I can remember going to a dance in 1987 - it was jr. high. It was a pretty typical jr. high dance. The gym was filled with nervous energy. There was the class clown making light of the situation - I always appreciated the class clowns. There was the rebel scheming to pour a little something extra into the punch. And there was a whole lot of talk, followed by only a little bit of action. For the first 4-5 songs the floor remained empty while groups of guys visited and groups of girls seemed to take shifts going to the bathroom in groups of no less than 5. Then all of a sudden there were some brave souls making their way onto the floor. That made me more nervous. You have to understand that I have 2 left feet... and they're both filled with lead. I'm as graceful as drunk elephant. So the jr. high sway suited me fine. I needed the slow song so my feet wouldn't have to move too much.
Like all the other guys there, I came with some initiative. I was thinking about dancing with one girl in the days leading up to the dance. I remember seeing her. She was dressed up in the high fashions of 1987. She looked great. But I wondered what my chances were of getting to dance with her. If she was cold to me there was no way I was gonna ask her. So I did a little reconaissonce. We happened to cross paths a few times, around the punch and when she was going with her group to the bathroom and when she and her group were coming out of the bathroom and whatever else I could work out. We exchanged smiles, greetings, and some awkward dialogue. It became clear to me that if I were to ask her to dance, she would probably say yes. This was exciting. But it was still nervous excitement. In fact, it was worse than before when I doubted whether she'd dance with me because there was only one thing left to do now. Ask her. The situation was right: the dance floor had a comfortable # of people on it - so I wouldn't be too obvious. She looked great... she seemed willing... everything was set... the dance floor was right there in front of me... So I sat down. For many reasons, those steps onto the floor looked like steps off the plank of a ship into shark infested waters. Fear of failure, rejection, embarrasment, .... It was easier to stay on the sidelines: Why would I want to leave the class clown anyway? He was doing a fine job entertaining me. Besides, he wasn't gonna be getting onto that dance floor so maybe I should be a good friend and keep him company. Not only that but I seemed to have tweaked my ankle earlier in the week playing basketball - resting it would be a wise thing. So there I was sitting on the sidelines. There she was, looking great, ready to dance. And there was the dance floor with room for us.... but not on that night, I just settled onto the bench and chimed in with the class clown.
To me, that story is like a little picture of life. Do you know what I mean? We think about how great life could be. We think about the potential. We have high hopes. Just in this last week I saw signs of this: During the Living Leadership seminars happening over the satelite here on Wednesday during Stephen Covey's talk, a short inspirational clip came up on the screen and it said: Life is short: so live, love, learn and leave a legacy. And a day before that I saw on TV an ad by a local network in the states - it just flashes two words onto the screen at a time, they said: Sing more, laugh more, live more, dance more, love more. These weren't part of a greater ad pushing some product - they were what they were. We're hopeful people because deep within us we know there's more. We think about living well, and the things we could accomplish. And we think about the difference we could make here or there. We think about the great legacy we want to leave. If we've set our sights real high, we've begun to contemplate the full life that Jesus said he came to give us.
But in between these thoughts are dream-crushing thoughts. After a chin-up look at the possiblities we let our heads hang and accept what seems to be the realities and we settle in on the sidelines. Maybe we've come from a long line of failures and the rut seems too deep to climb out of. Maybe we have a checkered past that haunts us and taunts us. Maybe things are just too unclear: why venture out of the familiar and take on all that risk when things really aren't that bad on the sidelines? Or we think that such life is for the real players and we're not the real deal. So, why not just settle in, make a little more money, have a family, and blend in along the sidelines? I don't think we ever fully settle in though. We don't fully settle in because we weren't made to settle in on the sidelines. We were made to dance, we were made to live and deep down we all have hope that springs out of that reality.
