A God You Can Dance Before

Every Sunday the man dances. Middle-aged, thin, and balding, he takes his place on the edge of the chancel with a handful of church youth and, in an ecstasy of long white limbs, performs actions to a series of praise choruses, no matter how silly he might appear. Ostensibly this is a demonstration for those desiring similar kinesthetic dimensions of worship, but one look at his face tells another story. He is not playing to the congregation. Rich is the nearest thing to a walking “Dance like no one is watching” t-shirt, and he knows the truth of that slogan — many are watching, but he only cares about one. It is before the Lord that he dances.

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I typically do not dance — not in church and rarely otherwise. I don’t do actions to songs, and you won’t catch me putting my hands in the air. Since the church I attend these days is not the sort to occupy those hands with a weighty hymnal, I keep them planted firmly in my pockets. My mind, meanwhile, is governed by an inescapable self-consciousness, somehow only worsened by the gyrating example before me. Doesn’t he care how he looks? What sense of security allows him to dance like that?

In the early stages of the Reformation, Martin Luther dusted off a couple of old Latin phrases to emphasize two distinct ways our lives play out in view of others: coram Deo (“before God”), contrasted with coram hominibus (“before humans”). Sometimes these are framed as vertical (toward God) and horizontal (toward other humans) directions, which allow us to speak of things like righteousness, justification, love, and ultimately our own selves in ways that acknowledge the reality and the difference of both kinds of relations. If my actions are ridiculous in the eyes of some fellow churchgoers, they might yet be precious to God. Likewise, if I am confident in how God sees me, this is likely to affect how I show myself before others. However, this neat disentangling of vertical and horizontal can lead us to overlook a basic problem: if the views and judgments of others are sometimes opaque to me, those of God can be a most unnerving mystery. I don’t know how God sees. What does he think of me now? Does he think of me at all?

Scripture is plain enough about the fact of God’s seeing: that I should give in secret so that the Father who sees in secret might reward me (Mt 6:4); that not even a sparrow falls without him (Mt 10:29); or that there is simply nowhere, in life or in death, to hide from his presence (Ps 139) — these thoughts don’t leave much room for negotiation. God sees, and unlike in the case of other people, I cannot get out of his view even if I would prefer to.

The truth of our condition is this: we are never not coram Deo. The bare idea of an omniscient God, which we cannot dispel no matter how we try, means that all of life — in its joys, its boredom, and its terrors — is one long dance before the judgment throne. We are told that God is watching, and this is the maddening thing, because we cannot watch him watch us. We cannot see his expression or whether he dozes, or when his eye is elsewhere or fixed upon us. We cannot even confirm for ourselves whether or not any of this is true, and so our convictions don’t resolve anything. Whether we affirm, deny, or doubt that God sees — or that there is a God to see — doesn’t unravel the mystery.

An astonishing array of human thinking — religious and secular, ancient and modern, Christian and otherwise — attempts to limit the fallout from this terrible indeterminacy. A truly unknowable God could be dismissed entirely, as a good part of the modern world has indeed done. A God who only establishes laws (the rules governing the world and our hearts) could be reliably accessed by those laws and made synonymous with them. A God who stands at arms’ length from our senses and all physical stuff, and instead dwells in the innermost recesses beyond sight, word, and thought would indeed be very hard to approach — but maybe just possible for those willing to practice a most careful game of knowing and unknowing, of yes and no, of groping toward God through that highest and deepest darkness. That in particular was the theology Luther had been led to think the very best — until he realized it was false.

He found the alternative in the book of Isaiah, where the prophet wonders at the scandal of divine judgment and salvation worked through a pagan messiah, Cyrus the Persian: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (45:15). God is not merely invisible, as if obscured from us by some law of his own nature. He does not abide by the laws he declares. He does not wait inaccessibly in silence and darkness. God hides, and he hides in astonishing ways, sometimes in plain sight. Yet he hides, and the story of scripture is the story of God’s strange hiding. He hides in created things — in the fruit of trees, in rocks in the wilderness and streams of water, and in the light streaming from the heavens. He hides in his dear Son, appearing weak and foolish in the face of sin and death. He hides in the words of prophets and preachers. The only real question remaining for us, as for Luther, is what God’s hiding is for. If we knew that, we might at last have a reason to dance.

