Dancing the Christian Crazy Dance

He has deconstructed: was Christian as a youth and now denies any deeper purpose to life.  "Christianity is this and does that and teaches these things ..." says my conversation partner.

Ugh.  He's not wrong.  Not totally wrong, that is.  It's as if I'm on a team with lots of other players wearing the same jersey, and sometimes it's unpleasant when I observe others in my jersey doing and teaching some pretty cringey stuff.  

This conversation has got me thinking about what you can (and can't) see from the outside looking in at the Christian experience.  More particularly, what it looks like if you've been on the inside and then deconstructed so now you're trying to make sense of the cacophony of messages coming from Christians and the Church.

I'm sure it's a weird spectacle to watch.  They're attending their gatherings and going to confession, crusading to retake Jerusalem, condemning outsiders and sinners and talking in great detail about the Afterlife.  They talk about being free from guilt and shame, but they pay a lot of attention to sin that makes them feel guilty and shameful.  

Liken it to a line-dancing convention in a huge-the-size-of-Iowa convention center.  Every ballroom you pass has a leader/pastor/priest on the stage and music on the PA system, and the crowd is dancing and learning the moves.  Some of the ballrooms look boring, others look fashionable, others don't let you pass by without being asked repeatedly if you wouldn't want to come in and learn.  Knowing how to do the dance makes you an Insider, which is its own payout.  There are kids dancing, too, and learning to do the dance as a kid makes it so you can muscle-memory the moves even when you don't fully integrate any deeper purpose.

At the same time, the craziness of the spectacle of the churches all dancing to the music of their own ballrooms* -- the hubbub of all the corporate dancing is loudly covering over a quiet, internal dance.

Each individual Christian claims to be privately dancing a Couples dance with the Lord.  You never see this when you poke your head in their ballroom; the collective church spectacle is so overwhelming.  But while they're dancing as a big group, they each are privately, tenderly, learning to follow His lead as he indwells them and teaches them his rhythms.

And that's a previous blog thought: https://sgfbend.blogspot.com/2024/05/follow.html

* (and there's more to that convention center metaphor--take, for example, the interactions they're having in the exhibit hall as they try to convince others to follow their form of dancing or denying the legitimacy of this or that dancing, selling books and videos about dancing -- maybe the metaphor doesn't ever stop!?)

I am HERE!

 We ask for stuff/bread/water and He gives Himself.

We ask for healing.

We ask for guidance.

We want to distinguish good from evil.  

I find in my prayers lately that God is frequently responding to my petitions with a big grin and an enthusiastic "I'm Here!"

And I look in Scriptures and I find the same thing.

He says to pray for daily bread, but then he says "I am the Bread of life."  He provides water, manna, and quail in the desert, but really wants to be at the center of the camp and be the central focus of our lives.  To focus on the quail and the bread and the water is our mistake.  He says "You need sustenance?  Yes, I'm here!"

He celebrates our faith when we ask for healing, but in giving healing he gives himself.  It's by his stripes that we are healed, which means that the healing isn't something that he is dispensing like tennis balls shooting from a machine, but that the healing we receive is through him.  It's not hard to imagine that he heals by coming upon us, enfolding us, and taking our infirmities away with him as he absorbs them from us.  We don't get healing From him as much as we get healing through him.

The conversations about "focus on the Giver rather than the gift" are less relevant when we stop looking at blessings as gifts that exist apart from his presence, when we stop differentiating the gift and the giver as if they exist apart from each other.  To get a gift of money is a familiar paradigm for us, but it's somehow less "true" than the idea of Jehovah Jireh settling himself down in and among us, becoming our provision rather than being the Giver of a gift that exists apart from himself.

We want his guidance.  We pray for it as if he's going to issue us a map or set of directions, so we can leave his presence and go find the way that he's chosen for us to go.  And I know this is going to sound unsafe, but I think lots of people take the Scriptures and hang onto them as if they are given so we can trust in them if God leaves us.  But he didn't come to give us "the way," right?  He claimed to BE the Way.  He didn't come to give us "the Logos," right?  He came to BE the Logos.  I don't think he's interested in giving us a map--he wants to be our map.

Like Pilate, people today ask "what is truth?"  If they are believers, they're asking God to show them, reveal to them, what the truth is for them.  Truth is a person.  He says "I am here!"  You don't get to have a truth that is amputated from him so that you can have it to carry around.

He's the Vine, and we stay plugged into him.  He didn't give us lithium battery packs and command us to stay close to the Charging Station, to come back for refills of him as needed.  We actually live and move IN him, and we're empowered by him only when we're fully plugged into him (though an argument could be made for a solar power metaphor here).

We read in Genesis that our original parents knew right from wrong because they walked in the Garden and could ask at any time.  The temptation for them was to know *independently* if something was good or evil, to eat from a tree that would give them that knowledge.  God's design was for us to look to him, like a child glances to its mother, to know if a new thing is okay to touch, good or bad.