Dancing Before the Ark: A Hermeneutic of Awe, Curiosity, and Delight

As we re-open this Wonder of Scripture lecture series for the 2025-26 school year, I would like to offer some brief comments on the notion of wonder, which will largely shape my approach to scripture this morning. Wonder is used variously as a noun, a verb, and as the root of the adjective “wonderful.” One definition of wonder as a noun is “a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.” I’ll refer to this experience as awe. To read with wonder, we should first allow the alterity of scripture to call us up short, to take our breaths. There will be lines and ideas we could never have invented in a million years. This is the divine irruption into the mundane. Certainly, the sacred texts of scripture can invoke this sense of wonder. In a theological sense, this is astonishment and reverence in the face of the ineffability of God’s power, mercy, and grace. Awe and reverence come from a sense that God actually inheres in these old stories and words, that they make a claim on my life and worldview, and that allowing them to do so will lead me into a deeper relationship with Deity. This is the first and fundamental stance of wonder toward scripture. I come humbly and hungrily to these old words, expecting here to meet God. George Steiner writes, “Face to face with the presence of offered meaning which we call a text . . . , we seek to hear its language [as] we would meet that of the elect stranger coming towards us.”^[1] God is the elect stranger who approaches through scripture.

As a verb, to wonder is to “desire or be curious to know something.” Last year in this lecture series, my friend Jared Halverson referred to this as “the superficial wonder of curiosity,” but curiosity will be central to the approach of engaging with scripture I hope to model. This is the kind of wonder that raises questions, that invites me to investigate and become a participant in the process of meaning making, that leaves doors open and prods my explorations. In order for the scriptures to come alive for me and manifest the power of God to me, I will need this second kind of wonder—that of eager curiosity, an interest in learning more, an imagination afire with possibility. The scriptures beckon us to question them, to lean in with inquisitiveness and genuine attentiveness to see what might be discovered. And just as relationships deepen as we ask questions and actively listen, our relationship to the divine develops through such curious engagement with the text. As my life intertwines with the life of scripture and I become a participant in its intention to create a new kind of world, I experience a deep sense of gladness and delight.

This leads to my third semantic association. Wonder provides the root of the adjective “wonderful,” meaning “inspiring delight, pleasure, or admiration; extremely good; marvelous.” I’ve vacillated on whether to call this gladness or delight, but this is the sheer joy we experience when we live inside the worlds of scripture, it is the light that pours forth from the pages. There can be elements of playfulness, whimsy, and gratitude in the wonderful. While with awe and wonder I honor the alterity of scripture—the strangeness and otherness of it—the ultimate goal of my scripture study is hospitality and relationality, to allow the divine message residence inside my life so that I am transformed into a more generous, more compassionate, more joyous being. This provides authentic delight.

These three elements of wonder—awe, curiosity, and delight—are central to what I would like to call a hermeneutic of wonder—a method of approaching, engaging, and interpreting the texts of scripture with humility, creativity, and joy. “Hermeneutics” is an academic way of referring to the act or approach of interpretation. Some etymological sources note an association with the Greek god Hermes who carried messages from the gods to mortals, which I like because we are trying to make godly things relevant and interesting and intelligible in our lives. I speak of hermeneutics because every act of reading is of necessity an act of interpretation, of translating old worlds and words and ways into contemporary contexts.

I want to start with a brief scriptural story that will help illustrate some of the points I hope to make. In 2 Samuel 6, the thirty-year-old David has just been crowned king over united Israel and has established Jerusalem as his capital city. He wants to involve God in his new kingdom, and he seeks out the ancient Israelite symbol of God’s presence, the ark of the covenant, to bring into his new city. “And they set the ark of God upon a new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab that was in Gibeah: and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, drave the new cart” (2 Samuel 6:3). David makes this an occasion for national (or tribal, really) celebration: “And David and all the house of Israel played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals” (v. 5). This celebration is David’s invention. While trumpets have accompanied the ark before, it has never been the center of such a procession, surrounded by a polyphony of sounds and ecstatic worship. But David is a musician and a man of passion. Of course, he brings his particular gifts and glad participation into the significance of this moment of engagement with the ark.

But then things get wild. The oxen pulling the cart stumble, and the aforementioned Uzzah “put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it” (v. 6). And we read that “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God” (v. 7). This is a strange story, and I hope you have begun to ask some questions in your mind, have begun to wonder. Something is happening here that calls us up short and wakes us up. I wonder if Uzzah had a wife, and if she did how she feels about this day of celebration.

