I WILL Dance!

A Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy)

If you know mercy then you now how to dance.

During the Easter Octave it has been my practice to pray with the various Resurrection narratives we are given across the 4 gospels. But this past Easter Octave was different.

I was recently reminded of 2nd Samuel 6:14-23. This is the story of King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant. You may recall how David danced before the Ark with reckless abandon, scantily clad and raucously free, he danced the Ark into the City of David. You also may recall how Michal, the wife of David, the daughter of the deposed Saul, looked down from her window and “despised David in her heart.” And when David returns home, desiring nothing more than to bless his own family with the beauty and truth of who he is in God’s eyes, instead he is met by Michal’s contempt for him seeking to trigger contempt in himself, threatening to turn fundamental blessing into shame, but David delightfully responds to her simply declaring: “I will dance.”

If we know mercy we too must dance! For David there was no choice to be made, he knew that all of us, before the Lord, must dance… it is what we were each created to do.

We work so very hard to force a life of “consistency” upon ourselves and upon others. Like Michal, stuck in deprivation, we look down on ourselves, on others, and like it or not, we “despise ourselves and others in our hearts.” What did Michal despise in David? What do we despise in ourselves and others? Strangely enough, we despise joy, we despise delight, we despise dancing! Why?

In our gospel today we watch Thomas learn to dance. Consider the reality of Thomas’ situation. He just watched the man he loved go to a contempt-ridden, shame-inducing death all orchestrated by those who look down on delight and dancing and instead delight in deprivation. Thomas’ sorrow, his grief, his sense of profound loss; his disorientation, his destabilization is all too real. We know Thomas’ plight. No one lives life too long without colliding into the kind of tragedy and inexplicable sorrow that Thomas knew.

But then comes the Resurrected Christ and he places a choice before Thomas: You can let the realities of grief, sorrow, and loss shrink you down into a life defined by a death-dance of deprivation? Or you can pass through those same realities and learn to dance with reckless abandon? When you’ve seen the worst you dance all the better! Real dancing before the Lord, the kind of Dancing David knew, is only learned when we choose to let the wounds of our life open us up rather than shut us down. It matters that Jesus invites Thomas to touch his wounds, because only when we are willing to touch our own woundedness and the woundedness of others; only by such experiences of mercy can we truly learn to dance.

Thomas cries, “My Lord and My God!” and he becomes a dancing disciple! And legend tells us he danced himself all the way to India, where he delightfully gave his life that no longer knew death.

If you need more proof just keep your eye on Peter during the course of the Easter Season. Peter, our Apostle of the Two Left Feet, who through denial and the experience of Jesus’ undeterred delightful love for him would dance in such a way as to inspire multitudes by his preaching, heal people by the mere passing by of his dancing shadow, and eventually out dance those who delight in deprivation and division, by kicking down the locked doors that divided Jew and Gentile. And Peter too would eventually dance through death to the eternal dance of a life that never ends. How we dance now is how we’ll dance then!

We live in a world desperate for dancers such as these. What was it David meant when he said, in defiant joy: “I will dance?” I think what David was saying was simply this: WE have to stop allowing the death-dealing, deprivation-driven voices of others from turning our fundamental blessing of self into ugly shame.

Perhaps you are thinking: “What does all this have to do with a world wracked by unjust war, with unempathetic leaders riddled with cruelty, and unjustly treated immigrants, not to mention the daily mounting lack of basic human kindness? Well, we live in a world ruled by the desperate death-dance of those determined to delight in deprivation. So there really is only one thing to do: DANCE! Probe the wounds of Christ freely, probe the wounds of your heart freely, probe the wounds of others freely and then pass through those wounds and dance.

Dance with reckless abandon. Dance with defiant joy. We each have a daily choice to make. Look down from our safe windows and harbor contempt in our hearts… or get out into the streets and become a dancing disciple of Christ. As for me:

I will dance!