Dance with Abandon

Dancing with God – Dance with Abandon
Sycamore Creek Church
October 20/21, 2013
Tom Arthur
2 Samuel 6:14-16 

Friends, let’s dance!

Growing up I hated being on the dance floor.  I hated going to school dances.  They never turned out well.  A friend of mine held a dance at his house.  He paired me up with a girl, and I didn’t know what I was doing.  She put her arms around my waist, and I put my arms around her shoulders.  Then I noticed that all the guys had their arms around the waist and the girls had their arms around the shoulders.  Embarrassing!  At another dance my date danced with a bunch of other guys who all seemed to dance better than I did, and then she took off my wrist corsage.  I conferred with my friends, and they told me to give her a quarter to call home and get a ride.  This was before cell phones.  So that’s what I did!  Even though I’ve been swing dancing for about fifteen years now, I still always feel a little embarrassed dancing with someone besides Sarah.  I don’t want to be seen as a “bad dancer.”  The dance floor is full of potentially embarrassing moments.

Today we’re continuing a series called Dancing with God, and we’re looking at the parallels between learning to dance and the spiritual life.  Today I want to explore that sense of embarrassment we often have when it comes to dancing and the embarrassment we often feel in our culture being a follower of Jesus.

The Problem
Here’s the problem I want to deal with today when it comes to these moments of embarrassment: We are more interested in saving face than living faith.  We play it safe when it comes to God.  We’re reserved.  We don’t want to be fanatical.  We don’t want to be seen as a weirdo.  We’re concerned about what others think.  We’re more interested in saving face than sharing faith.

I struggle with this myself.  I’m never quite sure how people will respond when I answer their question, “What do you do?”  I have a pastor friend who responds saying: “I’d be embarrassed to tell you.”  I often meet with people in coffee houses.  When we spend time in prayer, I pray quietly.  I don’t pray quietly so that only God can hear me.  I pray quietly because I’m a little embarrassed about what others will think.  There are in our cultural context some “rough” or “hard to swallow” beliefs of Christianity, and I tend to downplay those rough spots with my non-Christian friends.  In the end, I want to be seen as smart, educated, together, emotionally stable, a successful leader, creative, entrepreneurial, and on and on.  And I often want these rather than to fully live out my faith.

When was a time you were more interested in saving face than living faith?

Dance with Abandon
So today I want to look at a moment when someone danced with abandon before God even though it was embarrassing to some of those around him.  The story is told of the time King David, one of the greatest kings of ancient Israel, came back from a particularly successful battle.  Here’s what happened:

David danced before the LORD with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod.  So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.  As the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.
2 Samuel 6:14-16

And you thought there was no dancing in the Bible!  King David danced with abandon ignoring what others might think of him.  Now Michal and David have some baggage together.  Michal and David were married.  Michal was the daughter of Saul, the first kind of Israel who David overcame with God’s anointing to become king.  While David and Saul were fighting for the kingdom, Saul married Michal off to someone else.  When David eventually won the power struggle, Michal was taken from that husband and given back to David.  So their relationship at this point isn’t a blank slate.  And it may be because of this baggage that she despised him.  But there are several other possible reasons too.

We read that David was wearing an ephod.  An ephod is a priestly gown.  Was David wearing sacred clothes reserved for priests?  Maybe by doing so he was demoting himself from King to priest and Michal thought this was below David.

An ephod by itself is also a rather revealing garment.  Consider it the ancient hospital gown.  It certainly didn’t cover up everything as David danced with abandon into the city.  Perhaps Michael thought that David was being immodest as a king.

The ephod was white, and white is a symbol of purity.  Was David pure?  From Michal’s perspective, David had led a “coup” of her father.  Later David would see another woman he wanted, Bathsheba, and would have sex with her even though she was married.  He was the king after all.  When she became pregnant, David had her husband killed on the battlefield.  David was not the most pure guy around.

Or we read that David was leaping and dancing.  Leaping and dancing are not respectable decorum for a king.  A king is supposed to carry himself with dignity and restraint.  He’s not supposed to let his emotions show.  Maybe Michal despised him because he wasn’t acting his part.

So here’s the point of today’s message: Dance with abandon before God.   Live in the rhythm of the Holy Spirit, the beat of God’s heart for the world.  Ignore what others might think of you and dance with an audience of one: God!

Now when I say dance with abandon I don’t mean do any little whim that comes into your mind.  I said I wanted you to listen to the rhythm of the Spirit.  The rhythm of  God’s Spirit is always an improvisation rooted in tradition.  I don’t mean tradition in a negative sense.  I mean it in the most positive sense.  For example, Jarsolav Pelikan, a Yale church historian said, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead.  Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”  He also liked to quote Goethe, a German writer of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, who said, “Take what you have inherited from your fathers and work to make it your own.”  You have to remain rooted in the tradition while at the same time dancing with abandon into the future.  The reason you have to remain rooted in tradition is because if you don’t learn the tradition, you may mistake your own whims for the rhythm of the Holy Spirit.  David was dancing within a tradition in the story we just read.  The Ark of the LORD was going along with them.  He wasn’t just doing whatever he wanted.  The tradition of Israel was present with him.

