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Back to Sermon ArchivesApril 26,
2009
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Acts 3:12-19, Psalm 4, 1 John 3:1-3, Luke
24:36b-43
“Holy Ghost Dance: Is What We See Really
All We Get?”
Here he goes again – or “ghosts” again?! In this gospel story! Not
Casper the Friendly Ghost, but Jesus the Holy Ghost! The Hungry Ghost! The
disciples are sure they are seeing a ghost! Jesus is eager to prove otherwise.
He says we can trust our own eyes! Look at his hands and feet, he says – still
wounded with crucifixion. See that this is Jesus himself! “Touch me
and see!” A ghost does not have such flesh and such bones (yuck!) as you can
see here for yourselves! And he more or less forces his hands and feet to
our inescapable attention. We are supposed to pore over his wounds – and then he
wants something to eat!
Isn’t that just like Jesus! Always expecting to find someone has fixed
him food! Jesus does the “Holy Ghost Dance” with us – so we may see him for
ourselves!
I know “Holy Ghost” dancing from worship with store-front churches in Chicago.
Especially as the choir reaches the crescending climax of an anthem or hymn, or
the preacher builds to the end of the sermon much longer than even I preach – someone
is likely to “catch” the Holy Ghost. They dance like one enchanted with ecstasy
until exhaustion. Then they might even faint or “fall out” dancing on the
floor. Ushers also serve as nurses there -- prepared with handkerchiefs, fans,
and smelling salts. But on this Native American Ministries Sunday, we are
talking not only “Holy Ghost” dancing but also holy “Ghost Dancing!” The Ghost
Dance Religion was born right here in our part of Nevada.
Julie and I have used the second floor of the parsonage owned by the church where
the pastor lives -- 556 Marsh Avenue -- mostly for guests. You may see for
yourself -- if you come to help clean and make ready for the new pastor – how steep
and narrow the steps to the second floor are. Our longest-staying guest was
our son Jeffery while he found a job, a partner, and his own place. A couple
of other guests have come out of incarceration or rehab. Then there was David
Raymond, son of a friend of ours, Ph. D. candidate in history, at work on a dissertation
entitled, “Her Cry Rang through the Air”: Paiute Resistance, the Trauma of Conquest,
and the Origins of the Ghost Dance Religion, 1800-1875.” David was here to
see for himself the living wounds of native peoples.
A year ago on this third Sunday of Easter Rev. Phil Lawson preached the first
of our Dr. King weekends commemorating the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s
death by re-asking the question of his last book – “Where Do We Go from Here?
Chaos or Community? Wilderness or Promised Land?” Phil Lawson was preaching
the story of Jesus’ unexpected appearance to the disciples walking home from Jerusalem
to Emmaus. They are convinced their work in the world had ended with Jesus’
death. They listen to Jesus rehearse all the words of the prophets.
Then they ask him to eat with them. Then they see him for who he is. They
know him in the breaking of bread – sharing the body of Christ for others!
In that moment, Phil Lawson preached, the disciples no longer just see what they
believe! They are no longer limited by preconceptions of their preconditioning
as to how things have to be – the way things always have been. Rather, in
that resurrection moment of Jesus’ appearance to them, they believe what they actually
see for themselves! Even though what they see on that road, in that
meal, defies all they think they know – especially about the dead staying dead.
They trust in their own experience! As we bring greetings from the 70 or so
of us on all-church retreat at Lake Tahoe’s Zephyr Point this weekend, that is what
they are doing with the theme “Becoming a Thinking Christian.” In terms of
what we call the “Wesleyan quadrilateral” of bases for our faith, retreaters are
applying their own reason and experience to the scripture and tradition we have
been taught. Like meeting Jesus after his death, can we believe our own eyes?
This morning’s gospel continues that story of the “walk to Emmaus.”
Jesus leaves nothing to chance. No sooner do those who met him on the road
join up with others, than Jesus himself is there, too! Jesus leaps from
one death-defying appearance to another! His proclamation to them is of
peace beyond their fears. We fear that we are complicit in what happened to him
– by betraying him, denying him, abandoning him. We fear that what
happened to him will happen to us as well – that we will be made sorely guilty
by our close association with him. Jesus proclaims the Jubilee – his spirit
embodied in every person and body of people -- for forgiveness of sin and
renewal of hope.
Nothing has been held against us – much as we may deserve it. The God
of Jesus is not dwelling in, or on the past. God is revealing the future –
revealing us in light of the future – and calling us into that future as we may
see and believe it. Yet God expects us to see and confess and repent of our
wounded past as it is. Especially God calls us, and our rulers – those
whose authority we have too reflexively accepted – those whose power we have
allowed to intimidate us – God calls us out of our ignorance, our lack of
awareness and consciousness. Too often we stand obliviously by while the
honor of others is shamed in our names – says the psalmist. We settle for
vain words in place of just deeds. We seek after self-serving lies our
rulers and our media prove all too glib to supply.
It is precisely because we may see and believe in Jesus how much God loves us
– no matter what! – that we are forgiven and set free enough, healed and made whole
enough, to change our own ways -- and even the ways of our world! The world
may not have been ready for Jesus, as 1 John puts it this morning. The world
may have rejected Jesus, the very promise and self-offering of God as love.
Jesus and those who followed him may have suffered and died for their love.
