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Notes on a Dance: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 3, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Exodus 20:1-17 and John 2:13-22.

I am a big fan of the ballet—some of you know that I worked for the Nevada Ballet for a number of years before seminary. Behind the scenes, though—I was never a graceful dancer!

Working there, I saw a lot of ballets over the years. And one of those, in 2013, was a touring centennial performance of The Rite of Spring, an infamous ballet first performed in Paris in 1913.

Now if the thought of ballet makes you feel bored or sleepy, stay with me—because The Rite of Spring was not (and still is not) what anyone thinks of when they think of ballet. There is no dancing on pointe, no tutus. The music is not pretty. The whole work—the score by Stravinsky and the choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, is harsh and unsettling. The ballet portrays a fictional ritual dance done by pre-Christian Russian peasants, where a Spring Maiden is selected and ultimately dances herself to death as a sort of sacrificial offering. Cinderella it is not.

When I saw in on tour, I felt a little overwhelmed and disturbed by the whole thing. But back in 1913, when it premiered, the audience lost it. It touched some strange nerve deep within them. People started screaming at the stage and throwing things at the orchestra, and then they started shouting at one another and starting fights, and the police had to be called in, even as the dancers and the music kept going.

Critics called the performance “barbaric” and “in complete opposition to the traditions of classical ballet,” without realizing that this was, in fact, the entire point. The Rite of Spring was meant to be challenging, to point to something wild and uncontrollable that lay pulsating beneath the benignly oppressive surface of our social and political structures. It was an artistic premonition of sorts for a society that was, in 1913, already on the precipice of its own tumble into war-torn barbarity.

The Rite of Spring was only performed a few times, and after World War I, the music survived but the ballet was considered lost. The choreographer had suffered a mental breakdown, and nobody else seemed to have preserved the dance notations. Perhaps some felt it was best left forgotten anyway. Too raw, this dance, too zealous, too much a reminder of things that people would rather forget.

It wasn’t until the 1980s, when a copy of the those dance notes was found tucked away in the cupboard, that the ballet was brought back to life, to shock and unsettle and invigorate new audiences, including me.

We rely so much on the notes we take down. Notes of information, notes of music, notes on a dance—they are what help us perpetuate ephemeral, fleeting encounters with truth, including the unsettling truth, so that future generations can know what it felt like to see what we have seen, to feel what we have felt, and in so doing, to rediscover something about themselves.

It’s the same reason, here, that we sing the old hymns, pray the old prayers, and, above all, hear the old readings, year after year, even the ones that challenge us—for they, too, are something like notes on a dance—a very old dance, indeed, one even more elemental and uncontrolled than The Rite of Spring. A dance that, in today’s readings, begins like this:

Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.

I know, we don’t tend to think of the Ten Commandments as a series of dance steps. Maybe that sounds a bit absurd. The Ten Commandments are weighty things in our cultural imagination—words carved into stone tablets, all the “thou shalt nots,” words of stony solemnity, words thrown like stones at the unworthy: immovable, fixed, and cold.

But what if the Ten Commandments were not meant to be rigid and heavy at all? What if these notes, given to Moses from amidst the wild, dancing, fire-lit darkness atop Mt. Sinai, are in fact something quite different, quite dynamic?

Because we must remember that God gives the Ten Commandments to Israel while they are in the middle of their wilderness journey—out where there are no courts or palaces or temples. They are notes given to a group of lean, hungry dreamers, the salt of the Red Sea still clinging to their skin, the impassive judgments of Pharaoh weighing on their memories.

But God speaks to them and says, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. I am not Pharaoh. I have brought you out not so that you might be crushed under the heaviness of another oppressive system, but so that you might LIVE with me. So that you might DANCE with me.

I, the Lord your God, I am the artist and you are my beloved work! Understand: I have guided you through the raging, dancing waters of the sea, under the pirouetting pillars of cloud and fire and now, my children, I am giving you notes on this dance. I am teaching you, in ten steps, how to keep dancing.

These commandments I give you are not a stone around your neck, they are the choreography of your liberation, so that you and your descendants might never again be bound by the forces that oppress and constrain. I give you these commandments, these notes, so that the dance will never be lost, so that it will keep going, so that you will teach it to the rest of the world.

It’s funny, though. Even with the best notes, the interpretation can get a bit muddled after a while. And maybe the the power of those ten commandments, the wilderness intimacy upon which they were founded, became dulled by the passage of the years, such that people began to forget it was ever a dance at all.