The same thing is true on the dance floor.  Dancing with abandon is always rooted in a tradition of dance.  To be the most creative, you have to learn the basic steps of dance and then the advanced steps and then the creativity and abandonment comes when you add your own little twist.  To get a sense of that, let’s look at a dance form that is perhaps one of the most clear forms of dance where you dance with abandon: Breakin.

The Tradition of Breakin
Breakin, sometimes called break dancing, at first glance looks like it has no order to it.  It looks like it is complete and total dancing with abandon.  But breakin has a deep tradition.  Those who dance this dance are called b-boys or b-girls or breakers.  The “b” comes from the word “break” which is a “break” from the main parts of the song or piece.  To get a sense of what a break is, watch the first couple minutes of this video.  It’s about the “Amen Break”, perhaps the most famous six seconds of any song of all time.  The Amen Break was recorded in 1969 by The Winstons for the song “Amen Brother.”  It was on the B-side, the back side, of their album Color Him Father, and it won them a Grammy Award.

The break is the short part of the song that everyone waited for to really let it all go on the dance floor.  In the early 1970s DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican, was the first to realize that he could extend the short break by buying two copies of one record and have them side by side so as to be able to mix the two records back and forth between the same break.  This extended the break so that you could keep dancing to it.  So what before was a dance-with-abandon-to-six-seconds-of-music became a dance with abandon for as long as the DJ kept the records spinning.  Thus was born b-boys/girls or break-boys/girls.

B-boying consists of four kinds of movement: toprock, downrock, power moves, and freezes. Toprock is anything in a standing position.  Downrock is when the arms and legs are both supporting the body down on the ground.  Powermoves are the amazing acrobatics of b-boying.  And freezes are suspensions of the body in the air.

Breakin, which at first glance doesn’t look like it has any tradition, actually has quite a deep tradition.  It’s from that tradition that you end up with amazing dancers who add their own little touch, style, and improvisation, and dance with abandon.  There are hundreds if not thousands of videos displaying the amazing dancing of b-boys and b-girls, but here’s one of my favorites:

It’s within the tradition of breakin that a b-boy or b-girl is able to dance with abandon.  The same is true of the spiritual life.

The Tradition of the Church
It probably goes without being said, but the church has a tradition.  We’ve been exploring the pieces of it through this series.

First, get in the dance.  Show up on the dance floor.  You can’t learn to dance if you don’t join a community of dance.  In the same way, it’s pretty hard to learn the dance of faith without a community of faith.  So regularly join the community of faith and its “dance”, that is worship & small groups.

Second, there’s only one leader on the dance floor.  God leads and you follow.  God is in an eternal dance.  The Father and Son dance in the Spirit, and the Spirit is continually inviting you to join that dance of love, mercy, and grace.  To do so, you’ve got to let God lead, and you have to follow.

Third, to let God lead you’ve got to learn a couple of basic steps.  A woman can follow a man on the dance floor if she knows a basic step, and that leader can make her do all kinds of things she’s never done before, but it is all dependent on learning the basic step.  The basic steps of the life of faith are prayer and scripture reading.

Fourth, once you’ve got the basic steps down, then you can go on to the advanced steps.  In swing dancing, the basic step is the triple step.  More advanced steps are the Charleston or aerials.  In the life of faith, the advanced steps are things like fasting, meditation, simplicity, solitude, and service.

Once you’re showing up regularly on the dance floor; once you’re letting God lead while you follow; once you’ve learned the basic steps of prayer and scripture; once you’ve begun to learn the advanced steps of the spiritual disciplines, then you’re ready to dance with abandon by improvising and being creative; then you’re ready to listen to really listen to the beat of God’s heart of the world and step out unconcerned about what others will think of you.  That’s when some pretty amazing things begin to happen in your life:

Worship and work weave together.
Church and community converge.
Recreation and redemption reconnect.
Evangelism and entertainment equate.
Discipline and devotion don’t divorce.
Faith and fun fuse.

All of the Above
There’s a hip hop group in Lansing called All of the Above.  Many involved in it are Christians who are dancing with abandon in the streets of Lansing.  If you want to know what it looks like when you improvise on a tradition and dance with abandon before God, here’s what it looks like:

That’s no stuffy faith.  That’s no spirituality stuck in the 16^th century.  That’s a vibrant and living tradition of those who came before us dancing with abandon in the present and future.  That’s the kind of church I want to be: a b-boy and b-girl church breakin into our community with the love of God.  I want us to dance with abandon before God without regard for what others might think, and I want us to be surprised when people see us dancing with abandon and say, “I don’t know that I could ever do that, but boy is that beautiful.  Boy is that what our world needs.  I’m not sure I could ever abandon myself like that, but boy am I glad that they are.  I’m going to have to send my kids over there to learn to dance the way that church dances.”  Friends, let’s dance with abandon.

O heavenly Father, in whom we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray thee so to guide and govern us by thy Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget thee, but may remember that we are ever walking in thy sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.