Weeping - Laughing

A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.

It's sounds as if Solomon is painting the picture of opposites. Interestingly enough, weeping is made synonymous with mourning, and laughing similar to dancing. Mourning and dancing are the actions and weeping and laughter are responses to the actions. So:

Mourning necessitates weeping and laughter follows dancing.

I can definitely find myself in the latter. Every time I dance, pretty much the assembly begins to laugh. The use of the body to copy the rhythms in music is at the very core of how the world works. Have you ever noticed someone who is walking while listening to music through headphones? By nature, the body - even those who are rhythmically challenged - will gravitate to the beat of music. And once in tune with the music, we become one with the song and its meaning. I believe this is why people clap to keep the beat during a song or even move their feet. It's rare, I know, in Lutheran circles in the United States, for people to consciously become part of the music, but in certain places in the world, if you don't dance, you aren't really worshiping.

I have some really good friends who are Tanzanian. As part of the New Life Band, they witness through music and message to tens of thousands of youth and adults every year. Every three years or so, the band travels across the Atlantic Ocean to be missionaries to the United States and to gather funds for their ministries in Tanzania. They told me the story of their first experience with Christian worship in the United States. These are the things that struck them as totally outside their realm of experience in Tanzania:

1. Worship is one hour long. If it goes any longer than that, people start to look at the watches; they start to fidget. If they haven't gotten their God-fix by the time communion is over, they start heading for the doors. American worship services have tried to squeeze the amount of praise for God into one hour (sometimes less) and then move on to the really important things of the day like soccer practice, mowing the lawn, watching football, whatever kind of entertainment or work that might captivate a sabbath afternoon. In the last one hundred years, western society has lost all understanding of Sabbath. We no longer have a day of rest, to thank God for the peace of a day apart from work. We have an hour - an hour that many would say is simply 'putting in their time.' The Tanzanians were amazed by the lack of rest and reflection on God's abundant goodness to humans.

2. People don't dance. All the songs during a Tanzanian worship regard dancing as essential as much as the piano or guitar. To really understand the song, one must be one with the rhythm and the melody. They move back and forth. It seems coordinated, but it is more that they are completely in tune with their bodies and their congregation. God gave us bodies to praise. The New Life Band found American worship services so sterile that worship seemed almost a necessary evil rather than an expression of praise.

3. There is so little interaction between those that have come. Most churches have aisles, but they might as be walls. Most churches have permanent indents in the pews or chairs from the current residents who have been sitting in the same space for the last thirty years. We are creatures of habit and what the band noticed was that apart from the sharing of the peace (which lasted thirty seconds) there was no interaction at all between congregation members. I think we, as Christians, have lost the sense that we are a living body: what one person does affects all the others. Sharing the peace in Tanzania may take twenty minutes; they actually share the peace - find out how family members are doing - taking an interest in the lives of the people around you.

All in all, they (and I think I am included) would love to see a different type of worship that frees us from the starched repetitions that we have always done. Whether traditional or contemporary worship, a dose of dancing (which leads to laughter) might be just what the worship doctor ordered. I'm not saying that I'm all that comfortable with dancing, but that's because I don't often allow myself to be part of the Spiritual music of a congregation.

Dancing leads to laughter, and laughter leads to health.

That's where I will continue next week, I think.