Sermon: Waltz Before God
Texts: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 25:1-10
Date: March 8, 2009
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
“If God
invited you to a party and
said,
‘Everyone in the ballroom tonight will
be my special guest,’
How would you then treat them when you arrived?
Indeed, indeed!
And Hafiz knows that there is no one in
the world who is not standing upon
His jeweled dance
floor.” [1]
Hafiz was a 14th century Persian poet who wrote thousands of mystical poems. The note of universality he sounds here—“Hafiz knows that there is no one in the world who is not standing on His jeweled dance floor”—may sound at first like a counterpoint to the covenant recalled in our reading from Genesis. We are used to thinking of Yahweh’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah as an introduction to the Chosen People, chapter one of the long story of God’s particular relationship with the Hebrew tribe.
We may overlook the element of universality that is built into this story. God had first called Abram and Sarai to leave home and kindred, promising to make them a great nation and bless them, some 24 years before this formal statement of the covenant. The blessing God had promised back in chapter 12 was not just for their sake, though. It was so that through them all the families of the earth would be blessed. That expansive spirit is echoed in the covenant we heard today as God promises Abraham he will be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. Abraham and Sarah are to be the parents of many nations—not one single nation, but many nations—and that covenant of divine relationship will extend to all the peoples that grow up from their offspring. Paul Nancarrow proposes understanding Abraham and Sarah as “the channel through which divine relationship is to be extended to many peoples within the ways of the world.” [2] The covenant builds on the covenant with Noah, which was a covenant with the whole earth. It is a refinement, as God enters in a focused kind of relationship with human creatures. Through this covenant God calls a multitude of Abraham and Sarah’s descendents—as numerous as the stars in the sky—to know God, follow God, and be the instruments of God’s blessing.
I’ve used the word “call” as if the response of the human creatures is the essential theme of this story. It really is not. The emphasis in this story is on God’s promises. Here God is binding godself to humankind, who are nothing at all like negotiating partners in this relationship. Biblical scholar Gerhard Von Rad explains that the Hebrew word that is translated “covenant” here could be more appropriately translated “obligation” or “promise.” “The obligation can be taken up one-sidedly by one party toward another, but it can also be enjoined on one party by the other; finally, it can be adopted mutually by both parties. Here we have the first of the three possibilities. God binds himself; Abraham remains the dumb [as in silent] recipient of the promise.” [3]
It’s a curious thing. Why would God bind godself to humankind, making an eternal promise to be God to those who will obviously turn out to be a fickle species, intermittently faithful folk who will be a source of nearly endless heartbreak to God? Why? Does God ever wish she had chosen the robins or the mice instead of the humans? I wonder. I heard a lecture this week in which the speaker speculated that what God wanted to call out from the earth in the long process of creation was intelligence. And if there hadn’t been a massive extinction eons ago brought about by a collision with an asteroid which did in the dinosaurs, it’s possible that the earth would be ruled now by very intelligent lizards instead of us two-legged mammals.
For whatever reason, we humans have been invited to the party, we are the ones who are God’s dancing partners on the bejeweled divine dance floor. A faithful God has promised that he will never ditch us for a more attractive date, nor will we be left on the sidelines to watch others waltz with the divine. No wallflowers in God’s realm, unless they choose to be. Every single human has a dance date with the Holy. In the old days, when young ladies went to a dance they would be issued a dance card with a blank to fill in for each musical number. Popular people would get their dance card filled right away, either by a bunch of different party-goers or by one particularly smitten swain who would write his name down for every dance. That’s the way God relates to us humans; the divine name is on every line. God claimed us as dance partners before we even learned to toddle.
I sincerely believe this is true, that God for reasons known only to God has chosen to bind godself in loving relationship with every single human. We don’t have any good reason to suspect that God is bound to only one kind of person, that God sorts out humans the way we do, by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, class or any other sorting mechanism. Knowing what we do about God, the infinite quality of God’s love, we can safely deduce that God wants to bop with every single one of us. We didn’t get to choose whether God would choose us, any more than Abraham and Sarah did. We don’t get to choose whether God can dance with anyone else, either. God the Gregarious is free to be in relationship with everyone, which apparently is what God has chosen to do.