Which makes Jesus’ entry into the Temple, his big show of flipping of tables and driving out the livestock so very interesting. What was his purpose in doing this? Was he staging a protest against the system? Was he simply angry in the moment?

We could interpret it in many ways, and people do, of course, but to me there has always been something of the artist about Jesus in this moment—something visionary and deliberate and creative in his action, his all-consuming zeal. It is performative, not in the hollow sense, but in the sense that he is showing those around him how to perform—how move in a way that is expressive of a deep and fundamental truth. Sort of like…a dance.

And I imagine that some of Jesus’ critics said that he was being barbaric, that he was in complete opposition to the traditions of classical temple procedure—and they were right. But that was, perhaps, the point. Perhaps it was was meant to be challenging, meant to point to something wild and uncontrollable that lay pulsating beneath the benign surface of the Temple’s social and political structures. Perhaps it was the rite of a new spring about to blossom, and a new sacrifice, too.

The Son has returned to his Father’s house, and in the turning of the tables and the whip of cords he is saying: I, the Lord your God, I am the artist and you are my beloved work! Have you forgotten the steps? Have you forgotten that I long to be close to you, close as two partners dancing under the stars, close like we were in the wilderness, when I first taught you the choreography of liberation?

And now I am here, in the flesh, for a revival, to turn these tables over like I once made chariots somersault into the sea, and I do this to save you from forgetfulness, because ultimately this is what you were made for: Not to be the bearers of oppressive regulations as cold and heavy as stone, but to be dancers of a dance as alive and free as the God who made you.

What would our faith look like, what would our church look like, what would our world look like, if we realized that this is what God desired of us? That all of the Commandments and the codes and the practices and the liturgies we follow were designed to help us respond to the deep, elemental music of the earth, and to move in harmony with it? What does it look like for us to respond to that music here at St. Anne?

What steps would we make together? What small gods would we relinquish? What tables might we overturn?

Because here’s the thing: just as it was on Sinai, just as it was in the Temple, just as it was when the audience came undone during The Rite of Spring: there is something deep and fierce and strange and beautiful pulsating just under the surface of things, and it is true, and it is alive, and it is God, and he will never be content to let us forget. He is always emerging, the artist with his notes, to remind us who he is, and who we are, and what we are supposed to do.

Our decision is simply this:

Shall we dance?

On Facebook: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 4, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Isaiah 40:21-31 and Mark 1:29-39.

Today, February 4, 2024, is a somewhat significant anniversary. Do you know what it is?

It’s the 20th anniversary of Facebook.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook, or “The Facebook” as it was originally known, was launched by a team of students at Harvard as a sort of high-tech student directory and then began its long, seemingly unstoppable march towards changing the way we interact with one another and the world around us. Two months after launching, in 2004, it had 70,000 active monthly users. Now it has over 3 billion, or 37% of the world’s population. As with many types of anniversary dates, reflecting on who we were then, before Facebook, and who we are now might bring up some mixed feelings.

I was a senior in college when Facebook started, and I still remember hearing about it from some friends and signing up for the website in my dorm room in early 2005, uploading a grainy picture of myself and hunting for my real-life friends on there, when there were no links to news articles, no “like” buttons, no videos or vindictive comment sections.

It was, back then, a novel and gently thrilling thing to be able to connect (or reconnect) with so many people at once, almost as if everyone you had ever known had moved back into your neighborhood, their lives and their stories no longer obscured by time and distance. Maybe you, too, if you ever signed up for Facebook, felt that same sense of promise, of an infinite horizon somehow drawn close enough to touch.

But 20 years on, even if we continue to be active users of Facebook or other social media platforms, I think it’s safe to say that we have come to experience the shadow side of such a vast network of connections. And I am not just referring to the casual vitriol that seems to infect so much online discourse or the amount of time we spend staring at screens, though those are major challenges of their own.

But even more fundamental than these, I think, and something that we might overlook, is that the vastness of information and awareness that is available via digital social networks is more than any one person is equipped to process and integrate. It might be wonderful to reconnect with lost friends, but it is also true that we only have so much bandwidth to invest in deeply meaningful, mutual relationships.

And it is indeed valuable to have access to information about other people’s experiences, especially those whose lives are very different from our own, but the unceasing avalanche of content of all kinds, means that we also run the risk of becoming numb from overexposure, or that we end up spend a great deal of energy arguing and posturing around areas of social concern without actually engaging them in our off-screen realities.

