Tag: easter

Playful and orderly

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 3 – The image-bearers

Playful and orderly

[Bible references: Deuteronomy 12; Exodus 35:30-38; 2 Kings 17:1-41; Nehemiah 8:1-9:38; Psalm 100; John 4:23-24; Acts 6:1-7; 15:1-35; Romans 12:1-2; 1 Corinthians 14:1-40]

There is much that is wrong in the world. People endure pain and suffering sometimes from natural happenings and sometimes from the actions of others. Evil seems persistent and never-ending. When we are called to serve God in this world, we can become overwhelmed by all the work that is to be done. Playfulness can seem out of place. Particularly, any playfulness that emerges from self-centeredness or obsessiveness.

Actually, that is the point we need to assert. Playfulness can be out of place in a world of sin and evil. But playfulness can also be a reminder that the reality in front of us is not the total reality. Our playfulness arises out of the relationship we have with God, the one who has overcome the evil in the world, who will end the suffering and who will restore us and world to be what he intended from the beginning. Playfulness arises out of the hope and joy we have in knowing that the reality in front of us is not the whole reality.

Our imagination can be helpful in this play. As children, we can pretend there is another world and do something like taking a cardboard box and imagining it to be a spaceship and accepting the rules of living in that spaceship. Family traditions (or even community or national traditions) are a form of play, they do not serve a utilitarian purpose, but stem from the creative ways we wish to remember our unique heritage.

This same imaginative playfulness can be useful in reminding us of the reality that lies behind our current reality. Our traditions of worship are a form of play, albeit a more serious play. Our worship traditions represent ways for us to remember our spiritual heritage or to provide imaginative ways to perform biblical sacraments about which we have sparse details on how to perform them. These traditions and liturgies help us point to that other reality, a new Kingdom that began breaking into this world with the incarnation of Jesus.

Christian worship was in fact and from the beginning a festival:  the festival of Christ’s resurrection from the dead … Easter begins with a feast, for Easter is a feast and makes the life of those who celebrate it a festal life … Jesus himself compared the presence of God, which he proclaimed and lived, with the rejoicing over a marriage. His earthly life was a festal life, even if it ended in suffering and death … the early Christians have understood his raising from the dead and the presence of the now-exalted Christ as the beginning of an unending joy and a happiness without end … the risen Christ as ‘the first among those who had fallen asleep’ and as the leader of life; as the leader in the mystic dance and himself as the bride who dances with the others, as the church father Hippolytus put it.  Long before the somber dances of death were painted in medieval times of plague, the figure of the resurrection dance can be seen in the old churches. The modern Shaker song ‘The Lord of the Dance’ brings out very well the dancing Christ:

I am the life that’ll never, never die;
I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.[1]

We hope to participate in the inbreaking of the new Kingdom by living according to its rules. When we pray or worship, we are participating in the rules of that new Kingdom. When we come to others and share with them the hope that we have, we ask them to use their imagination to look beyond the current reality and envision the new Kingdom that is already here and is yet to come. When we accept contentment in all situations, when we trust in God, when we comfort others with the hope we have, we are living according to the rules of the new Kingdom.[2]

It is also true, that In this present life there are endless encounters with grief. Although we acknowledge the pain and suffering of that grief, whether that grief is ours or others, we can encompass that grief with hope. Even amid grief we can choose to cling to God and to the hope He brings us. If we can live under the rules of the new Kingdom, we can have assurance that the current grief will pass and will be replaced by future joy and laughter and that every tear that we have cried and will cry and even now cry will be wiped away.

Our hope of the new Kingdom allows us to endure the current pain and suffering knowing that the hard experiences can be redeemed and to be used for good. God can take the pain and suffering we endure to transform us to be more like Christ, who himself suffered for us, transforming the very evil intended for him into the final victory that shall ultimately also make us victorious. This hopeful living then is also a form of play, accepting the rules of a reality we cannot see and choosing to live according to the rules of a Kingdom that we can only realize in part.

That playfulness also emerges in our creativity, which erupts early on in our lives as our desire as children to play and also in the desire we have as parents to play with our children.[3] There is no doubt about how uniquely creative we are in the way we express ourselves, not only in all the various art forms we use but in the ways we can solve all sorts of problems[4] – even to the creative ways we try to cover up our sins.[5] No other creature can come close to expressing creativity the way we can.

Our ability to create and even detect order is also unmatched.[6] Our ability to detect order is evident in the way we can detect patterns in sight or sound. The sense of order is evident in our ability to recognize faces, our ability to recognize the voices of our mothers or fathers as infants and even before we are born.[7] Our sense of order is seen as we grow in our ability to recognize the patterns of letters and sounds and to recognize and respond to language – even languages.

Our sense of order becomes more evident in our ability to create order out of many abstract concepts such as math, science, philosophy, and many other areas.[8] It is our sense of order that allows us to create businesses, governments, and civic organizations to make society productive. When we bring order to farmland, we increase the productivity of the farm.

