The first movement in the dance with God is the experience of grace. Jonah knew that, and that is why he tried so hard to avoid going to Ninevah to preach. He knew God would offer grace to Ninevites willing to enter into the dance with God, and he couldn’t stand the thought of the dance floor crowded with forgiven Ninevites. The woman sitting on the floor at Simon the Pharisee’s house knew it, and was glad to hear Jesus say to Simon, "to be forgiven much is to love much." And then there is Zacchaeus the tax collaborator. The experience of grace spins him in a beautiful, immediate, well executed turn-around as he promises to restore more than he may have wrongly taken from others.

In scripture, we see repeatedly that it is in the proclamation and experience of God’s grace that lives start to spin in a new direction, the direction of love, the direction of empathy, the direction of justice. We can be bold to say that it is in the effective introduction of human lives to the gracious love of God in Jesus Christ that the plant of justice can grow truest, highest and best, precisely because justice that is not nourished by grace is not the justice God calls us to bring about.

Let me illustrate with a story about someone whose life I once knew. In 1980 I went to Haiti, funded by a Fulbright grant, to study the role of the Catholic Church during the Duvalier dictatorship. This was for my Ph.D dissertation in political science and years before I responded to God’s call to attend seminary. My focus was a movement in many coffee-producing parishes, a movement in which parish catechists were re-conceived as community organizers or "animateurs". I spent six months in a remote village I’ll call Ganise where a parish-sponsored coffee cooperative had delivered a serious challenge to the brutal and kleptocratic power structure. The duties of the nine catechists in Ganise included convening small neighborhood-based groups for Bible study and mutual support. This activity was considered subversive by the Duvalier regime and was monitored constantly by the paramilitary group nicknamed the Tonton Macoutes. All the catechists were young adults, male and female, who had attained a fifth grade level of education and so were considered the cream of this extremely poor peasant community.

But they were not all equal in courage and leadership ability. One of them stood out. Jacques. In a confrontation with authorities, Jacques was the one who would step forward even if it was dangerous. He would do it in a way that calmed people, while also making choices and stands clear and firm and fair. Even though he was the shortest and least physically attractive of the group, when he spoke the others heard the direction they should take. Toward the end of my stay I asked, "Jacques, you have taken a stand for the people of this region and dedicated your life to it more firmly than the others. What makes you different?"

He told me this story. He said that when he was a child he fell off of a mule and seriously injured his back. The hope of saving him and keeping him from being even more stunted and twisted physically was to put him in a mission hospital many miles away. Like most hospitals in poor countries, the family would have to provide him daily food, and yet they had no relatives in that place. So Jacques’ peasant father, who had seven other children to support, gradually sold off every single animal they owned to keep the flow of food coming to this one son in the distant hospital.

There was a pause during which it hit me with full force, what Jacques was trying to tell me about. Grace. Extravagant, generous grace. He had known that kind of love, had known its true cost, and had known he didn’t deserve it any more than his other siblings or friends or neighbors. He couldn’t withhold it from his community. He couldn’t stand by while others were treated in the opposite fashion. Like Zacchaeus, he had to make his life different. He lived the Good News because he had come to know the Good News personally.

For too long, many in the church who care passionately about justice did not claim this ground, and failed to form bridges between the personal and collective experience of God’s grace in Jesus Christ and the holy life of shalom that this experience is meant to call forth. I’m talking about the false dichotomy of evangelism and social justice that corrupts our American portrayal of the gospel. Many leaders of evangelicals have repented of that false dichotomy. John Stott for instance said he came to realize that when Jesus said in the Great Commission to go and baptize and teach all that he had commanded, Jesus meant for the word "all" to really mean "all." "All" includes teaching Jesus’ commands that we live lives of justice and mutual care. Socially committed evangelicals offer our country hope for restoring the wholeness of the gospel in the way it is proclaimed and the way it is lived. They have not stopped with the dance’s first step but have courageously moved on to the advanced classes! And at the same time some in the church who bought into the false dichotomy by taking sides with social justice have also repented and embraced the whole gospel. It was wrong to over-react by downplaying the role of evangelism as proclamation and personal experience. Our denomination has many effective preachers who both proclaim and live the whole gospel. We can really celebrate that fact and thank God for it.

