Children of the Light. . . I hope you dance.

Do children of the Light wrap themselves in robes of golden rays, dance drenched in all the colors of the rainbow, glorying in the Author of Light, magnifying His glory with their dance and with the righteousness of Christ they wear--knowing full well that the robes they exchanged for these, the robes of their own making, were the filthiest of rags, eyesores, a stench, biohazards unfit even for human company-to say nothing of their unquestionable unsuitability for presentation in the presence of a holy God. . . it would have been better if they had come naked into His presence-the only thing that could make them less worthy of His presence than their bare naked sin-soaked selves, is the filthy rags of self-righteousness they had assumed as their fig leaves. . . but neither rags nor fig leaves could camouflage their sin--only highlight it for all to see. Now their rags have been consumed by a holy fire of consecration, and bathed in His purifying crimson blood, the paradox . . . they are washed as bright as the most brilliant snow. No man's nor woman's righteousness could have ever bought such glorious robes. No mountain of heroic good deeds could have paid for a thread of these robes which were paid for with the blood of a perfect Man, also a perfect God. The One, the Only. Our At-One-ment.

Do the children of the Light dance before Him for His pleasure, celebrating His grace and His love poured out upon them, the mercy He extended when He invited them to feast with Him in spite of the nails they had driven into His hands with their own sin?. . . Indeed, there is so much to rejoice about--He has turned their mourning into dancing. Their ashes into beauty. That which was dead is sooooooooooo alive!! They are called to dance and they do dance, but the time has not yet come for the Great Uninterrupted Dance. . . there is a time to rejoice and a time to mourn. A time to work and a time to play. Before His Kingdom comes in all of His glory, we cannot stop toiling to bring redemption to the billions more dying daily in filthy rags that will too soon serve as filthy shrouds.

An angry American evangelical stands on the grounds of a university campus and screams to the lost about their sin. A message of holiness, but not a ray of love can be seen or heard or felt by any there who bear witness. There is no holiness, my friend, that is not driven from beginning to end by LOVE. You cannot love God without loving the humanity He died for. You cannot be holy without loving Him wholly. You cannot love Him wholly without loving them wholly. Unless you let Him make you His love poured out, you are an empty vessel, nothing more than a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. Many claim to preach in His Name. Oh, yeah? Who told you?

The Pharisees preached holiness without wholeness. They preached a message of good works. Condemnation for breaking their laws (hundreds more than God had issued). Holiness through personal goodness. Loving God, to the pharisees, seemed impossible without precluding loving humanity. It appears that they believed that loving anyone else could only detract from loving God. They did not understand that you cannot love God without loving His cherished humanity--all of it--every man woman and child. There is NO SUCH THING AS HOLINESS APART FROM LOVE. The pharisees would rather let a man die on the side of the road than get dirty touching him. The story of the good Samaritan is told around the world, but most Christians seem to miss the point just as obliviously as the Pharisees had. Would you allow yourself to be soiled with feces for the sake of saving a human life? Would you allow yourself to do so to save a human's eternal soul? Tony Campolo has made statements numerous times to audiences of evangelicals--variations of "40,000 people just died and went to hell. And you don't give a damn. And nothing proves this point more than the fact that you are so much more concerned about the fact that I just said the word damn than you are about any of those people." You have become petty and have completely missed the boat. You strain out a gnat, but you swallow a camel!

Those who call themselves children of the Light dance, so many of them forgetting so soon that they did not buy their own tickets to this party. That they could not even buy their own clothes to show up at this dance. And they look disdainfully out on those still dying in their disease ridden rags and occasionally scream, "Hey, Sinners! You are dying in the dark! You filthy miserable wretches-- you are clothed with the stinking rags of your unrighteousness, you are lost and don't know where you are going because you cannot see. You are starving and afraid and it is all your fault for being such a pathetic excuse for a human being. It sucks to be you. You should find the Light and leave the darkness, even though you deserve it because of your sin. Get your acts together! Climb out of the miry fiery pit-- though its walls are both as hot as burning coals and a as slippery as slime. Clean yourselves up! Get some new clothes! Come and do as we do--dance before the Lord. . . Get holy so you can hang out with the holy likes of us--the holier than thous." Astonishing amnesia. About how they got holy to begin with.

Even when God saves you and redeems you, He does not remove the free will mechanism from your brain. He cannot take over any part of you that you do not relinquish to Him--He must abide by His own rule and He chose to relinquish to humanity His right to control them, until this age closes and all is set right again. As a result, most Christians never manage to let Him take them over completely. And the room with their heart they guard the most fiercely is the one that gives them the illusion that they have something to do with their own redemption. In fact they got it for free. For the low low price of a request and repentance--all they had to do was identify themselves as spiritually bankrupt and in need of His help, to recognize Him as the Lord of all, and to turn over whatever they had to Him. What came to them as a gift, of course, had been paid with the highest sacrifice of all, by Someone Else.

So many 'children of the Light' screaming at those in darkness, condemning them, berating them, preaching a message of holiness and failure, forgetting that the whole Good News part was the part about how Someone Else would carry them out of the darkness and into the Light. Forgetting that whole co-laboring with God to save the lost part--forgetting that whole Being- Jesus-to-others-by-carrying-them on our backs as He did to a place of safety. Jesus did not scream to the lost about their sin. He spoke tenderly into their pain and healed them. He looked at them and LOVED them. And after that, He sometimes reminded them to Go and sin no more. (Three times it is recorded that He said this. On the other hand, the NT reports Thirty-Three miracles of healing and provision performed for the lost and the outcast. You do the math). But first He made them whole. Because no one can make herself holy unless He first makes her whole, and then He gives us the power to become holy THROUGH Him. Jesus preached holiness to the Pharisees--He preached the holiness that has its beginning and end in LOVE. Jesus scandalized them all by saying that all the law and the prophets could be summed up not only by the Shemah, which they knew--that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, but also with its corollary: love your brother as yourself, which they did not get. They understood the vertical. They did not understand the horizontal. They thought they could love God without loving man, and they were dead wrong. Thus He had occasion to say, Let the dead bury the dead. You follow Me.

