meditatio at the water's edge

In a culture that denies the possibility of an overarching explanation of life, the people of God cannot afford to forget the story that is to shape them. The alternative is to be shaped by the fragmented ‘un-stories’ of our culture. Regrettably, this is already under way.

What I am suggesting is that many (most?) Christians—okay, let’s say white middle class (because that’s where I happen to live) evangelical Christians—have become de-storied. Our lives are as fragmented as the 30-second-hyperactive-advertisement culture around us. It is prying us (has pried us?) out of thinking about life as disciples of Jesus—and thereby it is prying us out of living as disciples of Jesus.

We have a different agenda than Jesus. Think about this carefully. Weigh your ambitions in life and evaluate what you see us setting out there as goals. Do Jesus’ words and teaching shape our ambitions and attitudes? I’m afraid that if we were honest we might find that our ambitions and attitudes are more a reflection of the culture around us than those of the one we claim as Master.

Mostly I think we’ve gotten ourselves here because we’ve gone adrift from being a storied people—at least from being a God-storied people. The way we story our lives today makes us the central character—it’s all about me, or at best, it’s all about us (our localized group). Beyond myself as an individual (or my immediate social group), I am not concerned with seeing life as more than what I can do today or tomorrow. It is as if the story by which we are choosing to live began at our birth and is being written with each breath. Sure, it is important to see some significance in our lives (we all want to “make a difference”). But in these kinds of stories, I’m still the main character—it’s still all about me, or us.

The Story we are supposed to be living by, however, places God firmly at the center. You and I have our parts to play, but they are bit parts—it’s not about me. That is not to say you and I are unimportant in God’s story. It is only to say that we don’t have the lead role—so let’s get over it.

Okay, now the story idea is getting in the way. What am I suggesting? I am suggesting that you and I, as disciples of Jesus, must re-attach ourselves to the overarching explanation of life that is laid out in the complex, multi-faceted, diversely integrated, beautiful story of God and his people. If we may appropriate an ancient text to our situation today, would it not be appropriate to apply ourselves to the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the letter to the Hebrews?

There the author goes back through the whole story of Israel and shows how it was all pointing forward to what God was going to do through the Messiah. The people, therefore, were to respond by ordering their lives by the reality that the Messiah had come and he was Jesus of Nazareth. All around them, the author argues, are the storied lives of their ancestors pointing to Jesus—and they risk destruction if they attach themselves to some other story. Shake of those other stories, he says, and attach yourself to God’s story told in the person of Jesus.

You and I place ourselves in the gravest of dangers when we attach ourselves to some other story and forget the story that is supposed to shape us. The call for us is to go back and re-attach ourselves to God’s story—not a contemporary and partial version of it, not choice selected fragments of it, not slick and palatable but truncated portrayals of it, not even systematized, boxed-up, ready-to-ship explanations of it. We need the whole, life-consuming, life-demanding, life-giving story of God and his kingdom come to creation.

We’ve lost our sense of story. We have tried to write our own. We’ve allowed our consumerist, individualist culture’s stories to shape us. We are lost, confused, adrift. How do we reattach ourselves to God’s story? We remember by re-telling and re-hearing the story, and ordering our lives by the central figure in that story. We rethink our pursuits of the ‘un-stories’ of today, and go back to place our lives beneath the story that starts with, “In the beginning…”