Last week Dean did a great job explaining a story out of the Old Testament part of the Bible. He told the story found in 1Samuel 14. To recap, the story is about a King named Saul and his son Jonathan. In this story, Saul the king of the Israelites was at war with their enemies the Philistines. Actually, to say they were at war may be pushing it. The Philistines were armed and a large army was ready for action while the Israelites had two swords, a small army and were hesitant about battle to say the least. Let me read it for you:
Dean's Sermon - November 1 & 2, 2003
That's a great story. It has two distinct characters in it with two distinct characteristics. You've got King Saul under the pomegranite tree on the Sidelines and you've got Jonathan on the Dance-floor. A few moments ago I described us as people who hope for the full life. Well, hundreds of years before Saul and Jonathan were even born, God explained to the Israelites what a full life might look like for them if they were to follow him. Listen to Leviticus 26: 3-13:
That sounds alright. God would dwell with them and give them a full life - the possibility of a full life goes hand in hand with where God dwells. But this full life I just read about never really happened. There were snippets of this here and there when people would begin to trust God again. It said 5 of you will chase a hundred of your enemies. Jonathan and his armor-bearer killed 20 and chased a whole army. And every couple decades in the history of Israel there were these episodes like this where the people chose to follow God and these amazing things would happen exactly as God promised they would hundreds of years earlier if they would follow him. And you'd think that a story like Jonathan's would have been enough to bring everyone onto the dance floor for the rest of their lives - maybe even for generations. But it didn't. It never did. Throughout history there is this tension. People lived in want for a full life and eventually cried out to God for life. And God would again describe a full life in his presence and offer it again to these hungry people... and like starving people they would lap it up, for a time. And after a short time they would become self-starters, self-sufficient, autonomous in every way and they'd reinvent themselves - being self-made instead of God-made and they would make for the sidelines, trusting in themselves instead of him. And the full life God offered would again become a distant hope.
I can remember preparing to go back-packing in Europe 10 years ago. My friend Ken and I were going to go and live it up for a few weeks. We'd heard many great things about Europe. We'd heard so many people say how great their time was there. So we set our hopes high. OK, we didn't set our hopes super high but we'd heard there were many girls with cute accents there... not to mention the culture, the history and the scenery and all that. When we got there we found that yes, there were many girls with cute accents there. And we were pleasantly surprised by the culture - we even learned a thing or two. But several days into our trip we became dissappointed. It was life.... leaving us in want again. Only this time it was packaged differently.
I call this kind of thing the mirage syndrome. (Dictionary) It plays itself out again and again. Because we're hopeful people we look forward. We look for that moment like I described earlier on the dance floor. From a distance life can look so hopeful - so right. We can see in our minds eye the full life we'd like to live. Basically any time you envision God dwelling with us, you are getting a picture of the full life - the kind we were made for. We can see it in our minds eye... and the dance-floor is right there. But there might as well be a moat between us and the dance-floor filled with hungry crocodiles. All our initiative becomes suffocated by doubt, fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of risking, fear of being vulnerable... and suddenly the familiar sidelines look safe and comfortable and it becomes pretty easy to make excuses. And we turn off our minds eye and turn on the TV or fill our calendar or drink or go shopping or whatever.
Given the life we hope for - the one we see in our minds eye - it's pure insanity that most of us most of the time stay sitting on the sidelines - under the pomegranite tree. The life that could be becomes nothing more than a mirage - a nice thought - and we sigh... and we settle... and like drones we take a good hard look @ what everyone else on the sidelines are doing and we follow suit. And every now and then we look up at the mirage - that dance floor in the distance - and we say things like "what if" or "maybe if I had taken a couple more steps." And then we remember how hard those steps felt and we put our heads back down and we shuffle on through life as we know it.
Those steps onto the dance floor are hard steps. That's the bad news. I hate sharing the bad news. But it's true... it's true for me - I don't have what it takes to get on that dance floor... bad news.
But today I've got good news too. In fact, I've got great news for anyone lacking the initiative to making that mirage a reality - for anyone who can't get on the dance floor.
Our bad news isn't new news. It's age old. There are very few people, really, who spend their lives on the dance floor. This doesn't sit right with us or with God. And because God made us to live life in it's fullness with him on the dance floor, he went ahead and did something for us... something extreme, something drastic. We have an extreme God because his love for us is extreme. He's drastic becaue life on the sidelines is drastically wrong. He did this crazy thing for us and it can be described in one word: Incarnation.