God’s peculiar hiding is shown all over the Bible, but comes into sharpest relief where his actions appear most contradictory. A remarkable example is found in 2 Samuel 6, which is the story of David taking the ark of God from its resting place (in the house of Abinadab) up to Jerusalem. At the head of a great processional went the ark, along with its two guardians, Uzzah and Ahio, and behind them came David and the multitude dancing and playing. Then, suddenly, a reversal: “Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen lurched. The anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him there, and he died there beside the ark of God” (6:6-7).

If this happening is a mystery, it is not because God’s hand is imperceptible in it. On the contrary, God is identified by place, as “enthroned on the cherubim,” and so, as it were, seated upon the ark and moving with it. Further, he is identified by activity — sudden anger which works death. We know perfectly well where God is and what God does when he hides in the ark and strikes out at Uzzah. The problem is that we do not know why any of this happens. Our typical response is to rationalize, to generate a law of sorts that might explain the incident, so that we aren’t left with a story about God willy-nilly destroying people. I’ll let you in on a secret here: any law will do. Yes, it’s possible this has something to do with a general stricture against touching the ark. It’s also possible it doesn’t. You don’t know, and I don’t know, but in our anxiety we will assume that God must judge by some rule, however arcane, and that he couldn’t have just suddenly changed his mind about Uzzah and blown him apart. Surely he must have seen Uzzah doing something wrong, which means it’s Uzzah’s fault.

David, however, does not reason this way, which is in itself a marvel. Instead, he is struck by real fear, the fear of a God whose hiding is just too much for him — too much God, too close, rather than too little and far away.

David was afraid of the Lord that day; he said, “How can the ark of the Lord come into my care?” So David was unwilling to take the ark of the Lord into his care in the city of David; instead, David took it to the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite. (2 Sam 6:9-10)

In yet another reversal, the ark proves a blessing to Obed-Edom and his household. After three months David receives word of this and proceeds to lead another processional, finally bringing the ark up in spectacular fashion. Clad only in the linen apron of a priest, David offers sacrifices and “dances before the Lord with all his might” (6:14). He brings the ark into the city, pitches a tent for it, and makes offerings before God. Then David blesses the people in the Lord’s name, and distributes the food from the offerings.

By these actions David tramples on every conceivable law that might have explained the incident with Uzzah. He is no priest, but in his (un-)dress, his sacrifices, his blessing, he has taken to himself, shamelessly, the things reserved for the priests alone. Gone too is any sense of modesty or propriety, any royal dignity. It is not as if no one watches or passes judgment — all see him, and his own wife Michal looks upon David “leaping and dancing before the Lord” and despises him (6:16). When David has finished, Michal confronts him: “How glorious was the king of Israel today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself!” But David is untroubled:

It was before the Lord, who chose me… as prince over Israel, the people of the Lord — I will dance before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be humbled in my own eyes, but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be glorified. (6:20-22)

David knows he is being watched, exposed, and makes it clear whose sight matters and whose does not. Not even David’s own judgment is relevant — he will be humbled in his own eyes. The sight of the lowly, however — and most especially the sight of the female lowly (let it not be said that David, even in his more pious moments, fully escapes his own vices) — will glorify him. Above all, he dances before the Lord, and he does not care how low he sinks otherwise. How can David speak this way? Fortunately, he says it outright: “the Lord, who chose me …” David is chosen.

This is not an educated guess or inference on his part, but an event, a moment in his life, a specific place and time in which God hides for a singular and explicit purpose. When David was a boy, the prophet Samuel came to him and anointed him, and in that anointing God himself — the Spirit of the Lord — came upon David and hid in him (1 Sam 16:13). Time and again God came to David, hidden in his words, reinforcing what he had once said — and driving toward what would be said by Nathan in the great climax of 2 Samuel 7, in which the promise is given of a seed, an offspring, an everlasting son.

