Sermon: Who is Dancing?
John 1:29-42
Before the scripture reading:
Today’s story is difficult. The Gospel of John was originally written in Greek, and there’s lots of wordplay, which gets lost in translation. Have you read books that have been translated from their original language? When I was young, my parents bought a box of children’s storybooks from the West, about 100 pages each, translated into Korean from English or other European languages. I remember two things: first, there were lots of stories about witches who put children under various spells, and then the children had to find their way back home. Second, I read them in Korean, but many sentences just didn’t make sense because the translations were so poorly done. Despite this, I read them all. I was such a reader!
The thing that gets lost in translation in today’s story is the wordplay around “seeing” (with the root: eida!). Let’s try an activity. I will read a number of verses, and you clap your hands when you hear any word you think might be related to “seeing”. Ok?
The next day, he saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, “Behold! Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
After me comes a man, … I myself did not know (Eidein) him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason…
John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
Look, here is the Lamb of God!
Jesus said to them, “What are you looking for?” “Rabbi, Teacher, where are you staying? Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and remained with him that day.
Message:
The wordplay may not be very obvious to us in English, but “seeing” is central to the message of today’s story. The story, in a nutshell, is: (Let’s do this one more time: clap when you hear the “seeing” words.)
— What are you looking for? (What do you seek?)
— Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
— Come and see!
— If you follow him, you will find him.
— If you remain with him (dwell/stay), you will know him.
— Now is the time.
“Seeing” is the invitation: We need to search beneath the surface of life for deeper meaning. To find Jesus, we need to follow him. To follow him is to share time with him. Only by sharing time do we get to know the holy Other.
In today’s story, the disciples are asking, “Rabbi, Teacher, where are you staying?” “Find”, “know”, … rooted in “eida” in Greek, are the “seeing” words. To “follow” and to “remain with Jesus, the unknown, the community” is what we do in order to have the “seeing” experience amongst ourselves.
In today’s story, John the Baptist welcomes Jesus by exclamation, using the image of a lamb. He declares, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” Behold is commanding to us to do, more than just to look. John is asking us to look deeply. To see significance, to let our hearts open to the realms beyond the obvious surface. To see what is life-giving.
Jesus is portrayed in poetry - through the simple image of the Lamb -. The image, the metaphor, the analogy makes us wonder: Why is Jesus a lamb?
Is he a Passover lamb? The Passover lambs were killed during Jewish sacrifices and feasts. The lamb carries away the sins of the world and demolishes them as it is sacrificed. Or is he a ram? In the Bible, the image of the ram emerges victorious over God’s enemies and drives out the sinful acts of the oppressors. Another image of the ram is that it is “caught” in the thicket. You may remember the story of Isaac. God’s beloved child, Jesus, and Abraham’s beloved child, Isaac, both were like rams, caught in troubles and afflictions. Liberation comes in different ways in Jesus’ and Isaac’s stories, but certainly God shows a tender and intense nature that favours transformation, healing, justice, wisdom, resurrection over wrongful authority, oppression, and death. God invites us to see Jesus in many different metaphors, images, narratives, analogies that are life-giving, life-affirming, life-favouring, leading to liberation, with John the Baptist expressing one of them, the lamb or the ram. Your choice.
I still enjoy reading these days, and I got very excited when I found another life-giving image in the book I was reading: Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters. It features articles from prominent contributors who look at the roots of violence to illustrate how it diminishes life for all. And, in an article by Sandra Lamouche, herself a hoop dancer, I found a life-giving image of Jesus as a hoop dancer. When I saw it I thought, BINGO - it is quite timely, as we just had a fantastic night with dancing miniSTARS here at Immanuel. I saw a few photos of hoop dancers before, online, but I never knew the deeper context, as I never searched to know what they were doing. See, the “seeing” must go deeper through following, searching, seeking, finding, knowing, appreciating and celebrating.
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Sandra Lamouche, Dancer/ Choreographer, Sagowsko; Photo by Kyle Fowler
Source: http://www.sandralamouche.com/blog/infinite-wisdom-of-the-hoop-dance
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Lamouche introduces a story, originally from Basil Johnston’s The Manitous: The Spiritual Life of the Ojibway. The story is about Pukawiss (meaning the disowned one), whose real name had been forgotten. The middle child of three brothers, Pukawiss had been fascinated with nature since childhood. His father hoped he would become a good warrior and hunter like his older brother. Pukawiss tried to please his father but always returned to his ways of exploring the world around him. Eventually his father disowned him, and Pukawiss left his family and travelled from village to village as a performer. He created dances and performances based on what he saw around him, mimicking animals and humans alike. (Show the picture of author’s sister, Julie Lamouche, in hoop dance, who went missing when she was a teenager.)
One day Pukawiss decided to create a dance that encompassed all of life - the good and the bad - and thus he created the hoop dance. The beautiful designs reflect the beauty all around us - in birds, butterflies, flowers, and other beings. (Check Youtube videos of hoop dance performances, it’s easy to find them.) The hoop dancer’s transitions from one shape to the next represent life’s struggles. The transitions also show how everything in life is interconnected; the hoop itself represents interconnectedness, equality and balance. You visualize through your own bodily sensation that each hoop is a fairly small circle, and you need to put your whole body through it and come out the other side. Life’s dance is a process of not only beauty but struggle, and only when we see both can the full meaning of the dance reveal itself. In the Hoop Dance, Pukawiss dramatizes the trauma that people go through, their disorientation, disruptions, and he, as the dancer, acts like a counsellor or a healer, who instead of giving answers, directions, to enable a person to get out of their predicament, presents the distressed person with wooden hoops made of willow. The message is that everyone must press themselves through the hoops until they work their way through all of them, through the beauty and the struggle towards achieving balance and creation. It is a journey or dance through life to find and reconnect with identity, with ourselves, with the sacred stories and with life. With God, with the Creator. With All our Relations. With All creation. Here, I also see a parallel to the ways we seek relationship with Jesus. If Jesus is the hoop dancer, the teacher, we must be one as well, working with our own willows, embracing a life of connection, disconnection and reconnection. According to the sacred stories of the Original Peoples, the animals danced in a clockwise circular fashion and the winds blew, creating a huge and widening circle, and eventually, they created the huge island on which we live, North America.
Jesus danced through God’s path, and still invites us to encounter the world and ourselves through finding life-giving paths, examples and ways. We see ourselves through the life of Jesus - a ram, or a lamb, or a hoop dancer. The dance is liberating, as we move ourselves slowly and cleverly through the entangling thicket. We are called to participate in God’s work, which is the work of rebirth and recreation in and of the world. Let us continue to “come and see” Jesus, searching, following, seeking, dwelling, staying, finding, knowing and celebrating. Come and see the one who is dancing, behold, and join in the dance.
Ha Na Park
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