The interest across the spectrum in moving beyond this false dichotomy corresponds with an increased interest in God’s mission and the church’s special role in it. It is often said that mission unites us across the theological spectrum. It’s more complicated than that, of course. But it has some truth, and there are several reasons for that. One is that most of our mission partner churches around the world do not share with us a history of splitting the gospel into evangelism versus social justice. To work with such partners is to be healed of our self-inflicted wounds. A second reason mission unites us is that the urgency of some of the world’s problems simply makes our churchy arguments with each other seem like trivial luxuries. And a third is that when we immerse ourselves in the complexity of other people’s situations and love and accompany them well, we rediscover the wholeness of the person and the wholeness of the gospel and find our false dichotomies imploding all around us.

There are many examples of false dichotomies imploding with a sound that surely pleases God and may even be the dance music at times. Take for instance the concern for justice that is found among people called to frontier mission work. This summer I hosted two leaders of the Presbyterian Church of Pakistan for dinner on my deck at home. I asked them to tell about the origins of the Presbyterian Church in Pakistan. Their unhesitating and forceful response was "You made us people. Our people were outside even the caste system, and so not even considered relevant to the story of what makes a human being a human being. We were worse than nothing, we were irrelevant. With the Christian Gospel came the first knowledge that we were created and loved by God." Today the denomination formed by these social outcasts offers education, literacy, hospitals and vocational training to the majority community today, with a courage rooted in the deep affirmation they receive from the Gospel.

I know for a fact that many PCUSA members who feel called to frontier mission evangelism become inspired by precisely this kind of reality. They see people who are marginalized and oppressed and want them to know they are people and worthwhile in God’s eyes. Thanks to Presbyterian mission, today in Siberia, the mountains of Ethiopia and Sudan, the Roma people of Europe, and in many other places including the US, people are finding out that they are human beings just as the Pakistani Presbyterians did. The people we send with this message are assigned to also fight poverty, illness and lack of education. Some of them go into mission service resistant to denominational declarations on social issues and by living with an oppressed people group become much more interested in advocacy for them. Do you hear a false dichotomy imploding? Then join the dance!

I doubt there is any region that implodes the false dichotomies of US Presbyterians more often and more effectively than Latin America. Many of our members have been attracted there over the years primarily by the social justice work of Latin American churches and concerns about US domination in the region. While accompanying Latin American Christians in a pursuit of justice, they find themselves deeply re-evangelized, re-centered in their personal faith in God in Jesus Christ, and greatly improved in their ability to "provide an account of the hope that is within them" as the book of Peter says we must be able to do in proclaiming our faith. Speaking of Peter, I love the incident in which a different Peter, former Worldwide Ministries chair, and elder named Peter Pizor, was hosted by the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil. Peter is a bow-tie wearing professor and consultant. He and his Brazilian hosts chanced to come across a street preacher who was using a portable sound system. When the preacher realized Peter was a fellow Christian, he handed over the sound system and insisted that Peter preach on the spot. He found that he could do it! He now loves to tell how he became a street preacher!

By the same token, people who go to Latin America find their understanding of the gospel broadened hugely, and are even radicalized about how to live out the faith in society. Dennis Smith serves in Guatemala and his personal story of this broadening is beautifully written and available on the Mission Connections web site. Another implosion. More dancing. More glory to God.

And more reason to be involved in Presbyterian mission. Our denomination is a-swirl with opportunities to make this dance glorious, to crowd the dance floor, to show Christian unity and joy in the way we partner with each other. Worldwide Ministries Division is one of the many parts of our church enthusiastically devoted to bringing everyone into the dance with God. God’s grace is sufficient! It can turn us all out onto the dance floor in joyous movement for the sake of God’s desires for the world. Let’s dance!

And let’s pray:

God of grace, Lord of the dance, we gratefully accept your invitation and your lead. Fill us anew with the joy of your salvation so that in the words of the Shaker song, by "turning, turning we’ll come ’round right." In Jesus’ Name, Amen.