TWO STORIES ABOUT DANCING

“The remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God you fear everything else”
- Oswald Sanders

There’s something all encompassing about faith in God. It’s not like faith is there to comfort me when I die, but it has nothing to do with which Supermarket I buy from, or how I relate to the City Council or where I go on holiday to, or how willing I am to forgive my family… One of our texts for today locates our life in the middle of a great story, God’s story. In which all things (not just some things, not just human souls, but all things will be gathered up into God’s kingdom) nothing left behind, all things restored.

Let’s listen to it… (extracts from Ephesians 1)
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up ALL THINGS in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all thing according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.

To live in the Christian story, to live the all-encompassing life of faith… is to be alive to a vision of the future… rather than bogged down in the present anxieties… I want to come back to this at the end…

The other readings that came up for today were strange stories… they had a common link – dancing. The first one we’ve already talked about

Dirty Dancing
What is Michal’s problem? David is indecent.

I wonder if being decent and proper… isn’t too unlike the older person’s version of being cool
We sometimes think that our notions of decency are somehow universal and divinely inspired… Have you ever tried to explain to a teenager why certain words are ‘swear words’ and others aren’t. Very quickly the reasoning stops and you just end up saying, that’s what our society finds unacceptable and if you want to get on with people you have to learn how to speak in certain contexts and how not to speak (you have to learn to be decent)
It’s not that things to do with sex or the body are unclean… cause we don’t believe that. We believe all of God’s creation is good! Don’t we?
But these things go deep… I feel as uncomfortable about public nakedness as the next person…. But I still wonder how much our sense of decency is wrongly bound up with our faith? This passage is a counter point to the famous Presbyterian motto – things should be done decently and in order. According to our story it is David who is in the right and Michal who has got it wrong. The rules of decency don’t apply.

SLIDE: Can being a decent citizen be a hindrance to being a passionate Christian?

Dancing his head off (Mark 6)
Story 2 is part of a flashback… Herod is hearing stories about Jesus and he fears that it is John the Baptist come back to haunt him… Here we learn the story of John the Baptist’s death and why it bothers Herod so much.

You see, John the Baptist was outspoken. He created a bit of a public stir because he was prepared to declare publicly that Herod – the most powerful man in his neighbourhood, the man who has all the power of Rome behind him, is behaving badly. In fact John made it clear that Herod’s marriage is illegitimate… Clearly Herod’s political situation is fragile. Herod has the difficult job of being Caesar’s representative in a Jewish province and the Jews are a notoriously volatile bunch and Herod’s task is to pacify them. Herod find’s John the Holy Man strangely interesting and keeps him in prison rather than killing him. Perhaps that is the safest way to avoid a public outcry. Anyway just when all is apparently under control Herod’s daughter dances at the party… and Herod is so taken by her dancing (both our stories include dancing) that that he offers her a gift anything she wants… she runs away and asks her mother… what she should ask for and her mother, angry at the way her marriage has been put in question asks for John’s head on a plate. And so we have it, perched amidst the hors-d’oeuvres, the head of John – a man who dared to speak out against the powerful ruler. (I thought that image was a bit R16 for the kids talk)

Two things that can stop us doing what we should do.

Shame – it goes against what everyone thinks is decent and respectable
Punishment – we might suffer as a consequence

CHALLENGE [slide – pause for reflection]
How deep is our loyalty to Christ?

SANDERS slide again

RWANDA STORY:
Imagine a country with 90% of the population claiming to be Christian. Rwanda was famous as the most Christian country in Africa… and then in 1994 over a period of about 100 days 800,000 people, men women and children were slaughtered by their neighbours with machetes, mostly. Lee Camp writes:

“The genocide demonstrated – in a graphic and horrific way – that the western Christianity imported into the heart of Africa had apparently failed to create communities of disciples. In actuality the triumph of Christian missions preceded the triumph of ethnic hatred. When push came to shove, the Jesus who taught his disciples to love your neighbour went missing when young men were hacking old men, women and children to death simply because these neighbours were ethnically different. Numerous Christian martyrs – both hutu and tutsi died resisting the massacres. But that these faithful martyrs were a minority among the fold of Christians has led critics to suggest that the “gospel” imported into Rwanda failed to ever challenge the ethnic identity of its converts – they became Christian, but many remained first and foremost either Hutu or Tutsi.”

I guess to make it relevant here we should ask ourselves whether we are first and foremost kiwi, or pakeha, some other ethnic group, or decent citizen… How deep is our loyalty to Christ?

Rev Bruce Hamill 12.7.09 at Caversham