Does not the true child of the Light take that golden robe and make of it a rope. . . and then, while keeping one foot in the Light, anchored to the Rock of Ages, dare to step down into the darkness with the other, trusting the Light not to let her be swallowed up too, to be dragged into the pit of sin and despair? Does not a child of the Light take the risk of throwing out that brilliant robe so that someone in the darkness might be called out of it, awakened, as it were, by the Light falling across their faces as that child reflects Him onto their light-starved faces, awakened from the coma of the heart and soul into which they have fallen, awakened as ee cummings exclaims, "to life and love and wings and the great gay happening illimitably earth."

Does not the child of light reach into the fire and filth and grab the hands reaching for help and pull with all her strength--knowing that to be insufficient, but also knowing that where her strength runs out, His begins!!?? Knowing that our weaknesses are the platforms for His most amazing performances?

What are the children of the Light really drenched in? Contempt or compassion???? How many of those who call themselves children of the Light actually do live in the Light and dance in His courts before the throne? And how many are really just shadow puppets living between the lost and the darkness, in a perpetual state of denial? Too selfish to let the Light thoroughly subdue them, too selfish to take the step of faith towards the darkness where they can be His love poured out in golden light, trusting that nothing can separate them from the love of Christ, choosing the terrifying path of faith in Him, choosing to sacrifice that false sense of security that comes from self-righteousness and to love others as Christ has loved them--because the beauty and love that sacrifice will yield, like the birth of a child, will fill the air with laughter, drowning out the memory of the cries of anguish that preceded it.

WWJD? He'd do a lot more than wear bracelets with provocative religious initialisms on them-- He'd put Himself in harm's way for the 1 in 99 who had wandered away and fallen into dire straits. He'd open His eyes and attune His ears to the voices of the spirits of the people passing Him on the sidewalk, sitting next to Him in class, hanging back from participation in His study group. He'd be far more consumed with identifying the broken hearts around Him than counting lexical items on somebody's 'do not say' list. When you focus on forms, you focus on whitewash. when you focus on forms, you have become a Pharisee. When you focus on the function that is the injunction to LOVE all at all cost, you are not afraid to use whatever forms you need to to get the job done.

Focusing on a list of forms someone designates as sanctioned or not allows you to go on automatic pilot. It allows one to proceed without caution, without concern, without compassion--if somebody just gives you a formula then it makes faith unnecessary. (It actually makes faith impossible). Living by faith means you have to actually be alive and conscious and leaning in to listen to the Holy Spirit and find out what He wants from you right now with this person in this moment. And nobody can write you a formula for that. What He wants is for you to listen to Him all the time and let Him tell you where the relevant line is right now.

You can map the oceans but you can't map the waves. The waves move. The map could never represent each second of billions of shapes of billions of waves. If someone wrote you a formula about walking on the waves, tried to give you some detailed map to use and tell you what muscles to do what with each step of the way, it would never match the actual set of waves you would have to confront at any given point in time. But if you fix your eyes on Jesus and let Him tell you each second of the way what you need to do, what He will do through you if you are listening, you will walk with Him on the water and you will make His joy complete walking there by faith. Without faith it is impossible to please God.

That is why, Virginia, you cannot walk by a list of rules generated by man. You don't have a hard drive big enough to cover all the possibilities you will encounter. It's arrogant beyond description to think that you do. What you have to do is plug in to the Original Hard Drive, the one Who wrote the rules and can predict every eventuality. Then He will walk you through, moment by moment, telling you exactly what LOVE requires of you with this person in this moment. Think about how differently Jesus loved Mary at Lazarus' death from the way he loved Martha. He knew what each woman was struggling with at the moment and what she needed to hear--Jesus is not a cookie-cutter God--one size does not fit all--if He wouldn't deign to make two snowflakes alike, do you really think He'd treat human beings with any less particularity?

Yes, indeed. On that day many will come to Me saying, Lord, Lord, -did we not dance and pray and preach and tithe in Your Name? Did we not let everyone know, enthusiastically, about Your laws? And I will say to them--How many people did you tell about my love? Did you tell them with your lips or did you tell them with your life? I was the death row inmate whose execution you cheered, I was the single black mother on food stamps working at McDonald's and trying to feed and house four children, I was the mentally ill man living under bridges and pushing around a shopping cart of garbage all over town during the day. I was the gay man struggling to find . . a place where I would be loved just as I am. I was the bully who was beaten at home and acted out on other children. I was the weak child who was terrorized by the bully until one day I pulled a Columbine because no one cared enough to reach into my pain and love me. All the contempt you poured on them when they were Me, all the things you did NOT do for them, you did NOT do for Me.

You called yourselves by My Name, but you did so in vain, leaving a filthy stain on My reputation before the world! You may have bandied about my Name claiming association with Me, but in deed you denied Me. And on that day I will separate the sheep from the goats. To the goats, on My left, who used my Name without My permission, to those who used My Name in vain, I will shout, Away from Me!!! You who have despised and neglected love, the heart of Holiness-- I never knew you!!!

Now, will the children of the Light please stand up! ?? You done yo Daddy proud! I am taking you and those you have labored with Me to pull out of darkness into My glorious Light, I am taking you all to your eternal reward. And there will be dancing!!!!!!!!!!! And there will be feasting!!!!!!!!!!!! And we will live in joy forevermore.