camp. The ministers of the churches were active in producing, programming, and leading these camps. As part of the camp, we often closed with an activity that brought everyone together for some fun, some music, and yes, some dancing. However, we still had to be careful because we were meeting at various denominational camp facilities.
So in the written programming notes, the closing evening was titled as our “Closing Function”. Because at a dance, you dance … so at a function, you function! My father, one of the ministers planning these events, overcame his lingering resistance to accept this.
This was the early 70s … and Christian music artists began playing with the idea of dancing as … a spiritual experience. Ken Medema, whom you may know of as a Christian and now justice-oriented musician, was just starting out in the early 70s. Ken was actually a guest leader at one of those high school retreats where we had our “function”. As you may know, he was born blind, and although a gifted musician, pianist and songwriter, apparently, he had never danced.
And so, on the final night, he found himself at our “Function” sitting by himself to the side of the room as most everyone else was out on what had become the dance floor. He later relayed how he almost instantaneously reverted back to his own teenage years, as the lonely young man who couldn’t participate, sitting on the side. But that night, one of the high school girls came over and asked him to dance with her. At first he refused, but she insisted. So awkwardly, he let her pull him out onto the floor and keeping hold of one of her hands, they started dancing, to everyone’s delight.
The next morning, in our closing worship, Ken relayed his thoughts and experiences, and as usual, composed a new song about the experience … it began “She asked me to dance, and I’d never tried dancing before. I had visions of everyone laughing us right off the floor. And though I protested, it just wouldn’t do any good. She gently insisted, and finally I told her I would. Unforgettable. … She was a fresh breath of spring on a cold winter’s day. Unforgettable … She taught this singer to sing, in a whole new way.”
He then flipped the words so that they all applied to God asking him to dance … “ I had a vision of saints and angels laughing us right off the floor. And though I protested, it just wouldn’t be any good. He gently insisted, and finally, I told him I would. Unforgettable! He taught this singer to sing in a whole new way!”
Ken, in his own unique way, imbued the potentially scandalous idea of a dance with new meaning by transforming it into something spiritual … something religious … something life-giving … something Holy.
It was some twenty years later after college, after marriage and a couple of moves, after giving birth to my two children, that I responded to the call to ministry becoming part of the third generation of ministers in the Denham family, and began attending seminary classes. There it was much to my surprise, and delight, that I learned about a centuries old understanding of the Trinitarian God as a dancing God! How had I never heard about this before? It began as early as the 4th century with the Cappadocian Fathers who talked about the relationship of the Trinity as “Perichoresis” – in the Greek.
“Peri” – like in perimeter, meaning circle, all the way around, whole. And “choresis” which has the same root word for choreography. The verb, “perichoreo” means “to be in space, to pass or enter”, and by adding one letter it becomes “perichoreuo” meaning “to dance around”. Thus perichoresis means a cyclical dance movement, of reciprocity, and interpenetration.
Apparently others had heard of this, and had been painting images of it for centuries!
From circa 1300, what has become known as the Rothschild Canticles is a tiny, illustrated book – only 4 ½ inches x 3 ¼ inches, leather bound with rich hand illustrations of various mediations, the Song of Songs, and Augustine’s contemplations on the Trinity. This is one of the illustrations and is such a fun image – angels playing bells and trumpets and drums at the top. Two dancers bowing to each other but pointing to the Trinity above them. And of course, the depiction of the Trinity … three in one, merging, surrounding, relating, and engaging with each other.
In the early 1400s, the Russian painter Andrei Rublev created this famous icon of the Trinity. It depicts three angels visiting Abraham, yet is meant to be understood as symbolic of the Trinity, with the three divine beings seated together, pointing to one another, and relating to each other across the table.
Here’s a slightly clearer rendition. Although these illustrations and icons are two-dimensional, they hint at something that is dynamic, at something that moves. They give an impression of a snapshot in time, so that if the picture were taken a few seconds later, they would be in different places, with different expressions, and different poses.
I was fascinated by this rich history that I had known nothing about. That complex and often outlandish idea of a Divine Trinity, of 3-in-1, as separate but equal - separate yet completely in union, the static Godhead (often portrayed as all male, or two men + a bird) … morphed into something dynamic and understandable for me. And it has become a key theological underpinning for my understanding of who God is.
God is a dance. God is dance! Not something far away, untouchable, or a concretized unchangeable entity. God began growing into something bigger for me - joy and movement, mutuality and a dynamic relationship. God became community. God became Lord of the Dance.
Our opening song today, “Lord of the Dance”, is by Sydney Carter. Carter tells that when he composed the song in 1963, he was inspired partly by Jesus, but also partly by a statue of the Hindu god Shiva seen in Shiva’s dancing pose – Nataraja.
“I did not think the churches would like it at all. I thought many people would find it … heretical and … dubiously Christian. But in fact people did sing it and, unknown to me, it touched a chord … Anyway, it’s the sort of Christianity I believe in.”
He goes on to say, “I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus.”
The Holy Dance is more fluid and more inclusive than we can even imagine! When I think of perichoresis now, I think of God as existing in the space between us, interwoven, and flowing - in, through, around, and between all of us in a constant movement that draws us into the dance! Perichoresis is used as a way to describe the relationship between the Divine and the Human. So they are not separate from each other, but we find the truth of one inside the other.
We are called to become part of the dance! Despite our hesitancy we are being invited to participate. If we will accept, we don’t need to be worried about getting all the dance moves right or stepping on someone else’s foot or getting wet in the waves.
As Sister Katarina Pavelova writes, “Our dance together allows us to bring compassion to this wounded world. … Dance is free and fun and it also is loving and lively. … All we have to do is accept the invitation … to step out onto the dance floor.”
Unforgettable!
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