The Story… We Find Ourselves In

Scott Pederson, who is pastor of the Greenwich Vineyard in London, put together this retelling of the biblical story for the emerging church. It’s based on Brian McLaren’s book The Story We Find Ourselves In and provides a good introduction to Brian’s argument.
 Creation

We are all connected to the Creator by a story. God created order and life out of nothingness. God is not enough in this story. God does not want to be the only reality in our lives, the only relationship in our network. The Creator wants man and woman to find each other, as a lost part of themselves. The rib is taken out of Adam by God. God seems to want Adam to feel incomplete. God nicks a part of him on purpose. That means that Adam is, meaning we are too, incomplete by God’s design. The only viable option is for us human beings to enjoy the company of our (1) Creator and (2) creation, animals, and especially our mates, both our sexual mates and our friendship mates, in whom we find a lost part of ourselves restored to us again. It is not good for a person to be alone, not in God’s story anyway. We humans bear the Creator’s image and are given the most amazing gift of creating. We are growing, changing, becoming, as we are masterpieces in progress, so creation is continuing in us. We are created by God to join Him in creating, as creation reflects His beauty.

Crisis/Chaos

The Creator did not create humans as robots or machines, but as humans with the freedom of choice. We are free to respond to God’s invitation to be in relationship with Him, to be in His story, or to go our own way, and then create our own story. This is the beauty and the curse of free will. We have a tendency to lean toward isolation, independence, and aloneness. We fight for control and accumulate stuff, losing connection to God. We feel internal shame and this alienation disrupts our relationships. Our selfish behaviour becomes number one priority, the independent spirit, and this is the primary characteristic that destroys connection, relationship, community, and that is what eating the fruit is all about. Human achievements are impressive, like the Tower of Babel, but tragic too, because we keep fouling things up and we can not get along. Our evil has the capacity to unleash a flood of complete chaos and destruction. There used to be one world, one story. But now, we have separated ourselves. We have moved out of that world and that story and went out to form our own. We have broken the dynamic harmony of goodness, so humans struggle in conflicted relationships, like Adam and Eve. New economies arise and compete, often with lethal results, like Cain and Abel. Languages and cultures strive for dominance, as at the Tower of Babel, and civilizations develop in the flood plain of complete chaos and selfish destruction. We have messed up the story. That is the crisis and chaos, the story we find ourselves.

Calling

God entered into a special relationship with a man named Abraham, who lived in a land that is now called Iraq. The Lord said to Abraham, “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” Throughout the last four thousand years, because of our tendency toward crisis and chaos, we have misunderstood those words. When we think we are chosen only to be blessed, and forget that we are blessed to be a blessing, we distort our identity and drift from God’s calling for us. When we assume that we are blessed exclusively rather than instrumentally, when we see ourselves as blessed to the exclusion of others rather than for the benefit of others, we become part of the problem instead of part of the solution. If more people understood what it meant to be religious in this way ­ being blessed to be a blessing to others, not just to be some spiritual elite ­ then religion would have a better name in the world. Abraham’s family is being enrolled as God’s helpers, co-workers, partners, team-mates in cooperating with God in the ongoing creation of good in the world. So calling means God recruiting us to be part of this movement of people who want to bring God’s blessing back to the world. To be called, to hear our calling, or to find our vocation are all ways of saying that we have signed up with this higher purpose or mission in life, to be blessed and to be a blessing. However, our human tendency is to miss the point and wander from the path, but God’s constant faithfulness and patience through the deepening conversations and relationships with His people is inspiring.

Conversations/Cycles

God continued in relationship with his people through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses. Over a period of time God raised up Judges and then Kings. God continued to be faithful to His people, this special formed community, even though they disobeyed Him by walking out of relationship and thus writing their own story. God inspires people among them who fulfilled several important roles to keep the communication flowing between God and God’s people. God continuously called His people back to join His story. He sent priests who were the spiritual educators and guardians of the people. They helped the people sustain and strengthen their faith through the regular rituals of worship, through weekly Sabbaths, and annual holy days. He sent prophets who were seized with a passion to convey a message from God. Often they confronted the people about their moral and ethical failures. The prophets cried for justice and genuineness. He sent poets who tried to capture the experience and emotion of the people, their laments, hopes, joys, praises, fears, piety, furies, doubts, faith, affections ­ the whole range of human emotions and experiences. They articulated the hearts of the people toward God, and they tried to capture the heart of God for the people too. David is the most famous of the poets, but there were others, like the songs of Asaph. He also sent philosophers. Philosophy for the ancient Jews simply meant a way of life characterized by a passionate pursuit of wisdom. So there’s the book of Ecclesiastes. And there is the philosopher who wrote the book of Job. Proverbs is a kind of practical philosophy. So God through conversations, the title we labelled for this part of the story, partners with the people, guiding them, but not manipulating them, not robbing them of that special gift of freedom.

