Come Dance with Me

Scripture Lessons: Jeremiah 1: 4-10 and Hebrews 12: 18-29 Sermon Title: Come Dance with Me Preached on August 21, 2022 A great Persian poet once imagined that God speaks just four words again and again to His people through all generations: “Come dance with Me.” You might not like to dance, but pretend that you do. If “Come dance with Me” is all that God ever says, then who are we and what is the task of us, God’s people? It is to accept the invitation, which is both wonderful and terrifying. That’s how it goes in our first Scripture lesson. God appears before Jeremiah. “Come dance with Me,” God says. “Join Me and see what we’ll do together.” How does Jeremiah respond? “Who, me?” His reaction to God’s call reminds me of every middle school dance I’ve ever been to. The boys are all standing against one wall, the girls against the other. One brave girl bridges the distance. She walks up to a boy and says to him, “Come dance with me.” How does he respond? Don’t you remember? When I was in 7th grade, if I had an invitation to dance with a girl on one hand and the opportunity to stand before a firing squad on the other, I would have tied my own blindfold, for being invited to dance is terrifying. That’s why most grown-ups don’t do it. They think they can’t, until tequila convinces them otherwise. Yet God invites us to dance. Throughout Scripture are these bold and beautiful invitations. “Follow Me and become fishers of people.” “Have faith and move mountains.” “Pick up your mat and walk,” the Savior said, but powerful forces keep us from accepting these invitations. One of those powerful forces is doubt. Now, I don’t mean the kind of doubt we most often talk about in church. When we talk about doubt in the church, we think about how the preacher says, “Jesus walked on water,” and “Well I doubt it,” the cynic thinks. That’s not exactly the kind of doubt that I’m talking about. I’m talking about a more sinister force at work in our world this morning. I’m talking about the kind of doubt that keeps good, well-intentioned people from doing what God calls them to do, which is the kind of doubt that crept into my head when a good friend of ours lost her father. Hearing that news, I felt the nudge to go to the funeral, held in Florence, Alabama, which meant that I had four and a half hours for doubt to ring through my head as I drove from here to there. “This is a big waste of time,” one voice inside my head observed. “They’re not even going to notice that you’re there,” said another. Then, “I doubt that me showing up is going to make any difference.” That’s the kind of doubt that I’m talking about: the kind of doubt that keeps us from doing what God calls us to do, for doubt, in its most sinister form, convinces us that we’re not worthy of God’s invitation. That’s how it happened with Jeremiah. God issued an invitation to come and dance, only Jeremiah came right out with his self-doubt, saying, “But I am only a boy!” “God, I hear Your voice,” he said, “but You can’t mean me. I have two left feet.” This response must be the most human response out there, for again and again in the Bible, everyone who is called by God to do something special reacts this same way: “Who, me?” Just go through the list: Moses says he can’t speak. Isaiah says, “But I am a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips.” God says to Esther, “Come dance with Me” and save your people. She rightly protests, saying, “My life already hangs in the balance living in this palace, and You want me to go talk to the king?” There are a million rational reasons not to accept God’s call. Just as there are a million rational reasons not to get out on the dance floor; however, the life of faith isn’t an episode of So You Think You Can Dance. This isn’t about what you can or can’t do. This is about what God will do through you if you quiet the doubts in your mind long enough to accept the invitation. I knew that well enough to keep driving to the funeral. When I got there, I could see in my friend’s eyes how much it meant that I showed up. She and her husband had been hugged by a thousand people, and while not a one of them could replace being hugged by her father, I’ve been to enough funerals to know how much it means when people show up. I’ve been the pastor at hundreds of funerals, and so I’ve heard them say, “I can’t believe she drove all the way down here.” “I can’t believe they showed up for this. I haven’t seen them in forever, and yet they’re here.” The day turns into a fog for the family, so later they go through the guest book. They read the names, not because a funeral is a popularity contest, but because no one ever remembers what’s said at a funeral; the comfort comes from those who show up. There is power in our presence. God comforts broken-hearted people through us, and everyone who has shown up for you contended with the same doubts I did on the way to that funeral in Florence, Alabama. Everyone on her way to anything important is doubting herself, asking, “Are they even going to notice that I’m there? Who I am that my presence will make a difference?” That’s what Jeremiah was contending with. “But I’m only a boy.” Yet God