Shirley Maclaine Was Wrong; How To Really Dance In The Light

Some of you may remember Shirley MacLaine’s book from

the mid 1980’s. “Dancing in the Light”. Shirley MacLaine was wrong in her premise at least when viewed through the lens of scripture. Shirley believed that Light could be defined by the collective knowledge of all of our various personalities as she believed that all of us have been re-incarnated many times and the process of education or learning is merely releasing that information that we already have within us.

So, if we are to “Dance in the Light” according to Shirley MacLaine, we are to see the light as coming from within ourselves. Singing our own tune to dance to. While this is a very brief description of what MacLaine claims in her book, it pretty well summarizes her stance and that of many teachers of the New Age religions in our world. That we are ouselves are god and as such are accountable only to ourselves to discover the light within ourselves and learn the dance.

Our scripture for today teaches us a very different thing indeed. We are NOT the creators of light... Only God can lay claim to being the source of Light and if we are to “dance in the light” we need to hear God’s tune and learn that dance instead of writing our own tune.

There is a strong distinction between darkness and light in the whole of scripture, this passage is no different. We are able to be in the light because God has called us to it. The light has dawned in our lives becasue Christ has been made available to us.

Today is “Christ the King” Sunday in the life of the church. This is the last sunday of the Christian year and on this day we celebrate Christ as being the center of our universe. Not ourselves as Shirley and most of the new-agers would have us believe.

How is it then, that we can understand Christ as the center of our universe from our text for today?

First of all, as verse 13 points out, he has rescued us from the power of darkness and called us into his kingdom. A kingdom where we can know true redemption and forgiveness of our sins. Talk about a bright light of a new day!

Secondly, Christ is the firstborn of all creation. Meaning all things that were created were created by him. What was the first act of Creation? “Let there be light...” Because light has come into the world, the darkness was eliminated. Because the light of Christ has come into our lives, the power of darkness cannot prevail in our lives. Praise God, we don’t have to cave in to the power of darkness in our lives.

Because of the sacrifice of Christ and because of the light of an Easter dawn nearly two thousand years ago we have victory over all of the darkness of our world.

It’s sort of like this:

I was beginning to get really concerned about the engine in my Blazer a couple of moths ago. It was beginning to run pretty rough and I was remembering what it was running like a couple of years ago when I ended up having to have a new engine put in it. I looked at my checking account balance and began to worry about how I could afford a major repair bill or the cost of a new vehicle. It was about 10:00 one

evening when I decided to look under the hood and I couldn’t see anything wrong even with a flashlight. So, I went on to bed thinking the worst and had a pretty fitful night of sleep while I worried.

First thing the next morning I went out to the garage and looked under the hood again and saw the spark plug wire on the front right cylinder was laying along a piece of metal and had a huge burned place on it from shorting out against the engine block. I put a new plug wire on that cylinder and it began to run like it did the day I bought it. It was all a matter of light. Once the day had dawned, I could see the problem in a matter of minutes and as a result was able to fix the problem with a $2 plug wire rather than a $2500 repair bill at the Chevy garage.

Light has a way of helping us in that way. Light will allow us to see problems, diagnose them and then come up with solutions to the problem. When we are in the light of Christ, we can see the things in our lives that aren’t in line with his will for us and are able to fix them.

Light not only helps us to see the things that are wrong, it can also help us to see some very good things as well.