Becoming Like Christ: An Invitation to Dance
Tuesday, February 23
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An Invitation to Dance
Psalm 77
Rev. Shelley Woodruff
I have found two main approaches to understanding Scripture. For a lack of more precise terms, I call one approach “knowing” and the other “dancing.” Allow me to explain with a metaphor.
There are two ways (at least) that I could better understand my husband. One way is to study and analyze what he does and says and how he behaves so that I might know him more fully. I could read books about how introverted or analytical minds see the world. I could interview his mother to find out more about his childhood and significant, formative events that influenced his worldview. I could read articles about life in the emergency room or about medical procedures so that when he says over dinner, “I had to place two central lines today,” I would know what that means.
Such tools would work together to create a context by which to better understand this complicated and fascinating creature under my roof, to better anticipate his reactions to life, and to responsibly evaluate the unspoken communications present in every day.
Yet another way is to just be with him. To ask questions over dinner and care about the answer. To travel somewhere and see if lack of food or sleep triggers the grumps, or how spontaneous he is, or how he responds when our luggage is lost. To notice what makes him laugh and how loud. To listen to what sort of advice he gives to our daughter dealing with a disappointment at school.
This approach doesn’t really help me categorize or analyze. In fact, with this approach, knowledge in any scientific sort of way is only a happy byproduct. Rather, this approach molds me into a new sort of human—one that is mindful and present—aware that life is a dance of perpetual motion where we gradually learn each other’s moves and steps and sways as we develop into better partners.
One approach turns me into a creature that knows the subject more fully. The other approach turns me into a creature that abides with the subject more fully.
Of course, these two approaches are overly simplified and reductive, but I find them helpful nonetheless.
Most of the time, I approach Scripture in this first way. I try to know it better. I look at the grammar, context, and historical influences. I see if a different Gospel reports the same story in a different way. I look up a tricky Greek or Hebrew word. I open up a passage for study and ask, “Okay, what can I learn from this? What should I know from this?”
It’s funny how the “dancing” approach is so intuitive and natural with a beloved family member, and yet we are often untrained in this approach with Scripture. If we confess that Scripture is the living Word of God and if we hold these complicated theological truths that interweave God and Word and Incarnation and Christ, why is it so much easier to look into our Bibles for answers and knowledge? And far harder to allow these texts to pull us further into a way of being where Scripture becomes a beloved partner that we walk with, dance with, notice, ask questions of, and absorb?
Lent calls us to dance. The embodied nature of this season asks us to be on a journey from Ash Wednesday until Easter—a journey that beckons us to dance with the reality of human frailty, the wonder of a grace-filled God, the humility that comes with failure, the expansiveness of God’s plan for humanity, and the intimacy of God’s plan for each created being. Lent cares little about answers and far more about drawing us closer into a way of being with our God that implicates not just our brains and intellect, but our emotions and desires and fears and our doubts.
The Psalms call us to dance. More than any other book, the Psalter gives us glimpses of people of faith who engage with a holy God who they don’t quite fully understand, but refuse to let go of. This is why the Psalms pair so beautifully with Lent.
An Invitation to Dance
Today’s psalm is #77. This a gut-wrenching psalm where the author cries out to God in despair, questioning if God’s steadfast love has ceased for him alone (vv. 1-9). Then the psalmist makes himself remember the amazing things God has done in the past. He remembers God’s wonders, strength, and control over the most powerful aspects of creation (vv. 10-20).
And in the end, the psalmist has no answers. He has come to no magic answers or solutions, but he has been fully present with God—unabashedly setting all of his emotion and doubts and pain at God’s feet, and then engaging with a God that makes paths through the sea and owns thunder and lightening.
This psalm gives us a great example of someone figuring out how to be on this journey with God and invites us to do the same.
Read through this psalm and ask two questions.
If you weren’t worried about being measured, or stoic, or “correct,” what might you lament to God? What is your heart breaking over? What does your soul ache for?
Before you have any answers, and even regardless of the answer, what can you say is true of God? What has God revealed to you about God’s self in the past?
Now don’t try to draw any conclusions. Don’t search for answers or resolution or understanding—at least not yet. Just be. Be present in these two true things and see how they speak to each other in a dialogue. In a dance.
About “Becoming Like Christ” (Weekly Lenten Reflections)
In 2019, we developed a 7-week long series packed full of devotions called “Exploring Humanity and Divinity.” It was about wrestling with our humanity as we seek to be transformed into the likeness of Christ.
After a tumultuous last year, and with tensions high on political, cultural, and social levels, it seems that “wrestling” is just as relevant today as it was two years ago.
In that spirit, we believed it would be healthy to resurrect a similar theme to this year’s Lenten devotional series: Becoming Like Christ.