Christ

If God creates a real universe and if people of this universe really do have the freedom to make choices, and if they make some bad choices, then we have a real problem. God sent Jesus into the world to absorb all the punishment for our sins. That is what the cross was all about. It was Jesus absorbing the punishment that all of us deserve. He became the substitute for all of us. As He suffered and died, all our wrongs were paid for, so all of us can be forgiven. God’s merciful acts of absolute goodness and selflessness in giving Himself through Jesus on the cross satisfied or cancels out or absorbs God’s just anger about human evil and selfishness. By entering into and overcoming death, Jesus opens the door for us to enter into an eternal relationship with Him. Jesus becomes a representative of all humanity, and willingly submits Himself to being condemned and punished on our account, in spite of His true innocence, as a way of acting out real repentance for the human race. The cross demonstrates Jesus’ self-giving, His complete abandonment to God’s will, His complete self-devotion for the sake of the world. He makes visible the self-giving love of God. When that sacrificial love touches us, we are changed internally ­ “constrained” is the word Paul uses for it ­ so that we want to stop being selfish, and we want to join God in self-giving, beginning by giving ourselves back to God, and leading us to give ourselves to our neighbours and the world too. He gives Himself to God, for the sake of the whole world, and He invites us to do that same. Jesus is showing God’s loving heart, which wants forgiveness, not revenge, for everyone. Jesus shows us that the wisdom of God’s Kingdom is sacrifice, not violence. It is about accepting suffering and transforming it into reconciliation, not avenging suffering through retaliation. The cross shows God’s rejection of the human violence and dominance and oppression that have spun the world in a cycle of crisis from the story of Cain and Abel through the headlines in this morning’s newspapers. The cross calls humanity to stop trying to make God’s Kingdom happen through coercion and force, which are always self-defeating in the end, and instead, to welcome it through self-sacrifice and vulnerability.

Community

Jesus called people to follow Him…to be His disciple. The word “disciple” means “learner.” A disciple wants to know and do what the teacher knows and does, so we apprentice ourselves to the teacher. Jesus was creating a community of followers. A disciple is a follower of Jesus ­ and there was a way of living as a disciple. Later, they got the nickname “Christian,” which means “little Christ” or “mini-messiah,” and their way of living became known as “Christianity,” which might better be called a messianic way of living. They were disciples, which speaks of their being called together to learn and follow Jesus. They were also apostles, who would be sent out to practice and teach what they had learned. That is what apostle means, a person who is sent on a mission. So Jesus brings together this community of men and women who are called out from the crowds to be disciples, and then these disciples will be sent back into the world on a mission of expressing Jesus’ message of God’s Kingdom, and helping others become disciples who will in turn help others, and so on. This revolution spreads from country to country and from generation to generation. It often feels less like we have the mission, and more like the mission has us. Jesus was sent into the world to express, in word and deed, the saving love of God. We, as a community of faith, are similarly sent into the world to express, in word and deed, the saving love of God. Jesus was sent here on a mission, and He said, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” This mission has us! The Holy Spirit is changing us to be Christ-like people - transforming our lives from the inside out. The Holy Spirit tries to do something in us ­ makes us more like Jesus ­ and then tries to do something through us by involving us in God’s mission and giving us some special part of the mission to do. The Holy Spirit connects us with other people, so that what He does in and through one person is coordinated with what He does in and through another person, and so on. That way it is not just a bunch of individuals working on the same cause, but it’s people really united in one Spirit. And that is what the community of faith is supposed to be.