After this distressing incident, David becomes displeased and “afraid of the LORD.” He asks, “How shall the ark of the LORD come to me?” (v. 9). He leaves the ark in the care of Obed-edom the Gittite for three months, “and the LORD blessed Obed-edom and all his household” (v. 11). Pause. Surely there is a richer story there. What do you wonder about in this narrative? What did this three-month blessing of the household look like? How did God’s grace manifest itself for this man and his family? What has David been up to during this time? How is Uzzah’s brother Ahio doing? When David learns that the presence of the ark has blessed Obed-edom so abundantly, he decides to give the procession another shot. “So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom into the city of David with gladness” (v. 12). This time, in addition to the music, they have sacrifices and offerings. And then, one of my favorite verses in scripture: “And David danced before the LORD with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod” (v. 14). Just let that image fill your imagination for a moment. David danced before the LORD with all his might. This thing that had seemed so terrifying has become a source of exquisite delight and exuberant praise.

In our interpretation of this moment, let’s have the ark of the covenant stand in as a symbol for scripture—something made by mortals but manifesting the power and presence of God, something that makes a material difference in the lives of those who attend to it. Awe is the recognition that the thing manifests the very real glory of God. Curiosity is David’s desire to have it close to him, to know it better, to wonder what might happen if he brings it into his city. And delight arises in the reckless dancing with untamed abandon.

Much has been made of the moment Uzzah steadies the ark, but perhaps among other things it could signify a lack of trust that God has the capacity to perform God’s good and divine work. Sometimes we wring our hands, worrying that God’s presence in our lives is toppling, and everything is on the verge of falling apart. And we often have real reason to be concerned. But when we go about the work of God with anxiety, something inside us dies. Perhaps through this story we are being invited to dance despite worry, to bring more joy to our worship, to trust that God will perform miracles, and our job is to gladly trust as we dance before the ark.

But there is real pain here, as well, and not just for Uzzah. The story ends with the wife of David’s youth, Michal, looking out the window with disdain at her husband, who she believes is behaving in a very unkingly manner. “Then David returned to bless his household. And Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said [with sarcasm], ‘How glorious was the king of Israel today, who uncovered himself in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!’ And David said unto Michal, ‘It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father . . . to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel: therefore will I play before the Lord” (2 Samuel 6:20-21). How is it possible to recover a sense of play and gladness before God when life is filled with reasons for lament? How can we choose gladness in the face of failed relationships? Could scripture help with this?

When they first fell in love, Michal went to great lengths to protect David from her jealous father. But during the years David spent on the run, hiding from the jealous Saul and living in caves, Michal married another man and began another life. When David came into power, he asked for Michal to be returned to him. Messengers sent for her “and took her from her husband, even from Phaltiel the son of Laish. And her husband [Phaltiel] went with her along weeping behind her” until one of David’s men commanded him to return home (3:15-16). This scene contains so much pathos, so much humanity. What is Phaltiel feeling? What about Michal?

My favorite contemporary novelist, Marilynne Robinson, asserts that “the narratives of the Bible are essentially inexhaustible” because of the humanity they manifest, because their narratives are relatable to flawed, anguished, idiosyncratic mortals. She writes, “The Bible is terse, the Gospels are brief, and the result is that every moment and detail merits pondering, and can always appear in a richer light. The Bible is about human beings, human families—in comparison with other ancient literatures the realism of the Bible is utterly remarkable—so we can bring our own feelings to bear in the reading of it. In fact, we cannot do otherwise, if we know the old, old story well enough to give it life in our thoughts.”^[2]

One way I explore and expound on the inexhaustibility of scripture, give it life in my thoughts, and engage it deeply with curiosity and wonder is to write poems in conversation with these ancient stories. Here’s one about dancing before the ark:

In some ways, I feel compelled to write with scripture, alongside it, exploring its worlds and ideas. The scriptures awaken creativity. A text that is truly generative calls forth new texts. The Hebrew Bible gave birth to the New Testament and to generations of rabbinical commentary. There is a line from the Babylonian Talmud that I often share with my students: “God gave the Torah to Moses in a white fire engraved with black fire.” Tradition has interpreted this statement to mean that when God revealed the scriptures to Moses, there were blank spaces between the inspired words, but that these spaces were also divine fire, inspired of God. Gaps were built into scripture to allow for individual application of its precepts and principles. The scriptures are deliberately open and indeterminate at times so we can wrestle with them in our search for meaning.