said: Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’. Because this isn’t about you. This is about what I’ll do through you. Stop doubting and believe. Then God put out His hand and touched Jeremiah’s mouth. God also touched the Prophet Isaiah’s mouth, though it was with a hot coal, and so I imagine that with God’s touch, the doubts and anxiety go up in flames long enough for Jeremiah to hear these words: I will be with you to deliver you. And by My power, I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, To pluck up and to pull down, To destroy and to overthrow, To build and to plant. That’s what God did through Jeremiah once he accepted the invitation. Can you imagine what God would do through you if your doubts, fears, and anxieties melted away? Can you imagine the life you might have and the good you might do if you didn’t have to contend with your self-centered fear of looking like a fool out on the dancefloor? Our second Scripture lesson from the book of Hebrews speaks of stuff getting burned up, the earth shaking so that only what cannot be shaken will remain, for our God is a consuming fire. Maybe you’ve heard all that before. Preachers talk about fire all the time: How hot the fires of Hell are. How the sinners must turn to Jesus or burn in the flames. That’s not the Gospel message exactly, for while there’s fire in this passage from Hebrews, we must understand what is it that God consumes. For Jeremiah, it was the worry that he wasn’t good enough. That’s what went up in flames: doubt, worry, self-centered fear. For the Prophet Samuel, it was the trauma left by being a boy abandoned at the temple by his mother and the lingering worry that he wasn’t worth hanging on to. For Esther, it was the fear of being rejected by a powerful king. For me, it’s the doubts that my presence will make a difference. For all of us, it is the fear of looking like a fool out on the dancefloor. Yet remember with me what God does through people once their doubts and fears become fuel for the fire. A member of our church told me about how he took his wife to Longhorn Steakhouse. Leaving the restaurant, she left her wallet in the booth where they were sitting. Of course, they didn’t realize it was missing until they got home. He called the restaurant. They couldn’t find it. Not able to give up the search, the next day he stopped by just to check again. This time, a server named Ashley, who was not usually the hostess but was working a double shift at the front desk, went to check with the manager. The manager had it, and Ashley brought the wallet back to the man. So relieved to have the wallet back, he gave Ashley a tip, and that’s when she started crying. This church member of ours, now really paying attention, stayed and listened. Ashely suffers from MS, she’d just gotten out of the hospital and had missed a week of work. The man then gave her all the cash in his wallet. Ashley asked him why he was doing that, and he told her that, as a Christian, he always tries to be ready to help his neighbor. Then Ashley cried some more. The next day, the man told a men’s group the story. They all cleaned out their wallets, and Ashley ended up with about $400. Now that’s a good tip, but I tell you the story just to say that God is always calling. Are you ready to dance? I hope so. Back in Tennessee, we lived in a small city called Columbia. All those outside of Columbia thought it was small, but that’s because they didn’t know how small the towns outside of Columbia were. Outside Columbia is a small town called Culleoka. Culleoka had a unit school – all grades, kindergarten through 12th grade – and many years ago, a man named Jim Jones went to school there. This was back in the 50’s, and Jim grew up thinking that everyone who lived in Columbia was rich because everyone at Columbia Central High School wore shoes. Well, Jim made the Culleoka football team, and before they played Columbia Central High School, there was a dance. The football coach told Jim and all his friends to take a bath before the dance, put on their church clothes, borrow their fathers’ shoes if they had none, and should any girls ask them to dance, they were to answer “Yes.” Now there may be days when you feel like a small-town kid with no shoes and a bad accent at a middle school or high school dance, but pay more attention to God’s invitation than to the doubts in your head. God stands ready to change you and me and this entire world, but we’re going to have to accept His invitation to dance. If we’re going to change this world for the better, we’re going to have to do more than sit, watching it burn on the evening news. This week, instead of waiting for someone else to do something or wishing that God would choose someone else, when you hear that still, small voice, the whisper of a neighbor, or the ring of the phone and see the name of the person you can’t stand coming up on the caller ID, know that God may be saying through them, “Come dance with Me.” Don’t ignore it. Let your self-conscious fear and doubt to go up in flames. While we might look or sound like fools in the process, by accepting the invitation to come and dance, we will be a part of the good that God is doing in the world. Amen.