The visible order within Creation inspired Christians in the past to study Creation. Order within Scripture helps the Bible to be meaningfully used as meditative literature. In the same way, order during worship also helps us to avoid confusion and to focus on God.

[1] Moltmann, Jürgen. “The Living God and the Fullness of Life” trans. Margaret Kohl Westminster John Knox Press, 2015, p.192; Carter, Sydney. Lyrics “Lord of the Dance” (1963) Genius genius.com/Sydney-carter-lord-of-the-dance-lyrics; Tune “Simple Gifts” Brackett Jr., Joseph. (1848) Praise gathering www.praisegathering.com/media-files/pdf/a08380_lyrics.pdf

[2] Edgar, Brian. “The God Who Plays: A Playful Approach to Theology and Spirituality” Cascade Books 2017 (e-book)

[3] Gowman, Vince. “Playful quotes for the child in your heart” Vince Gowman www.vincegowmon.com/playful-quotes-for-the-child-in-your-heart/

[4] Baumgartner, Jeffrey. “The Basics of Creative Problem Solving – CPS” Innovation Management, innovationmanagement.se/imtool-articles/the-basics-of-creative-problem-solving-cps/

[5] Brister, Tim. “6 Destructive Ways We Minimize Our Own Sin” Bible Study Tools www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/6-destructive-ways-we-minimize-our-own-sin.html

[6] Basulto, Dominic. “Humans Are the World’s Best Pattern-Recognition Machines, But for How Long?” Big Think 24 July 2013 bigthink.com/endless-innovation/humans-are-the-worlds-best-pattern-recognition-machines-but-for-how-long

[7] Pfaff, Leslie Garisto. “6 things you may not know your baby can do” Parents www.parents.com/baby/development/intellectual/6-things-you-may-not-know-your-baby-can-do/

[8] Armstrong, David. “Christianity Absolutely Critical to Origin of Science” Patheos, 18 Oct 2015, www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2015/10/christianity-crucial-to-the-origin-of-science.html

Observe

Read Deuteronomy 12; 1 Corinthians 14. These chapters contain explicit instructions about how and how not to worship.  Since we do not yet experience the fullness of the new Kingdom, how can our imagination help us more actively engage in worship?

Patterns of love

The young women will dance for joy, and the men—old and young—will join in the celebration. I will turn their mourning into joy. I will comfort them and exchange their sorrow for rejoicing. (Jeremiah 31:13, New Living Translation)

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Preface

Patterns of love

[Bible references: Exodus 34:6; Numbers 14:19; Deuteronomy 4:37; 5:10; 6:5; 7:8-9; 10:12, 15; 13:1-4; 30:6,16-20; 1Kings 8:23; Nehemiah 9:17, 32; Psalm 17:7; 23:6; 33:18; 36:5; 103:1-17; Lamentations 3:22, 32]

The theme is love

The hardest thing to understand is the one thing we need to understand for the world to be understandable, to make us understandable, and it provides the themes for what we write the most poetry and songs and fiction about. And it’s even the hidden feature behind many non-fiction books.

We have this desire to express love and be loved but most of the time we are confused about what love actually is. We sometimes get analytical about it but only to wind up with a mix of

  • it’s an emotion that happens to us,
  • it’s something we choose to do,
  • we just fall in it,
  • we have to grow into it

We can’t pin it down, but it’s so much of who we are that we end up writing stories about it. The interesting thing about those stories is that we are creatures who desire to love and be loved but we all seem to be broken when we try to give and receive that love.

That brings us to another thing that seems so hard. Most of us are aware of this thing called “the Bible” or “the Holy Bible” but there seem to be confusing things about that Bible that seem to lead to many ways of trying to interpret it—and if “experts” can’t agree about it what chance do most of us have?

The Bible is about love as well, but it doesn’t get analytical about it, it basically just tells stories:

  • stories about God and the creatures he designed for love,
  • the Kingdom he desired to build with them,
  • how that love got broken,
  • and how God put a plan in place to restore that love and restore His Kingdom.

From the beginning, the Bible lays out patterns of all the practical ways to live out the Christian faith today. These patterns can be followed through the Bible itself as well as through church history. At one level, those patterns make it possible for the average reader to discover the Bible’s basic meanings while, at another level, scholars can discover the Bible’s richly intricately woven literary text and its patterns of clues and links that can lead to deeper understandings of God, of His Creation and of us.

The goal is of this book is to allow a more average reader to begin to uncover some of the literary richness of the Bible and see how the patterns laid out in Genesis trace not just through the rest of the Bible but also through church history and even provide guidance for us to live today.

Once we begin the process of finding pattern and discovering their meanings, we can discover that God of Creation has provided abundant patterns that could fill an encyclopedia, more than enough to fill our lifetimes. The full complexity of who God is, of His Creation and who we are is beyond our grasp, but He created us to be His Friends and the Stewards of His Creation. We can look forward to a joyous eternity of discovering and living out all He has laid out before us.