God did give some rather vague directions to Father Abraham when announcing the divine promises. Listen up, because as descendants of Abraham and Sarah these directions apply to us as well. God says, “Walk before me and be blameless.” Got that? Those are our marching orders, or dance instructions.
Abraham doesn’t say much in this whole scene. I wonder what he was thinking. I know what I would be thinking, if I heard God give this sort of instruction: “Good God Almighty, could you be any more ambiguous?” “Walk before me and be blameless,” what exactly is entailed in that? If you read the King James Version of this verse, it’s even more nerve-wracking for the interpreter: “Walk before me and be perfect.” Oh, is that all? I’ll get right on that.
I dusted off every single one of my commentaries this week trying to understand what was meant by this. This is what I found: To walk before God is to be loyal to God. Devoted, dedicated, faithful. Loyal. To be blameless means “unreserved faithfulness in every aspect of the relationship, but not sinless.” [4] Sinners, you may heave a sigh of relief now. The New Interpreter’s Bible points out that the second imperative—be blameless—presents the consequence of obeying the first. Walk before God and you will be blameless.
Von Rad’s commentary on Genesis spells it out a little more fully. The word translated “blameless” or “perfect,” sometimes rendered as “devout,” actually means “whole.” It is wholeness or perfection not in the sense of moral perfection [second sigh of relief] but rather in relationship to God. “It signifies complete, unqualified surrender.” In Deuteronomy 18:13 it is stated like this: “Be whole with your God.” There is a sense of entering into the relationship without reservations, without ulterior motives.
The New Interpreter’s Bible is clear that as far as Abraham and Sarah were concerned, walking before God was not a condition for giving the covenant. Abraham did not have to agree to this before God laid out all the promises. Remember, it’s all quite one-sided. As it happens, Abraham intends to do so. In point of fact, he has already been walking for 24 years, wandering toward the place God said years earlier he would show him. This episode is not new news but a reminder, a renewal.
There is something here for us, descendents of Abraham and heirs to the promise, to pay attention to. God’s going to walk with us, waltz with us. That’s been decided and announced. Whether we want to engage with God face to face and try to follow God’s lead is sort of optional. Imagine an obstinate kid sitting cross-legged and cross-armed on the dance floor while the music plays, and a grinning individual dancing circles around, ever extending a hand to the youngster, urging her or him to get up and dance. That is an option in our dance with the divine. We can refuse to get in the groove.
Obstinacy may be a factor in refusing to join in the dance. So might just pure awkwardness. When I was a young person I dreaded dances for a couple of reasons. I had a well-founded fear that no one would ask me to dance. And I was a clumsy and insecure dancer. I didn’t know the moves the cooler kids did, and was terrified of looking like a fool in front of my peers. In relation to dancing with the Divine, the first fear is taken care of. God obviously wants to dance with everyone, including me. But I think a lot of us feel uncertain about how to move and groove with the Holy One. We don’t feel like we know what it means to walk before God or waltz with the Lord. The God we know is, after all, mostly invisible to the eye; how do you dance with someone you cannot see?
We were musing in Bible study about the idea that we are called to walk “before” God. Why wouldn’t God ask us to walk behind God instead of in front? Wouldn’t that make more sense? Wouldn’t you rather be following a leader you can see, imitating every move as we did when we played “Follow the Leader” as kids? The author of Psalm 25 speaks for many of us as he pleads with the Lord to “make me to know your ways, teach me your paths, lead me in your truth…” [Psalm 25:4] But that is not the nature of this covenant, not the nature of this relationship. In terms of the language of this covenant, which is echoed in many other verses of scripture, the invitation is to walk before God. For some mysterious reason God chooses to carry on behind us, out of sight, not out front where we can see. Curious. Why?
