Today we read from two different passages, two passages which on their face don’t seem to have a lot in common. One is the tale of King David’s ecstatic entrance into Jerusalem. The other is the introduction to a letter sent to people in the region that would become what we know as Turkey. How do these two stories relate? And what do they have to teach us about the way God would have us live in the world? Let's see if we can figure it out.
The
passage in 2nd Samuel tells the story of David’s bringing the Arc of
the Covenant to his new city. Now David
had good reasons to celebrate. The northern
kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah had been engaged in a bloody
civil war. The war was finally coming to
an end, resulting in the merging of two long divided peoples. David, now king of a united nation, decides
to move his capital city from Hebron (the burial place of Abraham and Sarah,
Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah) to Jerusalem, and take the Arc of the Covenant
there to build a permanent dwelling for it.
The journey from Baale-Judah (the modern city of Kairiath-Jearim), where the arc was, to Jerusalem is less than 10 miles, but takes months to complete. The text tells us of two primary reasons for the duration of the journey. First, David was traveling with 30,000 fighting men and who knows how many slaves, servants, boys, women, and children. Army records don’t exactly tally the army’s entourage. Secondly, there was an accident with the arc in which one of the bearers touches the arc is killed. Remember that the Arc is equipped with carrying poles to prevent such a thing from happening. Anyway, after the display of the power of the arc, David is afraid to move on lest he anger God.
Nevertheless, eventually the processional does move on, and as David and company approach the Jerusalem, David can no longer contain his joy—for the work that God has done uniting the kingdoms, for the new start in the new capital, and probably because he’s glad the arduous journey is finally over.
David dances, and dances, and dances, and dances….and scandalizes people. Whether it’s because he’s dancing, because he’s wearing priest’s robes, or maybe because he’s wearing so little we can’t entirely know, but whatever the reason the dancing is shocking. But David doesn’t care. Doesn’t care that people are talking, or that he might look like a fool. In this extraordinary moment, David unabashedly dances, and instruments are played, and sacrifices are made, because words simply aren’t enough on their own to express what David feels. David’s dance embodies his gratitude for the goodness of his Lord.
Have you ever experienced something that left you without words? Like David, there are times when words can’t express what we feel—weddings, births, deaths, an unexpected surprise, graduations, a really good chocolate cake…are all times when words often fail us. Maybe we want to give thanks for reconciliation and reunification of family and friends. Or remember those who have made us who we are. We mourn loss. We praise God for being with us in the middle of our journeys. We shout for joy for new birth and new beginnings. In such times we too dance, and sing, and cry out, and weep, and play instruments, and just like David, our responses are often unconscious and spontaneous. These extraordinary and overwhelming moments prompt us to behave in unusual ways. Move us beyond what we would normally do.
It’s easy to dance in the extraordinary times. But what about all of the other times? How do we dance on a regular old Thursday? How do we dance when the car won’t start, or when the basement floods? How do we dance on ordinary days?
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the decorations in the sanctuary have been changed from red to green. This is because we follow the church calendar. The calendar varies a little based on which Christian tradition you follow, but it basically looks like this:
Purple for Advent and
Lent, white for Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter, red for a few holy days, and
green for all of the other days. The
green “season” we call ordinary time (the time between the second Sunday in
January and Ash Wednesday, and again for the Sunday after Pentecost up until
Advent), and you can see it is roughly two thirds of our year.
Interestingly enough, the term “Ordinary time” doesn’t mean “boring” time. It actually comes from the way we count the days of our liturgical seasons—I know there’s at least one mathematician in the congregation who knows the difference between cardinal numbers (one, two, three, etc.) and ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc.). So, our counting of the Sundays is where “Ordinary time” gets its name. For example, this is the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost.
But the usual understanding of “ordinary” fits too. These are days where we aren’t celebrating anything in particular—they are simply ordinary. And that feeling of sameness, of banal repetition, can lure us into thinking that ordinary is somehow less important, but that would be a big mistake. Even though ordinary time sounds, well, ordinary, and looking at green for so long might make us nauseous, ordinary time is crucial to our understanding of God’s desire for the world. Ordinary time teaches us that even in the mundane moments of life God is still busy at work, doing miraculous and extraordinary things. This is what the letter to the Ephesians points us toward—the daily work of God in the lives of God’s people.
