“Living from the Center”

Acts 2:1-8, 12-21

Pastor Melanie Hammond Clark

Pentecost, May 23, 2010

My mother started me in dance classes when I was four years old.  I thought it was because I showed some inspired proclivity towards dance.  Rumor has it mom was just trying to creatively channel some of my energy outside of the house.

What started out as something to do, grew into something I loved.  And I continued all the way through high school.  When I got to college I immediately signed up for an elective course in classical ballet and by the end of the semester my instructor who happened to be the dance company director at my university invited me to try out for the university’s Dance Theatre company.  I felt really honored that she would think of me, and I began to consider the possibility, but there was one stumbling block for me.  This was a modern dance company and, frankly, I thought modern dance was a little weird.  In the few performances I’d seen, it seemed a little bizarre and very unfamiliar; bodies all over each other, people doing all kinds of funky things.  But longing to dance and knowing this was the only company my university had, I tried out and happily was accepted into the company.

It was a strange transition for me and a more risky form of dance for me.  It had less structure and afforded much less control than classical dance.  It required a greater sense of comfort with one’s self because you had to take chances to make a creative piece work.  I had to use different muscles, different movements than in my previous training.  At first it was, to say the least, a little uncomfortable, a little scary, because, wll, you see classical ballet is sort of Presbyterian.  It’s done decently and in order.   Modern dance is a tad Pentecostal!

So when I read chapter two of the book of Acts and visualize this impassioned picture of the Holy Spirit being poured forth, it appears the way modern dance used to look to me; unfamiliar and uncontrolled.  It’s new ground, not only for the disciples then, but for us now.

John Fisher, a contemporary Christian musician, sited this religious reality when he wrote, “The Spirit of God refuses to be choreographed.  Much of the time the Spirit’s dance,” he says, “is raw, new, jerky.  It’s not always pleasing to the eye, for it is dancing fresh in the lives of real human beings whose floors have not been cleaned up.  It isn’t well rehearsed or polished or perfect.  It slips and it slides.  Sometimes poignant, other times exhilarant, it is always real.”  Fisher goes on to say that most people, even those of us who pride ourselves on our own life dance, are afraid of this real dance.  We’re afraid of anything we can’t control and the real dance is sometimes wild, a little unmanageable, but mostly it’s vulnerable … and that is the quality we fear most.  Being vulnerable, even if only to God, is the last thing we want to be.  And so our choice tends to be to create our own dance of predictable steps and proscribed routines that are familiar to us.  Even if they don’t make us as joyful as we could be.

Now unlike Fisher, I don’t buy the idea that God’s Spirit frowns so heavily upon predictability and order, because otherwise I couldn’t be a Presbyterian!  I don’t believe God wants our lives to be out of control, but I do believe that God wants to be the One in control.  God sent the Holy Spirit to invite us to join the company of Christians for whom all of this is still unfamiliar and unsettled.  God’s Spirit invites us to risk even if just a little, to see what it feels like to move more freely across life’s floor.

Now I know it seems like a dichotomy to us in this age and time to say we could live more freely if we give up control.  Most of us feel frantic, not free, when we lose control of our lives.  But the key is to whom do we lose control?  If we aren’t in control, who is?  We are right, and hear this, we are right in feeling unhealthy if another person controls us, runs our lives, manipulates our movements and feelings.  We are correct to feel uneasy if we’re in over our head and floundering if we gave up control to persons whose wants and needs drain us dry.  But that is not the kind of giving of control that Christ encourages.  Christ knows human sinfulness; the tendency of persons to use and abuse one another because each desires to control his or her own world.  So Christ says, “Turn the control over to me.  Let me hold the key so no one else can take it.”

Interestingly, giving up control to God is the closest we will ever get to not being controlled by others and living the life that is truly and freely ours.

Now back to dance for a moment.  A very important concept in dance is “holding the center”.  In dance training we were always taught that you move from the center, particularly in modern dance when you are moving in all kinds of wild ways it could look really uncontrolled, but in truth, those dancers are highly controlled right at the center.

The idea is that if you have proper focus at the center, then no matter what happens elsewhere you will be moving from a point of strength and balance.  Also, it’s understood, if you don’t move from the center, your movement will lack meaning because it will be disconnected, unempowered by your full range of energy and feeling.  These days people are learning this in Pilates and yoga class. 

Well the same is true in the dance of our lives.  If we focus on the center, on Christ as the center, our center of being, if we live aware of His Spirit’s strength at our center and not just our own, we will have a balance point, a power center, something anchored firmly within, even when other parts of ourselves are unaligned and unsteady. 

But how do we learn to dance this Christian life?  Does it happen just by imitating Jesus’ steps, by asking only “What would Jesus do?”  Or, is it produced solely by getting together a set of rules and regulations out of the New Testament and systematically obeying them?  That is how people often think of the Christian life, and that is why it is often such a dreary and unattractive business, and even with all of our efforts so utterly frustrating to people…

But as James Hastings writes in The Speaker’s Bible, “That is not how the people of the New Testament thought of the Christian life or experienced it.  What they found is that through the Spirit of Christ they possessed a root of life, a Spirit alive in their souls, growing up in them, shaping character from within and then finding its outlet in a certain way of life (not pushed on from the outside) but coming from within and in all their attitudes toward one another the life was in them,” he says, “as an original impulse breaking out in them in a way of feeling and thinking and doing, as the life in a tree breaks out in blossoms and fruit, and service for them was a fruit of the Spirit, and all that was good and whole in their lives was the fruit of the Spirit, which had somehow grown and been awaken to life in them through Christ”, not through their own competence, their own conniving, their own care.

Those of you have been to dance performances, (and I realize some of you probably avoid them like the plague) but those of you who have been to dance performances know which dancers draw you into the dance.  There are those who have extraordinary technique, whose movement is mastered, controlled, flawless.  They are not the ones who draw my eye, however.  I am drawn to the ones who dance as though their steps, turns and leaps are emanating from their soul, whose practiced steps flow forth from an inner passion for the dance they do, dancing form an original impulse within that training can augment, but that training alone cannot give them.

We know that the dance on the stage is not something we all do, as is true of any form of art or athletics, it is not a gift offered to all. 

But the dance of the Spirit is. 

As Peter proclaims, quoting the Prophet Joel in our Scripture lesson, “God declares, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.’”

Do not be mistaken, the Spirit’s power is not meant for someone else.  It is not just meant for those “wacky, crazy religious people”, those “fanatics”, those people who are not us.

The Spirit has been poured out for all flesh and the power of the Spirit can be yours.  God has made that promise, because it is only by the power of the Spirit that we live in God’s power.  All of us are invited into the dance of the Spirit to dream, to grow, to stretch beyond a box-step kind of religion, which is powerless and draws no-one to it.  In the dance of God’s Spirit we are all promised rhythm and vision.  In the dance of the Spirit we are all promised life.

Amen.