Tag: David

Dance Like Fools (Reflections on King David and John the Baptist on April Fools’ Day)

On By Rev. Dr. Jarrett BanksIn LentLeave a comment

old-guy-dancing

2 Sam 6:1-5, 12b-19 and Mark 6:14-29 NRSV

After King David led a great army to return the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, David and his army were so overcome with emotion that they engaged in festive dancing.

The scripture tells us that David danced before God“with all his might.”  He danced before God with all that he had and with all that we was, as he was utterly and completely overcome by the joy of God.

However, in this broken world there is always something or someone ready to burst our bubble of joy wide open.  So it was with David.

When David and his wife Michal arrived home from the party and began preparing to turn in for the night, David, if he was anything like most men I know, was probably expecting to hear some words of affirmation from his wife. “Honey, as I watched you dance this evening, you just don’t know how proud I was of you!  You danced your heart out!  And why shouldn’t you have, you brought the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem where it belongs!”

However, the words David hears instead were something like: “Baby, you really made a fool out of yourself tonight!”

Perhaps David did act like a fool. Uninhibited and unrestrained, he lost all self-control.  Seized by “a spirit of prophetic ecstasy,” that night David held absolutely nothing back. David gave in to the joy which had consumed him. He had completely surrendered himself to the joy of God.

David danced, affirming the rule of God.  David danced, consumed by the joy of God. David danced a dance of total self-surrender. David danced, holding nothing back. David danced giving all that he had and all that he was to God.  And Michal despised David for it.

This is the harsh reality of living the gospel of Jesus Christ. The dance of the gospel is a dangerous dance. The dance of the gospel is a disturbing dance. The dance of the gospel is a dance which is despised by the world. The active affirmation of the rule of God does not set well with the Michals and Herods of the world.  In fact, people are likely to lose their heads if they claim too much for the gospel.

To metaphorically call the life and ministry of John the Baptist “a dance” does not call for a stretch of the imagination.  Like David, John the Baptist had lost all restraint, inhibition and self-control.  John the Baptist held absolutely nothing back.  He had surrendered himself completely to the rule of God.  And in the eyes of many probably acted like a fool. The joy of God consumed him. One could say that John the Baptist was seized by a spirit of prophetic ecstasy.  Everything about him: his dress, his speech, even his diet was an uninhibited dance of joy.  He had given all that he had and all that he was to God. And his head was served up on a silver platter.

The dance of prosperity preachers are easier steps to follow, aren’t they? The message of false prophets distorting the gospel of Christ as nothing more than a little dose of “chicken soup for the soul” is much easier to swallow. If we just get ourselves right with the Lord, if we would just straighten up and pray right and live right, good health and great wealth will come our way.

The dance of the gospel is radically different. The dance of the gospel contains steps to the beat of a different drum. If we get right with the Lord, if we pray right and live right, if we lose all inhibitions and all restraint, if we completely surrender ourselves to the rule of God, if we love others as Christ loves thereby allowing the joy of God to consume us, to control us, then suffering is inevitable.

If we dance to the beat of this drum, in the eyes of the world we can expect to look like a fool. For the dance of the gospel is a dance of self-surrender to a very radical drum beat. It is a beat of sacrifice. It is a beat of selflessness. It is a beat of self-expenditure. It is a beat of love and of grace.  And to world, as the Apostle Paul warned the Corinthians, if we let go and dance to this beat, we are certain to look pretty foolish.

The world may call us fools when offer our friendship to a poor, lonely, childless, widow as we visit her in the nursing home on a regular basis.

The world may call us fools when we prepare and deliver a meal to someone recovering from surgery, especially when that someone has always treated us with condescending contempt.

We may look like fools to the world when we spend valuable time volunteering at the hospital, serving lunch in a soup kitchen, visiting someone in prison or working in a homeless shelter.

The world may call us fools when we offer love and forgiveness to our enemies, when we give the shirt off our backs to complete strangers in need.

The world will call us foolish when we give sacrificially and consistently to the budget of a local church.

And the world will call us foolish anytime we love anyone with the self-expending love of Christ—whenever we love someone without inhibitions, without restraints, and without reservations.

I believe this is the dance of the gospel—a dance of immense joy, but also a dance of enormous suffering.

And the Herods and Michals of the world despise this dance.  And they will do everything in their power to stop this dance.

We have all heard their voices, echoes which discourage such dancing.  “Don’t get too close to him.  Do not give your heart to her.  As human beings they will only let you down.  They may one day betray you.  They might move away.  One day they will die.”

“Don’t love that man.  He has done absolutely nothing to deserve it.  And will probably never be able to reciprocate.  Don’t love that woman.  She is poor and destitute.  She is too needy.  She will demand too much.”

The voices Michal and Herod say: “Don’t give yourself away to another.  Loving like that is too risky.  It leads to too much pain, heartache and grief.”

However, there is another voice.  A voice which was heard by David and by John the Baptist.  It is a voice which says: “Dance!  Hold nothing back.  Give yourself away. Surrender yourself to beat of the heart of the gospel.  Love.  Love honestly and deeply.  Love courageously and graciously.  Lose yourself.  Empty yourself.  Pour yourself out.”

Will this love cause pain?  It will cause enormous pain.  But the joy of God which will consume you will be so immense the suffering will be well worth it.  So, dance.

Garth Brooks once sang a song entitled “the dance.”  There’s a line in that song that goes, “I could have missed the pain, but I would have had to have missed the dance.”

