David, gender trouble, and being unserious

A sermon on 2 Samuel 6:14-24

This is a sermon I preached a couple weeks ago with reflections on my visit to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. You can read the Scripture text here (in which there is a reference to infertility not discussed in this sermon).

Dance at the Gay Activist Alliance Firehouse, 1971 (Diana Davies/ The New York Public Library)

When I was in New York a few weeks, I took the subway across town to Greenwich Village on a pilgrimage to see the Stonewall Inn. I blinked into the sunlight and looked around. Stonewall Inn is easy to miss, so easy to miss that I walked right past it and then had to double back when I checked the map on my phone. Stonewall still operates as a gay bar, and it was the morning – closed for business. Currently it’s covered in scaffolding, one among a block of indistinguishable bars and shops. But I stopped for a minute to pay homage, to remember how this little, unassuming place remade history.

In 1969, the bar was raided by NYPD as part of their frequent attempts to disrupt and endanger the lives of the gay community. This was an awful decade following many awful decades for LGBTQ people. The FBI used surveillance to create lists of “known homosexuals,” and the police would publish these lists, which led to gay people being fired, harassed, and assaulted. Bars and clubs refused entry to queer folks. Cities would humiliate gay people through sweeps of beaches, restaurants, parks, and bars.

Stonewall was one place where queer folks, drag queens, and trans people were not shunned, bullied, or hated. They could be themselves, a safe space in a world that was deeply unsafe.

But Stonewall wasn’t just a bar. It was a dance club. After visiting I read more of Stonewall’s history. One theory as to why Stonewall was targeted by the cops, despite being owned by the mob who frequently paid off the NYPD to leave the bar alone, was because this was a public place where LGBTQ folks were able to dance with abandon. They could hold each other in public.

The artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt was one of those dancers. In an interview I read he talked about what this place meant to him: “Being able to dance with someone of the same sex changed everything in the way you felt about yourself. Because you were having an affectionate moment, you felt totally humanized."

When the police arrived to shut down the bar on a hot night in June, Stonewall became the site of the first public resistance to the sweeps. Lanigan-Schmidt explains, "It was totally spontaneous. We were angry that we couldn't dance."

Dancing with abandon in a way that gets you in trouble with the authorities shows up in Scripture. In 2 Samuel, we catch up with David, the young ruler who has unseated the powerful warrior, King Saul. David has just recovered the ark of the covenant, this fancy box that travels along with God’s people. It’s important. It carries signs of God’s faithfulness in the past and is the promise of God’s faithfulness in the present. David is moving it to a new home and he is dancing.

One of my favorite images of David dancing before the ark of the covenant comes from a medieval psalter where David is in the middle of a back handspring. I like this picture because it gives us a sense of how wild this scene must have been. David, we learn, is dancing with all his might, accompanied by 30,000 marchers. There are shouts of joy! There are horns! They eat an amazing meal, including raisin cake.

Then we hear the perspective of Michal, the daughter of Saul who appears to be in a miserable marriage-as-alliance with David. Michal is unimpressed: “How the king of Israel has honored himself today, for he has exposed himself today to the eyes of the female slaves of his slaves, just as surely as one of the rabble shamelessly exposes themselves!”

In other words, David’s dancing exposed him -- his linen ephod shook open. There’s a sexual shaming to Michal’s scathing critique. Scantily clad David is seen by the aristocratic daughter of Saul turning circles with the lowest slave girls. This is not what kings do, this is also not what real men do. Michal describes David as man who has emptied himself of worth, an empty man. The only people whom the lowest of the low, the slave women of slave women, expose themselves to is one another. David is dancing like, and looking like, a slave girl. David has gotten himself into gender trouble.

The real man, the real soldier, the real ruler is not David but Michal’s father, Saul. And she is disgusted by what she sees in her husband – his body getting mixed in, indistinguishable from female slaves.

The genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament want to tie both Joseph and Mary to the house of David. The recorders of the gospels are clear -- the line of David runs down to Jesus. And today we see flashes of what this might mean, why its significant to the people who told these stories about Jesus to one another.

Jesus also finds himself failing again and again to meet the standards of elite men of his time. His body is leaky, it leaks power and blood. That’s characteristic of women, who are porous and weak. Jesus is never married, doesn’t produce children, which means he doesn’t put on display his sexual potency. He won’t fight back, doesn’t organize his followers to overthrow a military regime. He is blindfolded, whipped, stripped, and crucified. Even his risen body will bear scars on his hands and feet. Jesus dies as an emasculated criminal, an outsider. He is, as Michal said, emptied out of his manliness.

David has some words for Michal. He reminds her, in no uncertain terms, that God anointed David, chose David, and it was before this God that David danced like a girl. “I will play before the Lord,” David tells her. He switches the word here. He will play before the Lord. This isn’t the kind of play as in playing an instrument. David is goofing around, being silly, laughing. “If you think this is dishonoring, just wait,” he tells Michal. “I will make myself so foolish even I shock myself. But those slave’s slave girls you talked about? I will find honor in their sight.”

Michal idealizes another form of masculinity – seriousness, control, lack of emotion. David turns the tables on this idea. God doesn’t give a prize for our somberness and our earnestness. God desires a life that is filled up with joy, a joy that only makes sense to people like slave girls, who have carved out their joy in the midst of trauma and hardship.

This is not the first time slave women have danced in the story of David. After David kills Goliath, the same women from today’s story come out to greet David and Saul. They sing a mocking, hilarious song about how much better of a warrior David is than the king. It’s the first sign of who David will be, and it leads Saul to keep a close eye on David.

“It’s not more truthful to be serious,” the writer Adam Phillips writes. There’s a truth that emerges in this moment before the ark, an unserious truth. Before God, in total surrender to the joy of God’s presence, David stops being a manly man. The barrier between slave women and king dissolves. Everyone in the dance becomes fully human as God intended them to be.

“Being able to dance with someone of the same sex changed everything in the way you felt about yourself. Because you were having an affectionate moment, you felt totally humanized."

I thought about Stonewall this week, about the people in our church who once couldn’t get married, couldn’t share spousal benefits, weren’t protected from being fired from their jobs for being gay, about the threat that still exists to LGBTQ people we love, fellow Christians in our congregation.

We need organizing and federal protections and legislation. And there is dancing, there is unseriousness, there’s losing control, the kind that creates gender trouble for us to get into. There’s also the playfulness that creates forms of solidarity that tell us something about who God is and about who we are as God’s people, about what it means to live, even for a brief instance, in the promise of the reign of God.