August 1, 2024

Last Saturday my partner Don and I had a wonderful visit with a college friend of mine.  The visit introduced me to a song I had never heard of from a group I had never heard of. The song is “Dance with a Stranger”. The artist is Lake Street Dive (nicknamed online “LSD” for real!), a band described on their website as musicians who “have pushed the possibilities of pop music as a unifying force, not only through their eclectic sound – a boldly original cross-pollination of soul, folk, jazz, classic pop, and more.”1 Without hearing the song, its’ name brought to mind a party with my schoolmates in eighth grade. When we determined by consensus that we wanted to dance to a song (I remember one being Kool and the Gang’s funk classic Whose Gonna Take the Weight), all the boys in the room would walk en masse to ask the girls for a dance across the room. The walk across the room felt like a showdown from a western movie, with my classmates and I summoning up our fears for a dance, oddly enough with people we knew. 

I determined from our visit and conversation that I would listen to “Dance with a Stranger.” When I did, the song both inspired and challenged me to extend far beyond the fears from that eighth-grade dance floor in a very good way.  Like a good summer tune (released in June), it has a catchy rhythm and is danceable. However, our friend recommended the song to us because it contains an important spiritual message in its lyrics which say in part :

Look around the room

Find somebody you’ve never seen before

And lead them out to the dance floor

And dance, dance with a stranger

‘Till they’re not a stranger anymore

You just dance, dance with a stranger

‘Til they’re not a stranger, not a stranger anymore

Left, right, front, side, find somebody new

And then take them by the hand 

And say you understand…

The message in the above lyrics were brought to life in the Official Music Video for “Dance With a Stranger.” The video is a party, not surprisingly on a dance floor, with an array of unlikely partners.  An African American drag queen sashays with a young white woman wearing a bonnet full of flowers. A cleric parties with a middle-aged man who may be a person of another faith or one of no faith. Even the initially stone-faced security guard/bouncer gets in the groove, finding himself in the center of the dance floor.  A viewer commenting on the video confessed to being brought being teary, saying “if all the strangers in the world could dance with each other, imagine the possibilities.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_h4E0AsaJw

Imagine the possibilities indeed in today’s world, where wars rage on places like Ukraine and the Gaza Peninsula, and in our country, where political, social, cultural and religious divides run ever deeper. Imagine the possibilities not only in the United States, but in countries such as Yemen, Uganda, and North Korea, where basic human rights are oppressed and denied.  Perhaps there are many root causes for the reality in which we live. Yet I believe many of our problems stem from the fear of one taking another person by the hand who look, act, speak, love, and live in any way that is different from them, and recognizing that they too, desire to have a good time on the dance floor of life.  The possibilities, in a positive way, are endless, if all of us, without exception, took the time to ‘look around the room’ for someone we don’t know, or judge, or attach labels to, take them by the hand, and dance with that stranger ‘til they are not a stranger anymore.’

Based on the message in this song, I’d like to imagine the reign of God as one big dance floor.  And in on that floor there are no wallflowers. Everyone is dancing. Everyone is partying. Everyone is having a good time. I’d like to imagine the dance floor with political commentators from Fox News dancing with their counterparts from MSNBC, a Russian solider dancing with a Ukrainian teen, a refugee fleeing the violence from El Salvador dancing with an anti-immigration activist, an Olympic athlete dancing with a Special Olympics athlete in their wheelchair. It would be precisely the party Jesus would love. In fact, I think He would be the First on the dance floor. Based on the miracle at Cana, the parable of the Prodigal son, and the feeding of the five thousand perhaps many of you heard preached last week, I believe strongly that Jesus loved to have a good time. Moreover, if we are Jesus’ followers, then it is our call to keep the party Jesus started going on, and if the parable of the wedding banquet is any indication, the guest list is never-ending and continual. May we do so, and dance, in our own way, with a stranger, until we realize a world where there “are no longer strangers and aliens”, but “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (Eph 2:19 ESV).”

Let the dance continue,