At the heart of today’s readings are two dances, two VERY different stories about dance. We have David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, and then we have Salome.
This is a sermon about dance, about bodies. Last night, our country faced the first assassination attempt on a presidential candidate in over fifty years. We mourn those who died. I’ve not had time, we’ve not had time to properly digest the story. But today, we pray for an end to the gun violence, to the political violence which plagues our nation. We pray that this moment might not further deepen our divisions, but that we might come together to say, “Enough.” And now, a sermon about dance.
When was the last time you danced? I expect for some of us, it has been awhile. Dancing teaches us about our bodies. Today, I want to talk about dancing, about bodies, and God.
Salome’s Dance
We have two different dances in today’s readings, akin to the different dances that many of us are doing with our bodies. You have the dance of Salome, a calculated dance. Salome is using her young body, using her body for a particular political end. Now, off the bat, I need to say a couple of things about Salome. You may have noticed, that name doesn’t appear in our Gospel this morning. The writer of Mark’s Gospel calls her Herodias, which is also her mother’s name. Frankly the family tree for the Herodian dynasty loops around quite a bit. If you start reading the history, it plays like the “Real Housewives of Galilee.” We know her name was Salome from the historian Josephus, and this is the name that sticks. Salome is painted by Titian and Caravaggio, among others. She appears in music, poetry, opera, and even a play by Oscar Wilde. Salome may set the standard for the most fan fiction written about a Biblical character with the smallest amount of actual biblical text.
And I would argue, it is her dance that captivates us. The power of youth, of beauty, is on display. How many of us have danced that dance? How many of us are chasing some image of beauty, some image of how our body should look, how our body should move? Age is not necessarily a limiting factor on this dance. Yes, some of us gather grace about our bodies as we get older. But the standards also change. Salome’s dance can still be there in the background, every time we tap our toes to those old tunes: “if only I had a flatter stomach. If only I had hair that looked like hers. If only I could play tennis, or ski, like him at his age.” Our society worships certain images. What our scripture makes clear today is that the problem with this dance with Salome’s dance is not really about sex or beauty. No, the problem is that this dance leads to violence. When we worship an image, the result is often violent. We do that violence quietly to ourselves, and we visit that violence on others. That, I would venture is source of the pain in our politics today. We know there is an undercurrent of violence.
Now, I want to pause, because I know that it is problematic that Salome, whom I am criticizing, is a woman. I will, in a moment, turn to praise the dancing of David, who is a man. For women, the pressures of society around body and image are ever-present. Women have to do the whole dance backwards and in heels. We are probably unsurprised that the Bible gives us a feminine dance which is problematic, a young girl who is being manipulated by the figures around her. It is a problematic text. And I wish I could say our society was healthier today, that we had moved past the dance of objectification. But I worry we are just watching the dance grow online.
David’s Dance
In today’s scripture, though, we are offered another dance, another way of viewing and being in the body. This is the dance of David. As we hear all of these names in the Second book of Samuel, as David and the “chest,” the “ark,” get closer to the city, the story crescendos. David dances, not to please those around him, in fact we hear that some lose respect for David because of his wild dancing. This dance is a bit like the dance Richard Simmons would sweat to the oldies. This is not a calculated political dance. The vulnerability of a leader is on display. David dances because he is fearfully and wonderfully MADE. He dances because he knows, deep in his muscles and sinews, that God has created him for this moment. David dances not to please others with the image of his body, but to celebrate the God who made his body. He dances because God gave him the ability to dance, and that gift is worth celebrating.
Have you ever seen someone dance this way, like no one was watching? It can be awkward, yes, but if you let go of your cultural expectations, can’t it also be simply beautiful, to see someone celebrate recklessly?
David’s dance would have us believe that our body, in whatever state it is in, is a beautiful gift from God. I know, that is hard to believe in a world tapping its feet to Salome’s rhythm. But David teaches us that our body, whatever is left of it, whatever we have, is worth celebrating. David’s dance celebrates God because God created our bodies, without regard to how perfectly God’s creation fits into OUR culture’s image of perfection. David’s dance uses the human body to celebrate the God who created that body. So the big question is: How do we learn to dance David’s dance?
Baga
What I know of David’s dance, I learned from my grandmother. I called my grandmother Baga, a name I, the first grandchild, bestowed upon her. The name stuck. My grandmother was Baga to me and my siblings and cousins. She even had a license plate. What you need to know about Baga, for the sake of this story, was that she lived with Rheumatoid Arthritis. By the time I was born, the RA was pretty advanced.
She lived with a chronic disease, and my grandmother was fiercely independent. Baga had a stick with a hook on it so that she could pull up the zipper on her own blouse. In order to keep driving, she got my uncle to put a clothespin around the ignition of her car (these were the days you still had to turn a key to start the car). It took her two hands to start her car. She put the key in (step one), she then used both sides of the pin to turn the ignition (step 2), before taking the car out of park to drive (step 3). It took Baga a lot of conscious steps to do things with her body that you and I do unconsciously. Baga accepted her body, with its limitations. And she pushed her body. She did all the exercises she could. She stretched, and walked, and worked, and kept pushing herself.
That is how she taught me David’s dance. My grandmother, though her physical movement was tedious, though she was often in a lot of pain, she focused on what she could still get her body to do. She always worked to keep her body moving. When she had to ask for help, which was not very often, she did it gracefully, and often with laughter.
One of the moments I remember her laughter: My grandmother taught me to pour a beer, long before I was old enough to drink. She didn’t drink often, but on a hot day she loved a cold beer, usually with a straw. Pouring a beer was one of the few things she needed help with. She could maneuver a beer bottle over a glass, but she couldn’t simultaneously tilt the glass to keep down the foam. No one likes foamy beer, so she taught me, her scrawny teenage grandson how to pour. And she laughed until I got the pour down.
One of the last times we were together, I was talking to Baga about England. I was getting ready for some undergraduate study abroad at Oxford. My grandmother loved England. She was Episcopalian through and through, and she loved the old Cathedrals, and the English Church music. She wanted me to go hear Evensong for her in the Oxford college chapels. But she also told me to enjoy myself, and to check out the local pubs, and to have a beer for her.
A measure of the grace I have in David’s dance, in the dance of accepting and loving, and praising God for the body I have been given, I learned from Baga. My grandmother laughed through the parts of her body that were hard to bear. When she was getting toward the end, my grandmother told me she wanted me to make her a promise. I leaned in really close. She said, “Michael, you know that I have had a number of joints replaced. I have a fake knee, fake knuckles, and titanium wrapping my spine. I have metal all over my body. So when I am cremated, you have to promise me, you will shake the box of my ashes to find out if it rattles.” She had a wicked sense of humor, all the way to the end. But there was grace there too. If we can learn to laugh at our bodies, to laugh with our bodies, we might just laugh ourselves into dancing.
In these difficult days, when the rhythms of the world are so disconcerting, I wonder whether we need to learn to dance like David. Can we dance like no one is watching? Can can stop trying to dance like Salome. Can we let go of the violence we do to ourselves, and to our neighbors. Can we dance to celebrate that we are wonderfully and fearfully made? God doesn’t want us to wait for the perfect body, God doesn’t need us to strive for the impossible, or to force our way of seeing on others. We don’t to strive after some image of perfection. God just wants us to dance.
Mike Angell 