The Dancing God

The Dancing God--December 1, 2016

"And Jesus came and said to them, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." [Matthew 28:18-20]

My kitchen floor is one of the most sacred places in my life these days.

Not because I am terribly skilled in or devoted to the culinary arts (I am not--in truth, I only know just enough to be dangerous around a mixing bowl or a spice rack).  And not because I frequently bake bread for Communion in our kitchen, either (I don't--maybe once a year, to refresh my memory before we practice making it with the Confirmation students). 

Those would be fine reasons, but my reason for calling the kitchen floor one the most sacred places in my life is that it is there that my children most frequently grab me by the hand to dance with them in a joyful frenzy after dinner.  It is the perfect space for toddler dancing--it is next to the dining room with the stereo, it is relatively free of clutter on the floor, and it is big enough for a grown-up or two and two children to move freely.  Our song list is rather eclectic: my children are indiscriminate dancers who will move their arms and feet to the sounds of the Beatles and Rihanna... Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift.... 90s surf rock to classic soul... even good old Elvin Bishop's trusty "Fooled Around And Fell In Love" in a pinch.  They don't particularly care about the music; they just want to dance, and they are convinced that it is more fun when they pull me into the motion on the kitchen floor, too.

And there, when my children grab my hands to sway and swing and pick them up while music plays from another room, I learn what the Great Commission is all about.  The whole mission of the church, the whole project of Jesus' life and ministry, and maybe you could even say the whole point of the universe itself, is to be swept up in the great dance of God.

We have added too much starch, in all likelihood, to these words of Jesus that end the Gospel according to Matthew.  We have made them stiff and stifled.  We have, over two thousand years, turned them into a divinely-ordained membership drive for our religious clubs, or a motivational speech given to spiritual salesmen before they make their cold calls to sell people on their package deal trips to get to heaven.  We have turned Jesus' words into a "Get 'em to sign on the dotted line--we need new blood!" kind of threat, like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, pushing the salesmen to Always Be Closing and make sales... or be fired.

But Jesus always has a bigger view than we do.  He is always seeking after so much more than we can set our meager sights on.  Jesus is calling us to let ourselves get pulled into the dance of God, and then to pull other people into the joy of it, too.  Whether you are graceful and lithe on the dance floor, or have two left feet like me, we are all of us being pulled out from the edges of the room as spiritual wallflowers and into the movement of God.

I mean that bit about movement, and about dance, quite seriously.  We tend to imagine God (to the extent that we imagine God at all) being a static, fixed figure--seated, usually, and immovable.  That's how Aristotle pictured the divine, after all--an "unmoved mover," someone who was fixed and unchanging, but snapped the occasional finger to get the rest of the cosmos to do its thing.  But the New Testament--and with it, a strand of voices from Christian history--doesn't picture God as a celestial stick in the mud.  The New Testament depicts a God whose very being is in relationship: of, as the Gospel of Matthew puts it, "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." 

God is, if the New Testament and early church are to be taken seriously, a community of Persons who are also One.  That means that God, in God's very deepest being (Being?), is the moving, swirling, giving, receiving, constant motion of being Three-in-One that is also always three-in-relationship.  The old church Fathers of the East used to talk about it as "perichoresis," which is just a fancy way of saying in Greek roots, "dancing around one another."  You might recognize the "chor-" root in that word, which is the same root we get "choreography."  In other words, the Eastern church used to talk about God's very life as one great dance--a dance which, before there were any humans or birds or algae or even planets and galaxies, was already in motion between the Three who are also One.  God's very life is a dance... not a big long eternal sit.

And so... to be made a disciple of Jesus, to be baptized as his follower, is not simply to join a religious club or get a ticket to the afterlife from some pastor or missionary who sees himself as a heavenly tour guide.  To be made a disciple of Jesus is to be brought into a dance that has been going on from before there was a thing called time.  To be a part of the Movement Jesus speaks of is to be pulled from the sidelines into the very motion of God's own dance, the ever-flowing, ever-moving, ever-giving motion of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

That's why Jesus talks about being baptized in the name (singular) of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit--this is not a last-minute slapping-on of a brand name, but rather a picture of God's own joyful, unabashedly open eternal dance.  To be a disciple of Jesus is not merely to get your reservation in at the Heaven Hotel, but rather to be pulled into the very motion that is God's own life.  It's like when my son and my daughter reach out a hand and pull me into their dance on the kitchen floor.  They don't make me take a test first to see how graceful a dancer I am (answer: not very), and they don't make me dance while they sit back and watch me flail awkwardly.  They are already in perfect joy, and they simply want to pull me into that joy, too.

That's what Jesus calls us to do--it is less about getting people to sign on the dotted line, and more about being pulled out from the edges of the room to bounce and dance and swirl on the kitchen floor right where we are, where God is already moving to the music.  And when Jesus instructs his disciples to "teach" newcomers to "obey everything that I have commanded you," it is not like an audition or reality TV show to see who will be good enough to stay on until the next round. It is Jesus offering dance instructions so that we will learn to move like him.

Every day, then, is a chance to be a part of that movement, a part of that divine motion that has been swirling and circling between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit since before "in the beginning."  Every day is a chance to move like God moves--every act of selfless giving, every motion of grace, every instance of bowing and bending to make room for the other... it is all a part of the dance God is already in the midst of dancing.  That means every day is a chance to be brought into the motion of the Creator of the universe--not simply of the promise of one day getting to heaven, but to see that the dance is already happening in such ordinarily sacred places as kitchen floors, hospital waiting rooms, office buildings and coffee shops.  It is happening on farmers' back fields and on rivers and oceans.  And Jesus has not only sent people into your life to pull you out onto the floor to join the dance, but today, Jesus is sending you to a stiff and stodgy world to invite them into the movement, too, like children on a kitchen floor.

Lord Jesus, let us move like you move, and as we are brought more and more fully into the dance of your own divine life, let us bring others into the motion, too.