David does not know why God bursts forth in anger against Uzzah — there’s no sign he ever learns that. God remains truly hidden there in a majesty which does not tip its hand, what Luther called the nudus Deus or “naked God,” the invisible and terrifying glory. What David receives instead is a blessing from God, and so a repetition and renewal of the promise already given. This carries him through against any opposition, even if that opposition comes from God himself. Against a naked God, David has a clothed one, God wrapped up in his promise. What David learned about God’s hiding is thus what Luther would learn: It is for the sake of the promise, the same promise served by God’s anointing of Cyrus to deliver Judah, and the same promise finally handed on to and born of Mary. God can be sought with confidence only according to that singular promise, because he wants to be had in that way and not otherwise. This is the real purpose of God’s hiding, which is not to preserve his own glorious mystery in eternity, but to hand it over to you in the preached Christ.

The problem with so much of our spirituality, whether in the church or outside, is that we have no idea why God hides. We seek him exactly where he does not want to be found, apart from his promise. We look above and within, to heaven far away and into our own hearts, and the darker things get, the more we insist we must be on the right track. The real God, we think, is the far-off one at the top of that spiritual mountain, and if we cannot reach the top we can at least get closer. So we dream up rules by which God will be more present if we do the right things, worship with the right feeling, or go to the right place. But it must be said: God is no more present in church than anywhere else. There has been no comfort either for the generations who have preferred to ‘find God’ on the golf course or in the mountains (or wherever anyone has claimed spiritual experience), since without a promise God’s presence remains inscrutable as ever. Luther said it this way:

Although he is present in all creatures, and I might find him in stone, in fire, in water, or even in a rope … he does not wish that I seek him there apart from the Word, and cast myself into the fire or the water, or hang myself on the rope. He is present everywhere, but he does not wish that you grope for him everywhere. Grope rather where the Word is, and there you will lay hold of him in the right way. (Luther’s Works, vol. 36)

It sounds easy, to grope where the Word is; and it would be, if we were willing. But sinners never do look that way until we are compelled to. We would rather have God silent and invisible, for then he cannot hurt us. If he’s invisible, then he’s not the war, not the cancer, not the letter from the IRS. If he’s found in silence, then he’s not the screaming in our ears all day long. Silence and invisibility are what we suppose to be God’s majesty, which is a polite way of saying his distance from us — or in theological jargon, his transcendence. However, God’s real hiding is quite the opposite of this supposed majesty, and is no distance at all. This was a central truth of Luther’s reformation, when he realized that every human effort to ascend to higher reaches and access God there, however humble it pretended to be, was in reality nothing but another effort to cast God from his throne, to drive him out of creation so that we might stand alone and at peace, being gods rather than having God. Of course, it won’t work — so what then? Despair? What to make of David’s willful disregard for propriety, glory, danger, for God’s own law and its holiness?

Late in his career, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, having supposedly dispensed with the god of the philosophers and theologians, wrote of the possibility of a god one could play music and dance before (Identity and Difference). Nearly a century earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche had declared through his mouthpiece Zarathustra that, “I should only believe in a god who knew how to dance” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Whatever they meant, neither Heidegger nor Nietzsche found any place in their thinking for the God who comes to us in a word of promise. That promise, however, is the truth. David has God, knows him, has him hidden in one little Word. He is secure, not in self-delusion, but in the love of the God whose mystery is that he hides just for David and in David, so that at this moment David knows that all things in heaven and on earth are arrayed for his own good. David is a saint, yes, but not because his spiritual instincts are any wiser or better than yours or mine; the disastrous course of his life shows that clearly enough. No, David is a saint because God has breached his spiritual defenses, drawn close where David did not suspect, steadfastly refused to be found above in naked majesty, and come down to David in the humblest form. God, the true God, is his own, wrapped up in a word as real and tangible as you and I, and delivered unto David. And so David dances. David can sing and dance before God, because God has first sung and danced before him.