The letter to the Ephesians opens with dramatic,
superfluous, rapturous, over-the-top praise.
It’s almost as if the writer can barely find the words to explain the
wonder of God and so throws all the words he knows at the page. At great detriment to the beauty of the
passage, I’m going to briefly summarize it again for you: God is our blessing, has thought of us from
before time, and desires for us to be made whole in love; Christ is the way
that God has planned for us to be brought into God’s family, and because of
Christ we are redeemed and free; not just free, but abundantly free and
entirely provided for; the Spirit has sealed us, protecting, guiding, and
promising us that we are God’s children and heirs; and finally God’s plan for
us is long-range, from the beginning of time until the end when all is made
whole, and the Kingdom is fulfilled.
I think our ability to dance in ordinary times stems from our understanding of this passage. This passage points out that God is to be our focus, because all that we have and all that we are, as well as all of the promises of the future are based on the unchanging blessings and love of God.
And not only does God lead us, but God invented the dance! If we take this passage to heart we know that God has been planning from the beginning for us. This passage assures us that we are chosen to be loved. We are adopted. We are redeemed, free of penalty. We are gifted abundantly with everything we could possibly need for life. We are sealed with the Spirit and are God’s forever. And we know that in Christ we see who we are and what we are living for. And although Jesus had some pretty extraordinary days, Jesus is actually all about the ordinary.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but most of Jesus’s ministry was done in the course of his daily life. Sure, he spent some time in the temple, but most of the time he was walking down the street or hanging out on hillsides when people found him, people who were hungry for healing, nourishment, and relief from the misery of their daily circumstances. Not only that, but Jesus met people where they were—stepped from his ordinary existence into theirs—and showed them the love that had been planning for them since the beginning of time. In this sense, the saving work of Christ, the work that tells us who we are, makes even the ordinary, mundane, dull, days holy. The work of Christ “has sanctified all of time, bringing us and the whole of our experience into the orbit of resurrection.”[1] This is the good news revealed to us in ordinary time.
The world that we live in doesn’t follow this calendar. It doesn’t understand celebrating the average. Our world celebrates extreme achievement. Our world seeks out the new and unusual and isn’t satisfied unless things get bigger, equating new and bigger with better. Our world often becomes a caricature of itself because it has lost the ability to appreciate the small beauties of ordinary life. And people who order their lives around the calendar of the world ceaselessly work themselves to achieve a continually novel existence, consequently missing the tiny and wondrously budding work of God in their midst. Knowing the confused priorities of our world, it should not surprise us that what our world calls ordinary, God has called holy.
And knowing what we know, the work of Christ, the daily giving of abundant grace, we can confidently state that though there may be nothing particularly special about today, or tomorrow, or next Thursday, God continues to be at work in our lives, even in the mundane moments. In the mowing of our lawns. In the visiting of friends. In our feeding of the hungry. In going to meetings. In playing with our kids, grandkids, nieces, and nephews. In fishing, and in watching storms on the horizon.
This is what the letter to the Ephesians points us toward—the knowledge that because of the work of God’s salvation through Christ and the Spirits continual blessing on us all of our time is sacred, is special, is redeemed. God is present and at work in all of it, calling us to dance even when things seem ordinary and we see no reason. After all, the scope of God’s plan for us and for the world is a bit beyond what we can grasp.
So maybe ordinary is what God desires most. After all, God’s entrance into human existence didn't seem all that special. God didn’t come to earth as a god. God didn’t come to earth as a king. God didn’t even come to earth as a priest. God came to earth as the child of an unwed mother and a tradesman. If that isn’t an extraordinary use of the ordinary, and a reason to dance, I’m not sure what is. And just as with David, our dancing in ordinary times might scandalize people. Might make them wonder whether or not we're crazy. But it also might make them wonder how we can dance for no particular reason. Might make them see the one with whom we dance.
May it be so.
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