But it makes sense that this would happen. It is not simply a failure of the will, but the reality of our limited capacity as mortal beings who, despite our deep hunger for knowledge and our inherent sense of empathy, cannot know everything, cannot respond to everything in the world with the depth and nuance it requires.

And running up against our limitations in the face of the seemingly infinite need and infinite possibility of the world–transmitted to us online–can lead us to rage, or despair, or cynicism, or some strange mixture of the three. Thinking of this through a scriptural lens, every day we bite the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the truth is as it always has been: it was not meant for us; we cannot digest it.

And here we are, 20 years on.

But lest we get too down on ourselves and the ills of a digital age, we must acknowledge that this wrestling with our capacity for knowledge and compassion is as ancient as existence itself. It is a tension that is woven into all of Scripture, including our readings this morning.

The prophet Isaiah, in a passage of both comfort and gentle reproach for Israel, asks the people whether they have forgotten the incomparable scale of God–not only that God is acting on their behalf, to care for and deliver them, but that God alone has the capacity to do so. They, by themselves, cannot conceive of or effect their own salvation. Only God can do that. God alone is able to hear and understand the many cries of the people, to bear the pain and the longing of all creation and discern a path toward healing and reconciliation. God alone can do that, because God alone has a heart large enough to break open and hold all things, and to beat and to burn with determination for the rescue and restoration of all things.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth…his understanding is unsearchable…he does not grow faint or weary.

In other words, only God can digest the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only he can bear the fullness of knowing and loving all of us and each of us. And God does not give in to rage or despair or cynicism in the face of our infinite need. Our hope is found in the One who can do what we ourselves cannot: to be the agent of infinite compassion, of unyielding justice, of uncompromising charity. This is who God is for us.

And yet this truth about God sets up a deep and striking irony in the Gospel passage from Mark, where Jesus, picking up from last week, continues his ministry of healing and exorcism and in so doing, draws out the desperation and the hope and the curiosity of everyone in his vicinity, such that “the whole city was gathered around the door.” The whole city was gathered around the door. Much like reading the news online, when it can feel like the whole world is at our door, it was surely more than any one person could keep up with or even comprehend. Even Jesus.

Because unlike the infinitely expansive capacities of God spoken of in Isaiah, Jesus is–like us–just one man. Despite his eternal power, he is as finite as we are, and he can only take in so much need, so much information. And this is perhaps why, whether out of exhaustion or frustration, or both, he decides to evade the clamoring crowds, trying to stay focused on his mission to proclaim the Kingdom.

It is as though God, in the flesh, had his own epiphany: the needs of the world are too numerous for any of us to comprehend, much less to solve on our own. We children of the dust cannot bear the fullness of what it means to be alive, to suffer, to dream. And we need something more than help. We need some measure of God’s mind, God’s heart, God’s body to mingle with our own if we ever hope to digest the bitter fruit of the tree and know what to do with it.

And that, of course, is what Jesus ultimately gives us—not just help, but transformation into his likeness. This is my body, given for you. My peace I give to you.

So I think of Jesus, sometimes, when I struggle on Facebook and elsewhere with the enormity of the world’s grief and anxiety and the endless profusion of the world’s ideas. I think about how he, too, struggled to take it all in, and had to figure out what to do. I think about how his decision, in that moment, was not to try and understand everything or solve everything, nor to reject everything, but to love everything.

I think about how he showed up as one of us and how he blessed our finitude; how he demonstrated that true wisdom is less about an infinite capacity for knowledge or strength and more about getting in touch with the deep well of compassion that forms and sustains the cosmos.

And I think about how we are invited—when we are overwhelmed by waves of information and endlessly expanding networks of connectivity—to neither ignore them nor to be subsumed by them, but, like Jesus, to find the still, small center of love that abides at the core of our immensely complex world and to hold fast to it no matter what. To observe and bless the ground beneath our feet; to pray; to heal whom we can heal; to love whom we can love; to proclaim what we have been sent to proclaim–the Kingdom of incarnate love; to trust that this will be sufficient.

And to realize that, as we do so, even in our limited capacity, we are taking part in the infinite; that we are part of the broken, beating, burning heart of the One who will gather us all in and hold us; the One does not grow faint or weary, the One who will someday carry us up on eagle’s wings into the vast interconnectedness of heaven and creation, of time and eternity. Into something far better than a social network–into the very fabric of life itself, where we will be truly known and understood, where our infinite stories and endless longings will finally make sense, and where the fruit of the tree of knowledge, at long last, will be for us, and we will eat of it, and it will be sweet.