(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on April 29, 2018)
Dancing
While I was studying in England,
I was fortunate enough to have several opportunities to watch my favorite
soccer team, Liverpool, at its hallowed home stadium. I remember one such occasion. I had taken the train in for the day and met a good friend
there, Stephen, who happened to be a Liverpudlian himself. It was a wonderful day. Stephen gave me a tour around the
stadium. We indulged in a matchday
pastime, a hot cup of Bovril, or beef broth. We sang with the Liverpool faithful a number of their songs,
including “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
And to top it off, Liverpool won!
After the game, I had a couple of
hours before my train left, so Stephen led me to O’Neill’s, an Irish pub close
to the Lime Street train station.
We entered into a room abuzz with music. A spirited guitar and violin were seesawing back and forth
through a number of traditional folk tunes. There we sat basking in the glory of victory, reliving our
favorite moments from the match, when the guitar and violin struck up a
spirited jig that roused half the pub.
Suddenly the open floor was filled with dancers. I was laughing at the novelty of this
experience when all of the sudden two women yanked Stephen and I out of our
chairs and onto the floor. I
wasn’t laughing anymore. Now I was
feeling a mixture of fear for myself and pity for the woman. The closest I’d ever come to an
education in dance was the annual Episco Disco at college, and I’m afraid I
didn’t learn much more there than how to make folks laugh.
But I was surprised. The jig was over before I knew it—and I
had managed to dance the entire time.
Of course, much of the credit goes to that woman, who led me well. (If you’re grabbing partners as indiscriminately
as she was, you’re sure to get some experience with non-dancers like
myself.) But even so, I still
would have expected a train-wreck.
All things considered, the dance
felt surprisingly natural. It was
as though one step led naturally into another. I couldn’t help but follow along.
The Priority of the Body
I think that
the letter of 1 John is about dancing.
Well, not about literal dancing.
But about the many different dances that our bodies perform throughout
life. It’s about the dances of
eating and embracing, of loving and leaving, of being born and dying...and the
mysterious dance of rising again.
What I’m trying
to say, is that 1 John is about the body.
It’s about flesh and blood.
The letter of 1 John was written in a time of confusion. Different people were proclaiming
different things about Jesus Christ. Some were saying that Jesus was not actually here in the
body, but rather that he was a spirit who had come here to help us escape this
world of bodily limitation.
But 1 John
proclaims the opposite. In 1 John
4:2, the writer declares that Jesus Christ has come “in the flesh.” In the body. It’s perhaps the simplest and most profound point of our
faith. The gospel of John—the
parent text from whose thoughts and ideas 1 John emerged—puts it like
this: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). And one of the early church leaders,
Irenaeus, expresses it like this: “The glory of God is a living person.” In other words, God is most fully God
not in some perfect spiritual form but in the frail and fragile body of a
person. It’s sort of funny if you
think about it: we humans are commonly dreaming of an escape from this world
into some celestial heaven, while God dreams of living here in the flesh. The glory of the body, then, is clear. It was clear from the very beginning,
from the moment of creation, when God saw that this flesh-and-blood,
dirt-and-water world was good, very good.
As we currently
are in the season of Easter, it is especially appropriate now to be reminded of
the significance of the body. For
what is the ultimate hope of our faith?
It is not for the immortality of the soul. That idea is not biblical, it’s Greek. The ultimate hope of our faith is the
resurrection of the body.
Love and the Body
If the letter
of 1 John is about dancing—is about the body—then it’s equally as much about
love. And that, I think, is no
coincidence. Love and the body
have a lot to do with one another.
How do we know
God’s love, for instance? Is it
because of words or because of the body?
According to the gospel of John, we only really came to know God when
the Word became flesh. We only
really heard the Word when we touched the body—when Jesus handled our hurts,
celebrated our joy, shared our suffering, broke bread and filled our cups. We know love ultimately not because of
words but because of the body.
Isn’t this a
truth that we live out every day in our world? The body speaks before the mouth does, doesn’t it, and much
louder too? This is why sometimes
we know that people are lying.
They say one thing, but we can already see in the hesitation of their
eyes or the anxiety of their hands that they feel differently. The body can tell us much more than
words do.
According to
today’s scripture, the body is what makes God visible. The body is where God’s love is made
real. “No one has ever seen God;
[but] if we love one another, God lives in us and [God’s] love is perfected [or
completed] in us” (4:12).
God’s love is
like a musical score, and our bodies are the instruments. They are where the music becomes
real. God’s love is like a dance. But a dance needs bodies. The body is where God’s love dances.
A Faith Before and Beyond our Mind
The thing that
I learned about dancing that night years ago in Liverpool, is that it’s
actually pretty natural. One step
leads to another. You can’t help
but follow along.
And that’s the
image that I have in my head when the writer of 1 John talks about love. Love is a dance. God takes a step, and then we quite
naturally take the next. Because
God loves, we love too. And so the
writer says things like, “Since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one
another,” and, “We love because he first loved us.”
I’ll confess:
for much of my life, I have tried to live my faith in my head. I would suspect that many Christians do
the same, because in this world shaped so strongly by the Enlightenment, we
often confuse ourselves with our minds.
“I think, therefore I am.”
But we are so much more than our minds.
One of my
favorite theopoets, a thoughtful Brazilian man named Rubem Alves, once
wondered, “Isn’t it strange that, most of the time, we consider what people
think, and not what they love, to be most important?” I’m certain the writer of 1 John would agree. What matters most to our faith is not
what we think or understand, but whom and what we love. The question is not what we think about
the trinity or miracles or heaven and hell. The question is, are we dancing? Is our love as plain as our bodies, when a stranger
interrupts our day or when a homeless man looks to us for his dignity or when
the poor in spirit cry for help?
Lately I’ve
been discovering something about my own faith. In certain settings, I am reserved and shy, anxious about
holding anyone’s eye contact for longer than necessary lest I incur their
judgment of my person or even worse their dismissal. In these moments, my body is constrained and inhibited, and
I think it is telling me something about my faith. I think it is telling me that in these moments my faith in
God’s love is weak. Rather than
living freely and confidently from God’s love, I am worrying about what others
might think.
This is why
gathering with the memory care residents across the street and the L’Arche
community here in Richmond has touched me so deeply. There, in persons whom the world considers slow or behind
the curve, my body encounters God’s love.
Many of the folks in these groups are “dancing,” living not in fear or
judgment but in an unreserved joy and trust. Their bodies welcome me with the simplest of gestures:
smiles, handshakes and hugs, eyes curious and caring. I don’t have to prove a thing in their presence. Whether or not they speak, their bodies
have already said, You belong here.
We’re happy that you’re here.
The body is
where God’s love dances. In their
bodies, I know God’s love and I am invited to join in the dance, to follow one
step with another. To love others
freely as I have been loved.
It’s like the
writer of our scripture says. “No
one has ever seen God.” But in the
body of Christ that danced among us, and in the bodies that are dancing still,
we know God’s love. And we are
invited to join the dance, the love—not just in our minds or in our words, but
before that and beyond that, in our bodies.
Prayer
Dear Christ,
Whose body
Dances among us
And makes God’s love real
In our lives:
Invite us anew
Into your dance.
Whisk us beyond
Our careful and controlling minds
Into the trustful and joyous and
bodily
To-and-fro of your love
As it skips throughout creation,
Renewing all things.
Amen.
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