Literary scholar Erich Auerbach argues that this indeterminacy or openness represents the distinct difference between Hebraic and Hellenic literature, between the perceived sacred and the secular. The sacred will always prove more numinous, more transcendent, more mysterious. Using characters’ speech in the texts as an example of the difference between these two types of literature, he writes, “The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts—on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. . . . Everything remains unexpressed.”^[3] He posits that the gaps, the questions, the things “unexpressed” open the text and demand interpretation. For Auerbach, the Bible is “fraught with background” and “multilayeredness,” and he ultimately claims, “Since so much of the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his [or her] effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon.”^[4] For Auerbach, textual gaps are the defining characteristic of biblical literature. For this reason, scriptural texts continue to beget texts—they demand imagination. Drawing on Auerbach’s thinking, Geoffrey Hartman asserts that “Bible stories . . . force readers to become interpreters and to find the presence of what is absent in the fraught background, the densely layered . . . narrative.”^[5]

The presence of what is absent. That’s a delightful idea. What do these stories not tell? The book of Jonah tells of the reluctant prophet’s flight from God, of his adventures inside the fish, of Jonah’s unwitting success among the people of Assyria—his people’s violent political enemies. And it tells of Jonah’s petulant temper tantrum because God spares Nineveh when the people repent: “Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil” (Jonah 4:2). Jonah is upset because God is good. The book also recounts the charming exchange in which Jonah asks to die because his enemies have been spared, the comfort God gives Jonah by preparing a lovely gourd plant to give him shade from the sun as he pouts, and the anger Jonah feels when the gourd dies. “And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death” (v. 9). But the book of Jonah doesn’t tell what happens next. It literally ends with a question mark. God asks Jonah to reflect on the deep love he felt for that random plant and then asks if God should not love and spare the real humans who inhabit Nineveh? How might Jonah have responded? I wrote two poems imagining the next scene. Here’s the happier of the two:

The book of Jonah asks us to reconsider our prejudices and hatred. That can take work and humility.

One way to read with awe is to slow down in our study. The poet Rilke writes,

So, let’s slow down with our scripture study. Let’s get curious and ask questions. Let’s lean in with our imagination and create something beautiful together with the sacred text. The medieval rabbis have a long and multifaceted tradition of engaging their holy books. One of my favorite interpretive approaches is known as midrash. Midrash plays with scripture, examining a word or connection in the sacred text, arguing about its meaning, and sometimes imagining the background to the scenes and the significance of pericopes and teachings within the text by fleshing out the stories with new, expanded storylines. Midrash combines elements of intertextuality, narrative theology and formal exegesis. The midrashists’ role in part was to make the biblical narratives come alive for their audiences, giving contemporaneity to the scriptural teachings and personality to the ancients. Although the midrashim are often legal in nature, sometimes they include creative narrative expansions. There is an element of freedom and playfulness to many midrashic interpretations. These narrative commentaries are called aggadot, which translates as “tales” or “narratives.” The commentators weren’t necessary asserting that these tales reveal the actual intended divine universal meaning of the text, but rather that they open windows of possibility. Medieval rabbi and theologian Hai Gaon notes, “They enjoy no authority . . . these midrashic views are neither a received tradition nor a halakhic [legal] ruling; they are no more than perhapses.”[7] They are no more than perhapses because, as literary scholar Judah Goldin remarks, “In haggadah [the singular of aggadot] one is at liberty to draw cheerfully on his own intellect or imagination, on popular narratives and folk sayings, on anything congenial to his own spirit, to interpret a biblical verse or create a homily or amplify a scriptural anecdote . . . . The key word here is free, be it explanation or musing.”[8] This is the tone of my poetic interactions with scripture, which bring me the kind of delight in scripture we’ve been discussing. What if we can be co-creators of meaning in our engagement with the text? How can we do otherwise?

As a father of three daughters, I wonder about the relative absence of women’s voices and stories in the ancient texts. So I lean in and imagine.

Here’s a poem that is inspired by one brief verse at the end of the book of Job. The attentive reader of that book will note other allusions to the poetic language found there amid philosophical and theological ramblings seeking to understand injustice and live in a world of suffering. The verse that got me wondering is Job 42:14, but we’ll back up just a bit. After the voice of God comes from the whirlwind and humbles Job and his friends, Job memorably finds himself miraculously twice-blessed: “So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Kerenhappuch” (vv. 12-14). There is a lot to think about here. I wonder why the daughters are named and the sons are not. I’m sure the fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels would have been a comfort to Job and his wife, especially when they were cold or hungry or weary and in need of wool or mutton or an animal to carry them. And I’m sure they loved the ten new children they received from the hand of God with the wild abandon of any parents. But Job has lost ten children already, and as a father, I cannot imagine that Job and his wife ever forgot their original ten. Nothing could possibly compensate for their loss. I wonder what life might have been like for one of the daughters of the new family, living in the shadow of that other, previous life. I like that we know the daughters’ names, and this poem takes the oldest, Jemima, as its point of wonder:

I want to listen to Jemima’s stories and songs when we meet the next side of the veil. I’m sure my imagination of her misses the mark, but I’m glad to have thought about her soul.