I think it’s because God desires dance partners, not foot soldiers who are marching along in lock step following orders. God wants partners who will follow but also show off their own distinctive style. There is a tremendous open-endedness in our journey with God. Our Lenten study book, Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living, reminded me again of the wide-open nature of our walk with God. The author asserts that we are part of God’s holy adventure just as God is part of ours. He writes, “I believe God is constantly present in our lives, giving us dreams and possibilities and the energy to bring them to birth in the world…God gives us a dream and invites us to improvise. God likes creativity, artistry, and adventure. The living God is not stuck in a preplanned vision of the universe. God does not determine the unchanging future in eternity but moves toward the future in terms of the constantly creative present moment. God is constantly creating, and so are we!” [5]
Epperly and other Process theologians would say that God is not walking visibly ahead of us insisting that we follow a particular path because the future is still unfolding, and we are co-creating the earth in partnership with God. We are, you could say, dancing down the path to the future together, creating the steps as we go. God can both dance with each of us and see the whole dance floor, and is trying to lead all of her partners to create something beautiful as we move. God has the lead, but at the same time the Holy One is not unreceptive to the influence of all his partners.
In a way that is even more of a cause for sweaty palms—the idea that God might be interested in what I would uniquely bring to the dance floor. The idea that I might influence the way creation turns out! As a teenager I lacked confidence on the dance floor, and I still feel self conscious when I dance with a gifted partner like my darling husband, John “Smooth Moves” Eisenhauer. I wonder if we carry a similar self-consciousness into our dance with the Divine. We don’t always feel confident that we are following properly. We may suppose that we’ve stepped on God’s toes from time to time in our clumsiness. We suspect that we look like dorks on the dance floor. We may even worry that our Partner has abandoned us while we were in the midst of a spin. I was drawn to and comforted by this other verse by Hafiz, addressing a friend who thinks she is dancing alone, poorly:
You have
not danced so badly, my dear,
trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.
You have waltzed with great style, my sweet, crushed angel,
to have ever neared God’s heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow, and even His
best musicians are not always easy to hear… [6]
I trust that what Hafiz is trying to say would be the message God would also want to give us: you have waltzed with great style, my sweet angel. It’s not always easy to hear the music that draws us into movement, and we may not feel absolutely sure we’ve got the steps just right. But God delights in our utterly unique efforts to dance along anyway. How does that saying go—dance as if no one were watching? God is watching, but watching with great interest, love, amusement, and joy, not scorn. If we get into the dance with a sincere desire to give ourselves wholly to our partner, following God’s lead and responding with our own creativity we need not obsess about the mistakes we make. Remember that in the original formulation of the covenant being “blameless” is a consequence of choosing to give oneself unreservedly to walking/waltzing before God. The only way we really disappoint God is if we are continually answering God’s invitation with “I’m going to sit this one out.”
Back in January, I watched some of the Inaugural Balls that President Obama attended. He made a little speech at each appearance, and at the end of most of them, he spoke about his appreciation for the constant support of his lovely wife, and wound up saying “ Now I’m gonna dance with the one that brung me.” And then he did.
Perhaps that could be an expression of our will to walk before God, and be blameless. “I’m gonna dance with the One that brung me.” I’m gonna dance like nobody’s watching, except the One that brung me. And I’m going to put my whole self in, and shake it all about, and swing and do-si-do and tap and shimmy and clog and arabesque and dip and all that jazz. And at the end of my set, whenever that may be, I’m going to bow to my Partner, and say “Thanks.”
[1] Hafiz “If God Invited You to a Party” Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West Daniel Ladinsky, ed. New York: Penguin Compass, 2002, p. 158
[2] http://www.processandfaith.org/lectionary/YearB/2008-2009/2009-03-08-09-Lent2.shtml
[3] Von Rad, Gerhard Genesis Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972, p. 199
[4] New Interpreters Bible, Volume 1 p. 458
[5] Epperly, Bruce Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living Nashville: UpperRoom, 2008, p. 25
[6] Op cit. Hafiz, p. 178