would you like to dance?

Based on these Bible readings.

I want to talk to you for a minute about dancing.

My wife and I have recently started learning a new dance. Lindy hop, specifically. A relatively new couple in the parish, Jeff and Aimee, teach dance, and throw regular Friday-night dances in a dance studio just south of here. They were the ones who did the recent workshop here in the parish hall. And if we ask them nicely, we might get them to do it again once in a while. Now, for those of you who don’t know us that well yet, my wife and I love to dance. She’s been my dance partner longer than she’s been my wife, and we spent a significant amount of our courtship on one dance floor or another.

Learning a new dance is an interesting thing. Coming to it as dancers who know other steps, there are some similarities. Some are basic things like rhythm, counting, dancing with a partner, one of you leading and the other following. Some of the patterns are similar, too. There are underarm turns, hand changes, spins, that sort of thing.

But there are also some differences. The basic step, the thing you learn first, is eight beats of music instead of six. The style, the feel, is subtly different from other kinds of swing, and dramatically different from classical ballroom dancing. There are things in our muscle memory that have to be unlearned. Things that once worked now don’t.

Thankfully, we’re at the delightful stage of laughing with each other over little things like blown leads and my mysterious inability to count to eight. We have a community of regular dancers helping and encouraging us, and all of us are learning together, at our own speeds.

* * * * * * * * * *

Five hundred years before the birth of Christ, God spoke these words, in the mouth of the prophet Isaiah:

Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

These were words first spoken, or written, we don’t really know which came first, after the nation of Israel had been defeated by the Babylonians, and many of the people had been carried off into exile in Babylon. And there, in exile, they asked themselves, has God abandoned us? How can we be God’s people if we can’t go to the temple? How can we be God’s people if we don’t have a king? How can we be God’s people if we’re not our own nation?

And God said: fear not. Don’t worry about the former things. I am still with you. I am still your God. You are still my people. See, I am doing a new thing. Are you paying attention? Can you see it? I will show you a new way to live.

Five hundred years later, as we hear in today’s reading from the gospel of Mark, four people carry a paralyzed man on a mat, bringing him to Jesus, and lay him at Jesus’ feet. The crowd watches, and waits. Everyone knows what they want. Everyone knows what, presumably, the paralyzed man wants. He wants to be healed. He wants to walk. Everyone waits, holding their breath, for Jesus to heal him.

But that’s not what Jesus does. He says, instead, your sins are forgiven.

There are scribes in the crowd, teachers of the law. Keepers of the tradition. Interpreters of the scripture. And they say “hey, you can’t do that!”

Now, I think most Episcopalians would make good scribes. (even better Pharisees) And that’s not meant to be derogatory. We’re keepers of tradition. We’re teachers. We know how things should be done. We worship using an ancient liturgy, using a pattern that has not significantly changed for centuries. We respect the wisdom of the spiritual masters of faith. We even know how we like our music, don’t we?

So the scribes question Jesus. Hey, you can’t do that! No one can forgive sins but God. That’s not your place. But Jesus responds: God is doing a new thing. Are you paying attention? Can you see it?

Oh, and you? Get up. You’re free.
Walk.
Dance.
Live.


* * * * * * * * * *

One of the holy places in the world for me is a little church on the top of a hill in the middle of San Francisco. It’s called St. Gregory of Nyssa, and if you’ve heard of them it’s because they’ve become famous for their style of worship. They are, in some ways, a quintessential urban San Francisco congregation. They serve really good coffee, they have an active homeless ministry, they’re active in all the social justice concerns of the city. And they do some odd things. The architecture is odd, there are painted icons all over the ceiling, they have two rectors. I used to call them “St. Gregory the weirdo.”

We lived out there a few years ago, and some friends came to visit over Easter weekend. And they convinced us, well, no, dragged us kicking and screaming is a better phrase, to go to the great vigil at St. Gregory’s. You have to realize that the great vigil of Easter is my favorite day of the year. And I didn’t give it up lightly, but I really loved the people who were visiting, and so we went.

Now you might think, after I’d grown up attending Baptist and Methodist and Lutheran and Mormon and jump-for Jesus Pentecostal and Catholic and other various flavors of churches, that I might run out of ways to think, “no, I’m sorry, that’s just too weird, church just can’t be done that way.” But I found one more way to make we wonder what the heck was going on.

It was packed. Sardine-can packed. So bad that one of us got claustrophobic for a while and had to step outside. The room where they celebrate Eucharist together is about as big as the altar area here. Icons painted all over the ceiling, icons of dancing saints. There was incense. And I mean, lots of incense. Great billowing clouds of incense. Not an instrument in the building, expect a handful of Tibetan prayer bells, and the voices of the congregation. And, at Eucharist, they sang. In parts. And... danced. Around the table.

Each person had their right hand on the shoulder of the person next to them, and their left hand holding a service book with the music. The steps were simple. Right, left, right, back. Right, cross behind left, right, back. And, like all new people to the congregation, I was trying to read music and remember steps and not step on somebody and not kick somebody.

It sounds chaotic. And it was. It sounds awful. Definitely out of the box. Sounds quite un-Episcopalian. But you know what else it was? Glorious. As in, the glory of God made manifest. I know, because I’ve tried to describe it before, that it’s something I can’t capture in words. And I know that many of you are like me, wouldn’t go to do something like that unless one of your favorite people on God’s green earth came and begged you to go like my friend Jason did to me.

And I looked around with new eyes. And I saw the members of the church feeding the hungry. And sheltering the homeless. And caring for and grieving with and praying for the thousands and thousands dying of AIDS in the city.

And I said, "God is doing a new thing. And I wasn't paying attention at first."


* * * * * * * * * *

The early spiritual masters of the eastern orthodox church described the nature of God, who we typically affirm as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as an eternal dance, a relationship of movement and interaction in mutual love, honor, respect, and joy. In John’s gospel, Jesus prays that the disciples, that we, might be one as Jesus and the Father are one, that we might be in him as he is in the father, inviting all of us, all of creation, into the great dance of joy that God wills for all creation. In this understanding, some of us ‘sin,’ deliberately step out of the dance, corrupting its rhythm, crashing into other dancers, pushing and shoving and stomping on feet. Then, in Christ Jesus, God enters creation to restore the beauty again, to teach us the new steps, to call us back to an ever-widening dance of joy that includes all of creation.

It is into this great dance that we are called. And each new age means that we need new steps. The basic patterns will be the same, but, like us learning the Lindy hop, the dance will be different enough that we’ll have to pay attention, unlearn old habits, and learn new ones. There are things in our muscle memory that have to be unlearned. Things that once worked now don’t.

Because as people join the dance, the dance changes. As the music of the age changes, the dance changes, in subtle ways, still with the same beauty and order, but with new steps and new style to fit the new day.

And that’s okay. Because God leads. And it is God who invites us to dance.





(Today is the feast day of St. Gregory of Nyssa.)