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.
Dancing In The Kingdom 