Let Us Dance

 (This Sunday we are doing something a little different in our worship. We are worshipping outside which we regularly do during this pandemic, but instead of a lining up the chairs in a traditional way of rows, we will be lining up the chairs in a circle and having two leaders dance through a folk song at the end of the sermon.)

(We will start the service with some dance music, brief clips of In the Mood, Hound Dog, Twist, Twist and Shout, YMCA, Footloose, the Right Stuff, and I've Got a Feeling)

I apologize that we didn't any square dancing music or more ballroom music as I know there are some avid dancers of those types of dancing in our midst. When I was in Aberdeen, I was in a band with Kileen's brother and we played all types of music that people could swing dance or jitterbug to, as long as we had the right beat. 

The Congregationalists were a stodgy group that worshipped for hours, a two or three hour sermon, an hour of discussion, and then an hour-long pastoral prayer in a meeting house with often not even a cross, just bare walls or a chalk board for the school as it was used for during the week. We have had to fight against our tradition and the "we've always done it that way before" to bring back color and art into our sanctuaries, music, and now the next frontier is dance, which makes more than a few people even here a little nervous. Dance could just be clapping in time with our hymn or bouncing our foot along to the prelude or postlude or reflection. 

But it even goes further than that, the body was denied as something good for much of the history of our Christian faith. It isn't so in the Jewish religion, but once we decided that original sin was the thing to capture the conscience of the people, Christianity has literally whipped our bodies into shape with severe ascetic pratices or denied them as Paul the Apostle wrote, "temples of the Holy Spirit." Especially women's bodies, they were covered and shamed for tempting men and had to be covered and modest so men could focus on God. However, there are stories about dancing in the Prime or Hebrew Testament, Miriam and the women dancing after crossing the Red Sea, King David dancing when the ark of the covenant come into Jerusalem, and in the Psalms we are told to dance, dance during worship. In the Gospel of Thomas, one that didn't make it into the New Testament, had include dancing of Jesus and the disciples after the Las Supper in its story. Many of you are probably glad that we are only having dancing in our worship once a year, however we are to honor and love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and BODY which means to dance, to move, to feel, and to enjoy.

In the prophecy of Jeremiah takes place as the Babylonian Empire overtakes the Assyrian Empire and the people of Israel has its hopes of freedom dashed as Babylonia conquers all of Israel and Judah and Jerusalem itself, destroying the Temple built by King Solomon. Though they are going through tough times, Jeremiah prophecies that the bad times won't last and good things will come afterwards. There will be celebration, shouts of joy, all will return, there will be abundance, and there will be dancing.

One of the reasons we do Tai Chi on Thursday mornings is because we do not have an equivalent in our faith tradition. We do have the sports of Western Culture, a wide variety of dancing, but especially for Western mainline Christianity, though KathyAnn grew up with a lot of movement in her worship service, we don't have traditions to borrow from and update. I hope this will change over the next hundred years and as what it means to be a church and how to live out our faith is changing rapidly in our time, maybe we will affirm all bodies, their movements, and the joy they do and can bring. 

So, enough talk and let's put our feet to worship. I will invite Zahir first to teach and share his dance, which is a Jewish folk dance if I am not mistaken. Then Ann will lead us not in the Bunny Hop or the Congo line, but in a dance and song to bring us together. 

Let us dance!