Consummation

Instead of history being driven by the past, what if history is constantly being invited to receive the future? God unleashes history in the beginning. God helps the baby to stand in the beginning. But God is also out ahead, calling history homeward across the field or across the room. God doesn’t force it. Sometimes history responds, or some parts of history respond, but others resist or rebel. But God keeps calling. Not just being pushed from the past, or even engineered in the present, but being pulled, invited, called, into the future, which keeps coming to us as a gift. God is waiting to give Himself to us across the field, across the room, and so we are pulled toward Him by hope and desire. God lets the dog off the leash and God calls the dog from across the field and God runs next to the dog wherever it roams in the field until it makes it across to the voice that’s calling its name. You know, it is one God, but in three ways! What are we called to do? To enter the Kingdom of God…to come into the future of the Kingdom of God. And that is a great way to understand the church. The church is a community of people who are learning to live the way everyone will live in the future. We can think of it like a love story, a romance. God creates the universe, and loves her. God calls her to Him in the future, and at first, she refuses to come. But God beckons her ­ and this is a great way to understand Jesus ­ by entering time and space and by coming to her to declare His love. God comes to walk beside her wherever she roams. She rejects God. But God’s love can’t be defeated, and eventually, by patiently walking beside her, God wins her heart. And God continues to call her into the future, and she finally comes to God, and God comes to her. And when they meet, because all the wrong, all the evil, all the dishonesty and ugliness and distrust are judged and gone and forgotten forever, God can take everything to Himself in an embrace of boundless, uninhibited, limitless love. And that is the new beginning. That is the consummation: that embrace. God allows us to be characters in the story of creation, and every day we are writing more and more of our story within God’s story. We are developing our character by the choices we make, the words we say, the things we think, the attitudes and habits we prefer. And in the end, when our story has been gathered by God into the bigger story, who we have become and what we have done will be clear ­ clear in God’s eyes, which are perfectly gracious and just, perfectly merciful and holy. So judgment is inescapable.

God can say, “Well done! You have lived well! You helped the story advance toward my creative dreams. You fed the hungry, clothed the naked, welcomed in the lonely, visited the prisoners, shared your bread with the poor. Wherever you went, you contributed love and peace, generosity and truth, courage and sacrifice, self-control and justice, faithfulness and kindness. You enriched the story, enhanced its beauty and drama and nobility. You have become someone good and beautiful and true. Your unique, creative contributions will never be forgotten, and even the smallest act of kindness will be eternally celebrated, rewarded. After naming and forgiving and forgetting your many faults and failures, I see so much substance to your character, so much to cherish, so much of value, and it will now be set free, given a new beginning in my new creation. You have an eternal place in my story! You have been harvested from this creation, and now you will enter into the joy of the new creation!”

Or God can say, “Sadly, your contributions have been neutral or negative. You have added more pain and selfishness, more dishonesty and coldness, more greed and disharmony and clutter into the story. I tried in every way possible to get through to you, but you wouldn’t respond to my grace. Even if I forgive and forget all the bad things you have done, is there enough of your character left for you to continue existing in my new creation? And would you even like living with me in a story you have avoided, minimized, resisted, or subverted all your life? What have you become? You’ve made money and enjoyed luxuries and seemed like a great success to some of your fellow characters as you pursued your own dreams and desires, but in terms of my dreams and desires, you had your chance to become a good and unforgettable character in my story, and you wasted it. You’ve squandered the time and space you were given. I feel regret about what you could have been, what you could have done, what you could have become, but didn’t. I wish you had given me more to work with, but you haven’t. Your story has been a tragedy of waste and missed opportunities. My heart is sad because I love you so very much. But because you have rejected me all your life, you have chosen to live according to your story, and will have to continue to live for all eternity apart from me.”

What story are we living ­ Gods or our own? “For what does it profit a person if he pursues a story of personal gain that makes his soul languish and his character miss its chance to really come to life? It would be better to lose that selfish story, to abandon that plot line, and to enter God’s better story…”

We need to acknowledge that our story has been hijacked; and that all of us are, to some degree, passive participants or even co-conspirators in the hijacking; and that our misdirected story needs to be reclaimed, saved, redeemed, and set right; and that, for this to happen, God has to step into our story and absorb an unfathomable infliction of pain, so we won’t suffer it ourselves, so our story won’t have a tragic end.

We can come to repentance and put our faith and trust in God through Jesus, realign our lives with God’s hopes and dreams and purposes.

I am indebted to Brian McLaren, as much of this story is taken from The Story We Find Ourselves In.

J. Scott Pedersen

Greenwich Vineyard Church