But we are no less God’s children now! We are no less loyal to God’s future
in Jesus – the Holy Ghost! The one whose Spirit is coming to indwell, inspire,
enable, empower his Body the Church! What we see is NOT all we get!
God is not done with us yet – for “What we will be has not yet been revealed” –
even to us! Sooner or later, one way or another, we will “appear” – “like
Jesus!”
God the Creator -- creating, revealing anew each day – appears (as in resurrection
appearance!) to be so infinitely complex and diverse. We are even now just
learning so much about our own selves! About ourselves in relation to others
– most intimate others and others most opposite us – others in all the world and
“Other” as Earth and Creation themselves. Even Christ is not fully revealed,
fully appeared -- nor even fully resurrected! No matter how hard we try to
contain and control Christ – by proof-texts and bumper-stickers! – we are just now
beginning to “see Christ fully at last” – and ourselves as being “like that!”
As works in progress, in process, we ask this morning what might be revealed
to us, and of us by the holy “Ghost Dancing” of Paiute brothers and sisters.
We cannot do justice even to parts of David Raymond’s dissertation – I am happy
to pass them on to others who’d like to see them. The dissertation begins
–
In the summer of 1863, a small group
of Owens Valley Paiute women and children desperately fled from an attack by U.S.
Army soldiers, high into the foothills of eastern California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Most of the men in the group had already been killed by soldiers or settlers.
Seeing no other way to defend themselves from a potential massacre, a ten year-old
Paiute girl volunteered to climb to the highest peak, exposed to gunfire from the
soldiers, and make an appeal to the spirits to save them. “Her cry for mercy
rang through the air,” and a short time later a sudden rain dampened the gunpowder
in the troops rifles. Unable to fire on the women and children, they retreated.
Six years later, in the spring of
1869, an Owens Valley Paiute man climbed to the top of Kurangwa, the
sacred mountain of the Walker River Paiutes, about sixty miles north of the Owens
Valley in Nevada. Like the Paiute girl earlier, he made an appeal to Numa
na ah, the Paiute creator, to call down rains to save the people. . . . Wodziwob
attempted to re-create the kind of flood that was central to the Paiute creation
story. While the deluge never came, most of his followers were not disillusioned.
Their passion for his revelations increased. Wodziwob began to prophesy that
their dead loved ones would be resurrected and return to live with them in a paradise
on earth. . . Wodziwob’s revelations gave birth to the influential pan-Indian religious
movement of the Ghost Dance. The prophecies were to be enacted through a spiritual
Round Dance, over several days, in which participants appealed to the Creator and
to the spirits to bring a new world into being. . . .The Paiute term for this dance
was Nanigukwa, to dance in a circle. . . .
Followers of Jesus – now as they -- are challenged to find a spiritual way of
resistance to the invasion, occupation, conquest, division that plagues us.
Similar sets of conditions and circumstances face followers of Jesus today.
They also face followers of other prophets and saviors/revealers rising to call
upon God’s justice and mercy. For the rain of God’s creation falls on the
just and the unjust alike! Why not build the same Jubilee rain of creation
into God’s reign of history, too? Why not break with deadly cycles of violence
and vengeance, weapons and war? Why not look for resurrection of the dead
-- and life in the new world revealing? Resurrection always only begins –
first day of forever!
Ghost dancers are no more successful thus far than we followers of Jesus often
are to keep up with his dance. Still the Ghost Dance serves to reunify, interrelate,
and create new identities among American Indians. Dancing grows out of external
oppression -- grows into indigenous histories and cultures. “First,” writes
David Raymond, “profound longings (especially the desire to see dead loved ones
again) which were triggered by grief provided emotive force to the ritual, and vision,
of the Dance. Second, its adherents acted on their culturally specific beliefs
in the spiritual powers capable of transforming the world. . . .”
Who knew that we and our larger California/Nevada communities, both of creation
and of history, helped give birth and life to this movement so reminiscent of the
dance born of Jesus’ Spirit and embodied as Church at Pentecost?! “The Ghost
Dancers put their faith in a spiritual movement that did not call upon them
to join in an armed rebellion against colonialism.” David Raymond ascribes
this lasting importance: “The Ghost Dance was the major inter-tribal cultural movement
in the latter phases of military conquest and the beginnings of the reservation
system and forced assimilation. As such, it helped people of various indigenous
ethnicities to craft ethnic identifies and to identify racially as Indians.
These developments in turn were vital to the Native American political and cultural
revival of the twentieth century.” May we Jesus Dancers be so vital!
I close with David Raymond’s citation of the Ghost Dance as seen by a ten year-old
Dakota boy at Pine Ridge shortly before the massacre at Wounded Knee –
“The dead are to return. . . . The
white people will soon go away!” . . . To think I should see my dear mother, grandmother,
brothers and sisters again! . . . All joined hands. . . . [and soon many collapsed
and went into trances] They were now “dead” and seeing their dear ones.
As each one came to, she, or he, . . . began wailing inconsolably. Spiritual
leaders proclaimed their visions to the people. Then all wailed with her.
People in their visions saw a great encampment of all the Dakotas who ever died,
where all were related and therefore understood each other. . . . There was not
sorrow but only joy, where relatives thronged out with happy laughter to greet the
newcomer. That was the best of all! Waking to the drab and wretched
present after such a glowing vision, it was little wonder that they wailed as if
their poor hearts would break in two with disillusionment. But at least they
had seen!
At least we have seen – for ourselves! Dance, then -- wherever we may be!
Amen.
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