When I first learned that word it could have very well meant a trendy flower to go on a suit... incarnation. I had no idea. It means infleshed. The root of the word is the same as in Chile Corn Carne - it means flesh or meat. God became one of us. Remember what I read in Leviticus - that section on the full life God offered if Israel followed him? He said that he would dwell among them and the mirage would become real life and it would be their life. The problem is that no one could follow God. Some people enjoyed the dance floor for a while here and there but no one could keep it up. If they could only initiate and follow God, he'd dwell with them and life would be beyond their imaginations. God knew the problem - that we couldn't follow him - that we're initiative deficient - that we couldn't get on and stay on the dance floor. And if we couldn't stay on the dance floor, he couldn't dwell with us - cause he lives on the dance floor. We needed something extreme from God. And 2000 years ago, God acted extremely on our behalf.
John 1:14 says: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us... This is initiative. The God of the universe... the same one who made the stars and the sunsets, the waterfalls and the eagle. All-powerful, all-knowing, uncontainable and in need of nothing, God set it all aside and became one of us. He exchanged power for servanthood, glory for suffering. There was a song a couple years ago that asked, "what if God were one of us, just a slob like one of us?" Well he did just that. He's extreme because his love for us is extreme. 2000 years ago God took initiative: He took off his tux, put on his work clothes and served us. Because we're initiative deficient, because we couldn't get on and stay on the dance floor, he brought the dance floor to us. He served, lived, died and was raised again in order to take everything that was in the way of living the full life on the dance floor - he took our excuses, he took our fears, he took our sins, he took our long line of failure, our checkered pasts that haunt us and he took them all to the grave with him. But he left them there and raised up to new life so that he could give us new life... life on the dance floor with him. If we wanna dance, we only have to take the outstreched hand of the master.
Conclusion:
It only took my friend Ken and I several days to become dissappointed when we went to Europe. We had arrived where we thought we wanted to be and realized we were still looking at a mirage. Then one night in our hotel room we talked about our dissappointment to each other and then we remembered our God - the same God who took on flesh to initiate life for us. So we prayed to him. We prayed that he'd bring life to our trip. Basically, we prayed that he'd get us on the dance floor. The next day started like any other except we were somewhat expectant. In the morning we hopped on a train to make our way to Munich. Our compartment on the train sat four. We sat down on one side and a couple minutes later a guy named Scott sat down on the other side. He was an American back-packing in Europe alone. After talking for a while we learned that he had a similar dissappointment to us - he had high hopes for his European adventure and after having been there for a while he found that his mirage was still in the distance. After much more dialogue we learned that he had prayed the same prayer as we had the night before - so we told him what we prayed and we all thought that was kinda cool. Then he explained where he prayed it - it was the same hotel as us - and that was kinda cool. Then we realized we had prayed around the same time - almost to the minute - cool. Then we realized that his room was right beneath ours, that he was about 10 feet away from us praying as we prayed. We had prayed that God would dwell with us and bring us life - and we spent the next few days of that trip on the dance floor - it was great.
I'd like to say that I spend all my days on the dance floor. I'd even like to say that I spend most days on the dance floor. I don't. I don't trust God often enough to take his hand. But I know why I hope. Because my God made me to dance. And when he took that great initiative 2000 years ago, he was just getting started. He's working on me, taking the led out of my feet - he's giving me rythym. And I know that when I'm stuck under the pomegranite tree, all I have to do is reach up and take his outstreched hand to be with him on the dance floor. Last week Dean spoke about choices. We don't have to stay on the sidelines: Get out from under that tree and choose to take his hand... and dance.
Let's pray:
God you made us well. You made us so that we can't be content on the sidelines. You made us to dance with you. We thank you for your great initiative and for your great love for us. Every day of our lives has your initiative written all over it - give us eyes for that. Give us the initiative we need to take your hand and follow your lead. We trust you, and we expect great things from you.
Amen. |