Loving others will inevitably bring pain.  However, never loving to avoid that pain is never really living.  There is no joy being a wallflower on the wall of life.

So, may we dance!  May we go out and dance in the streets of our world!  Let us go out and have seizures of prophetic ecstasy!  Be warned, we might look like fools, and we will suffer for it. However, the immense joy of God, the joy of abundant life, now and forevermore, is well worth it.

Whom God Favors

On By Rev. Dr. Jarrett BanksIn Advent and Christmas, Short ArticlesLeave a comment

dirtyshepherds

The very first ones on earth to hear the pronouncement of Christmas were shepherds.  Who were these shepherds?   It is accurate to say that they were folks that the popular religious people knew would never “inherit the kingdom of God.”

This is not easy for most of us to hear.  For most of us have a tendency to romanticize the shepherds.  After all, we have been raised in the church with our innocent children depicting shepherds wearing bathrobes in adorable Christmas plays.  And for most of us church folk, shepherding evokes a very positive and pastoral image.  We think about the Old Testament images of the shepherd king David.  We think about the beautiful green pastures and still waters and the protection of the rod and staff of the twenty-third Psalm.  And, of course, we think about Jesus Himself as being the “good shepherd.”

However,  the reality is that shepherding was a most despised occupation.  Mercer New Testament Professor Alan Culpepper writes:  “In the first century, shepherds were scorned as shiftless, dishonest people who grazed their flocks on others’ lands.”  Therefore, it would not be too great of a stretch to give shepherds the current degrading designation: “illegal aliens.”

And why were these people involved in such a despised occupation?  The theology of the day would say, “because of sin, of course.”  They were who they were because of either their own sin or the sins of their parents.  In the eyes of popular religion, the shepherds were poor, immoral sinners.

Fred Craddock writes that the shepherds belong to the Christmas story “not only because they serve to tie Jesus to the shepherd king, David (2 Sam 14:23, 21) but because they belong on Luke’s guest list for the kingdom of God: the poor, the maimed, the blind, the lame (Luke 14:13, 21).

The very first people in history to receive the birth announcement of the messiah, the very first ones on earth to celebrate Christmas are sinners; they are the despised, the lowly, the immoral and the outcast.

This is why the angels pronounce the good news of Christmas is great joy for ALL the people.  Culpepper writes:  “The familiarity of these words should not prevent us from hearing that, first and foremost, the birth of Jesus was a sign of God’s abundant grace.”  The birth is a sign that God is on the side of ALL people—even the most despised, the most lowly, the most immoral, the most outcast, the most alien, and the most illegal .  Jesus came even for those who find themselves standing on the outside of the community or church.

And in what form does this sign appear?   The savior was coming into the world through a poor peasant woman to lay in a manger, a feeding trough made for animals.  And it is this humble scene that sets the stage for his entire life on earth.  Jesus, the savior of the world was born and lived and even died on the fringes, on the margins of society—underscoring the truth that the good news has come into the world for ALL—maybe especially to the marginalized.

Page Kelly, my Old Testament professor at Southern Seminary, used to love to say that the biblical symbol for God’s justice on this earth was not a blind woman holding a set of scales.  “It was one of the Old Testament prophets holding a set of scales with his eyes bugged out and his long bony finger mashing down on the side of the poor.”  –Favoring those who have always been despised and marginalized by society.

Sounds a little like the Angels’ song:  “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors.”

“But God does not have favorites!” we say.  Arguing that God’s grace is all-inclusive, some ancient manuscripts even omit, “among those whom he favors.”   Fred Craddock says that interpreting this passage all depends on where you put the comma.  The original Greek was without punctuation.  Thus, one could read:  And on earth peace among those (comma), all those who inhabit the earth, whom God favors—making it the song all-inclusive.

But then we have the Song of Mary.  In the Magnificat, Mary sings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”  And this favoritism does not appear to be all-inclusive for “he has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.  He has filled the hungry with good things, and set the rich away empty” (Luke 1:46-48, 52-53).

So, maybe just maybe, those folks, who for whatever reason, cause people to judge as unworthy of “inheriting the Kingdom of God,” are not the ones who have the problem.

Now, here’s the good news.   And it just so happens that I heard it while visiting an Alzheimer’s patient in the nursing home who does not remember who I am.  There are some days when she does not know who her husband is, but amazingly, she has never forgotten who her Lord and Savior is.  As soon as I entered her room, she read me the front of Christmas card that she was holding in her hand.  “Jesus—in the incarnation, God showed us mercy.”

The good news is that when we realize that we stand in desperate need of God’s mercy, when we realize that apart from the grace of Christ, we are all outsiders, we are all poor, alien, sinful, immoral, when we realize that the shepherds are our brothers, then the joy and peace that is Christmas, that is salvation, is ours.

Wake Forest theologian Frank Tupper commented on Luke’s story of the Good Samaritan stating, “We are all half-dead men or women lying in a ditch somewhere east of Eden—beaten so badly by the sin and evil of this world that no one can tell if we are rich or poor, slave or free, male or female.”

And the news even gets better.  When we realize that we are sisters and brothers to the shepherds, the outsiders, the lowly and despised, the poor and the weak, when we reach out and offer them our bread, our drink, our clothing, our presence, our touch, our love, when we reach out and take in, then the Song of the Angels still fill the skies singing with the comma in just the right place—“Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, among all who inhabit it, whom God favors.”