Come to the Dance

Dancing with God: Come to the Dance
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
October 13/14, 2013
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 

Let’s dance, friends!

What?  Isn’t dancing of the devil?  Doesn’t dancing lead to sex, drugs, and rock and roll?  Why are we talking about dancing in church?

Well, dancing is actually often an act of praise in the Bible.  Take Psalm 30 for example: 

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.
(Psalm 30:11 NRSV)

Apparently the person who wrote this psalm in the Bible thinks that dancing just might be something that helps you celebrate when life is good.

Recently I came across a lost book of the Bible. It’s called, Dancing with Jesus: Featuring a Host of Miraculous Moves!  There’s the Carpenters Clog, the Temptation Tango, the Apostolic Conga, and more!  Seriously.  And you thought Jesus didn’t dance.

Ok.  Now that I’ve offended someone…What I’m trying to do in this series is explore parallels between learning to dancing and the spiritual life of following Jesus.  Last week we looked at one basic idea: Only one person can lead.  God leads and you follow.  Today I want to look at something a little more, well, messy: the dance floor itself.  I’m talking about the church.

Why Church?
I get to see the good, bad, and ugly of church life, and I often have to answer a question not only for those around me but also for myself: what good is the church?  Let’s dwell in how messy it is for a while.  I deal with a lot of people’s junk and baggage.  In fact, people bring all kinds of junk and baggage with them to church.  I essentially lead a volunteer organization (a herd of cats?) that has a serious branding issue in our culture.  Church is just about as popular these days as Congress.  I have “cousins in the faith” that make me embarrassed to call myself a Christian.  So why bother?  Sometimes I’d rather just dance my own dance to my own music and ignore everyone else around me.  Like this young woman who likes to Dance Like Nobody’s Watching:

Admit it.  Even if you love the church, sometimes you just want to ignore it all and dance all by yourself.  Looking at some of the particulars of why people don’t like the church, we find these reasons:

66% – Religion is too focused on money
66% – Religious people are too judgmental
60% – Don’t trust religious leaders
51% – Strict/inflexible beliefs
47% – Wasn’t relevant to my life
42% – Church is boring or uninteresting

In the midst of all this negativity about the church, there’s a deep spiritual current that runs through our culture:

45% “consider myself a spiritual person.”

And yet amidst this spiritual tendency only 17.2% consider it “important to attend religious services.”

So what does all this have to do with dancing?  Our culture is asking, “Why do I need a community of faith?  I can dance alone.”  Here’s the problem we immediately run into: It’s hard to learn to dance alone.

Why Community Matters
When we turn to ancient wisdom in the Bible we read this powerful explanation of why community matters:

It’s better to have a partner than go it alone.
Share the work, share the wealth.
And if one falls down, the other helps,
But if there’s no one to help, tough!

Two in a bed warm each other.
Alone, you shiver all night.

By yourself you’re unprotected.
With a friend you can face the worst.
Can you round up a third?
A three-stranded rope isn’t easily snapped.
~Solomon (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, The Message)

So if the problem is that it’s hard to learn to dance alone, here’s the point of today’s message: We learn best to dance in a community of dance.  Likewise, we learn to love best in an admittedly messy community of faith.  In fact, it is sometimes the messiness that gives us the opportunity to learn better how to love.  It’s the messiness of the dance floor that inspires improvisation and creativity.  Creativity and improvisation are best formed in a community rooted within a tradition.  Learning to love is best formed in a community rooted within a tradition.  I might even go so far as to say that all creativity ultimately comes from a particular tradition.  John Calvin, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, understood the church in this way.  He called the church “the church reformed, always reforming.”  In other words, it is always reforming its dance move. It’s always staying rooted in the past but improvising into the future.  Dance is just like this.  Dance is always rooted in a past tradition.  Take swing dance for example.  To give you a feel of the history of how swing dancing has changed over time, and yet remained true to a basic simple step, check out this history of swing dance:

Join the Dance
So if you want to go deeper and be more creative with this whole spirituality thing, you’re going to have to show up on the dance floor of a community of dance.  You’re going to have to go to the lessons.   You’re going to have to have a community of dance that teaches you the tradition of the dance you’re trying to learn and you’re going to have to master some basic steps.  It’s hard to learn to dance alone.  You need community.  It’s hard to learn the life of faith alone.  You need a community of faith.  So join a community of dance & regularly show up on the dance floor.

Sarah and I grew the fastest in our dancing when we participated in dance communities.  We took classes, went to weekend workshops, paid instructors, hung out with friends in basement jam sessions, went to monthly big band dances, watched DVDs, and on and on and on.  We learned to dance better in a community of dance.

The church is at its best when it is a dancing community learning from the past the dance of loving God with everything you’ve got and learning to love your neighbor as you love yourself.  The church is at its best when you learn from people who are better dancers than you are, people who are further along the faith journey than you are, people who have followed Jesus longer than you have.  The church is at its best when you bring your own unique style to the steps.  The church is at its best when you learn from the past so you’re ready for the present and the future, when you learn the tradition and improvise and be creative for the present and future.

I recently had the chance to talk to someone who is new to our church and didn’t attend church before coming to our Monday night Church in a Diner.  Her name is Joanna.  She’s an art history PhD student.  Here’s how the church was giving her a community that is helping her grow in her spiritual life:

Imagine a Dance Floor
So what would it look like if the church was like a dance floor where people were regularly showing up to learn to dance better?  It would have a whole range of skills and abilities.  It would have people sitting on the sidelines just watching.  It would look like a celebration where people who were watching wanted to join in.  It would have people just starting out.  It would have some really great dancers mixed in with some people just learning the basic steps.  It would have people learning from one another.  Off in one corner someone would be learning the Charleston.  Another corner would have someone learning the Jitterbug.  Another corner someone would be doing the West Coast Swing.  But they’d all be dancing to the same rhythm going deeper and getting better.  And now we’re back to the point: Why be part of a faith community, a church?  Because we learn best to dance when we show up on the dance floor.