Sometimes the strangeness of scripture makes me laugh. And I think laughter is holy, perhaps one manifestation of awe. Reinhold Niebuhr, an American theologian, insists, “Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer.”[i] One of the stories that delights me deals with the prophet Isaiah. Renowned for his poetic language and poignant prophecies, he also shows his beautiful humanity at times. The Old Testament prophets often engaged in surprising behaviors to get the attention of their audiences and to convey truth in memorable ways. Scholars often call these actions “prophetic sign acts,” and Isaiah competes with Ezekiel for the all-time greatest. The year is roughly 711 BC, and Assyria is taking over the Near East. Some of the nations are tempted to rely on Egypt’s power for deliverance, but God has revealed that Egypt will fall (see Isaiah 19). Then comes perhaps the wildest invitation God will give Isaiah: “At the same time spake the Lord by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, Go and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot. And the Lord said, Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia; So shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners, and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt” (Isaiah 20:2-4). Even with their buttocks uncovered? That one’s hard to get around. I’m guessing you have some questions right now. That’s good. Take note. Write them down. Follow your curiosity. My question regards Isaiah’s wife. We know he’s married and that the scriptures have called her “the prophetess” (Isaiah 8:3). She has been patient as he’s given their children interesting names like “Maher-shalal-hashbaz” which means something like “Swift is the spoil, speedy is the prey.” What do you think she felt and thought during the three years her husband walked around naked and barefoot?

Oh, the love of a good woman! That brings to mind the whole story of Jeremiah, which is heartbreaking. He prophesies that Jerusalem will be destroyed and has to sit and watch all of his prophecies being fulfilled as he repeatedly experiences rejection. God tells him that the people “have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Their lives have become an exercise in futility as they seek safety and peace outside of God. Jeremiah engages in the kinds of dramatic sign acts we discussed earlier: he buries his linen priestly girdle in a hole until it is rotten, then pulls it out to announce that Jerusalem’s pride has made them as rotten as the deteriorated cloth (chapter 13). He smashes a ceramic pot among the people gathered in the city gate and warns that if they don’t repent, they will be shattered and scattered like the shards of the jar (chapter 19). He gets put in stocks and smitten, and he tells his oppressor, a man named Pashur (which name means “freedom” or “liberation”) that from now on people will call him Magor-missabib—“Terror all around” (chapter 20). This can feel like schoolyard name-calling, but Jeremiah is hurt and angry. He wants to give up the ministry, but he can’t quit because God’s “word was in [his] heart as a burning fire shut up in [his] bones, and [he] was weary with forbearing, and [he] could not stay” (20:9). His zeal overwhelms him and he can’t help but preach. But one of Jeremiah’s commissions that feels most challenging is the command he receives not to marry because destruction is coming, and Jeremiah’s singleness will be a prophetic foreshadowing of the lament, loneliness, and absence of mirth his people will experience in days to come: “The word of the Lord came also unto me, saying, Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. For thus saith the Lord concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bare them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land; They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth: and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine; and their carcases shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth. . . . For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will cause to cease out of this place in your eyes, and in your days, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride” (Jeremiah 16:1-4, 9). Jeremiah’s devotion to God led to a life of solitude and rejection. Do you think he ever had a girlfriend? How would she have felt about this uncanny command? This poem imagines her perspective:

We are nearing the end, but I want to commend to you a hermeneutic of wonder. May we find delight in reading with awe and curiosity. May we sense in the mysterious and magnificent stories of scripture the pulsing power of God. May we wonder at what we find there—the humanity and the holiness. And may we find joy in our interactions with this wild and radiant thing.

I’ll leave you with one final poem—this one from the New Testament. It enters the imagination of Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Chuza. Joanna became one of Jesus’s benefactors, helping fund from her husband’s coffers the revolutionary and beautifully subversive work of the rabbi from Nazareth. How lovely that one whose husband was implicated in circles of domination and power came to find in Jesus’s words something worth sustaining and supporting. This little midrash considers how she might have felt to hear the stunning words of the Master sharing the Parable of the Sower:

Let’s allow God’s life-giving words to sink into the soil of our souls and bring forth something beautiful. You will find your own ways of engaging scripture with awe, curiosity, and gladness. For me, poetry has been one vehicle for giving the text space in my own life and thoughts. You may not create texts in dialogue with scripture, but I invite you at the very least to create a life in dialogue with the text. Live in these words and embody the goodness they offer. Dance before the ark. Feel God’s power, and find your gladness. Thank you.

[1] George Steiner, Real Presences, 156.
[2] Marilynne Robinson, “Wondrous Love,” Christianity and Literature 59, no.2 (Winter 2010), 204.
[3] Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953), 11, italics added.
[4] Auerbach, 12, 13, 15
[5] Hartman, “The Struggle for the Text,” 15, italics added.
[6] (Translated by Stephen Mitchell, The Enlightened Heart, 134).
[7] Judah Goldin, 59, italics added.
[8] Ibid., 63

[i] Reinhold Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times: Sermons for Today and Tomorrow, 2013, 72.