For people who want to love

Many of us look at the Bible and we can love some things … but other things are not so easy. Most of the time we find it easy to love Jesus … most of the time. But some things that the apostle Paul writes about? And the Old Testament can be tough; some things are so violent and there are those religious practices that we can’t relate to.  Are they even relevant?

How are we to understand how the apparent conflicts in the Bible: the stories of an angry God in the Old Testament and the merciful Jesus in the New Testament, the violence in the Old Testament and the message of peace in the New Testament; a story of creation that doesn’t seem to match the findings of science; the meaning of the laws in the Old Testament when the New Testament tells us we are not under the law; why Christianity of the New Testament seems so disconnected from our Jewish roots in the Old Testament.

And then, if we can get by all that and learn how to love the Bible, how do we move beyond that and love the church when so many people over so many years seemed to do so many wrong things. And even if we manage to love some of our people in the church, all those other people in the church are hard to love. It doesn’t help that over the years it has seemed that the church has divided up into so many denominations that we can’t even count them never mind trying to get to the point where we could love them.

On top of all this, who has the time to do all the reading to put all this together enough so that we can understand how the processes God’ started with image-bearing creatures in Genesis follow through to Revelation and then through church history to the processes and problems we can follow today.

From a writer who loves

More than 45 years ago, I was, in one moment, in such a bitter spirit that my brother warned his Christian friends to stay away from me, then in another moment I found myself sneaking into his room to start reading some of my brother’s books like Basic Christianity, Mere Christianity, Knowing God, and Evidence that Demands a Verdict. Somewhere in that reading my heart softened until I acknowledged Jesus as my Lord. Somewhere in that reading I also seemed to grasp that the story of Jesus began in Genesis and that the Old and New Testaments made a complete set.

In my first year as a Christian, I found myself in a small group that took an entire year to work their way through the four-page book of Philippians because Philippians seemed to be a portal to many other parts of Scripture and also to their lives. Also, in that first year (in fact, the first semester of that year), I had a Sunday School teacher who assigned a five-page writing assignment on one of the attributes of God. I didn’t know any better about how unusual all of that was. I just soaked it all in.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity for more than 45 years to serve the church in different ways including church governance and teaching different levels of Sunday School and Bible studies. I was ever curious to learn and to read about the Bible and the church because to me it always seemed that there must be a whole story to connect from Genesis to today even if I didn’t know all the pieces.

It seemed like such a large task. I also had a large problem which I will share later in the book. As we all know, the ones you love the most can hurt you the most. And so, in the reality of church family, as in all families, there is ample opportunity to get hurt. It is in the processing of that hurt that gave me a chance to learn how to truly love the church.

The impetus for this book started in 2017, when I participated in a 9-month (12 if you include the pre-class summer reading) journey in theology. The course was designed to provide, through group discussions, readings and practice of the spiritual disciplines an

“understanding of the scope of the Good News of Jesus Christ: By his death and resurrection, his renewing his people and the world. We want participants to see how their individual faith stories are part of the larger story of God’s redemption so that they find new freedom and boldness to serve the church and to engage every aspect of culture.”[1]

The intensive course required 4000 pages of reading, but I even read more. I also had the desire to bring this kind of knowledge to others who did not have the time for such expansive reading. It is therefore, the intention of this book to provide a manageable way for the average person to explore breadth and continuity of the biblical story, how that story has been expressed by the church through the years and how our individual stories can fits into that original story, so that we can look forward to participating with God in bringing His kingdom into the world.

This book can be read at different levels. To make this book more accessible, most theological terminology is minimized while at the same time terms that are commonly used (e.g., church, bible, etc.) are explained. People who have less background or have less time can get all the essential information by simply reading through the text without using footnotes or appendices. Those who have more background or have more time can explore the Bible references, appendices and more than 500 footnotes. Again, to make the book accessible, the footnotes point to online resources whenever possible.

For deeper exploration, discussion points are available at the end the chapters which have thought provoking questions designed for group study, challenging readers to engage scripture and their own thoughts and to share thoughtful responses within a group. This approach recognizes the value we have as interdependent parts of the Body of Christ and the value we each have as creative and capable image-bearers of God.

There is also a journal available, Dance Steps, for a day-by-day closer reading of the book and how it may apply to your life.

I bring no special academic credentials to this project. I do bring a love of the church, of teaching, and of reading widely. The research needed to create even this short book is shown by the extensive footnotes referring to experts from many different fields such as biblical studies, ancient near east languages and cultures, linguistics, church history, anthropology, psychology, science, Judaism, philosophy, etc.

I love the Bible, the church and the One who gave us both. I love reading, and teaching and the One who gave me both abilities.

[1] The class, called Brooklyn Fellows, was offered by a church network, Resurrection Brooklyn in Brooklyn NY. Special thanks to Marc Choi who led the class and my fellow students who gave their time and attention to all the necessary reading and gave their input and questions. The journey of the church network that gave rise to Brooklyn Fellows has ended, but God continues his work through those people.