In USAmerica, today is voting day. Regardless of who wins, we are again presented with living in an USAmerican cultural story that will either be led one way or another by the upcoming government. Many USAmerican followers of Jesus simply follow and live in that story without asking if there is another story that they should be living into. Many simply believe that the USAmerican story is the Christian story. The hybrid story is so well mixed one can’t tell where the Christian story is and where the USAmerican story is.
It seems to me a good time to review what story we are choosing to live into. So in the few words below, in the tradition of Reader’s Digest and the art of Modernity’s reductionism, here is a synopsis from my book God’s EPIC Adventure (318-319) of the proposed story of God from Scripture.
The drama begins in Act 1 of his play in the Genesis account of creation, “there was a time when God spoke all things into existence.” He created humankind and gave them free run of the most beautiful garden, which was his created world. But, in Act 2, as the crown of the Creator’s creation, humankind made a decision to worship what God had created rather than worshiping the Creator. What God had created perfect, humankind had flawed and the true humanity of the Garden became distorted and their view of God became dimly lit. The missionary God sought his created beings out and banned them from his Garden.
Act 3 continues the story, which is the content of the rest of the Old Testament, by God’s creation of a people whose vocation would be to become the “light of the world” so the pagan societies in which she lived could see what God was really like. Israel’s creation came with four great acts of God. He first delivered/redeemed them from their bondage in Egypt in the great act of the Exodus. He took a group of slaves from the slave market of the day and freed them. The next great act of God for his people was the giving of a national charter, a Covenant, so that they would know what it was like to live out their vocation as the people of God. Next, he made them into a kingdom where there vocation moved from nation to individual, which looked forward to a day in which a new kingdom with a truly human being would inaugurate God’s Kingdom here on earth. In the last scenes of Act 3, we find Israel in Exile and a short return from Exile. She had all but lost her vocation of being God’s “light to the world.” In the physical return from Exile, spiritual return did not occur. The Temple rebuilt did not return to its former glory which produced a conception of life that they were continually living in exile waiting for the one promised by the prophets who would bring them their freedom.
Act 4 tells the story of Jesus who stepped into human history, in the fullness of time. In his ministry, he came proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was present in this Present Evil Age. A truly human being, as humans were intended to be, had arrived as God honored his promises to this people. Four different writers tell us four different stories about the events of the life of Jesus. His message: “Repent and Believe!” The first hearers heard him say in this message that they should stop living in their present stories of military means, quietism, or their compromising ways with the present powers and begin living in a different story. He demonstrated for his followers, then and now, in his words what an authentic disciple should be like and demonstrated in his works of healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead what actions his authentic disciples should follow.
Moving into the final act of God’s EPIC Adventure (Act 5, Scene 1-6), we find the creation of the church by the Spirit as God’s new humanity. Like Israel before her, this new community of the Spirit was and is to be the light to the world by the releasing of gracelets given by the Spirit to help followers of Christ accomplish his mission.
We, as Christ-followers, now live in the scene between the sixth scene of the early church and the final scene yet to be written. Out mission is to discover our part in God’s EPIC Adventure and imagine and improvise how we live our part out for his sake, our sake, and the sake of the world. There are some clues about how this grand narrative is going to end, but they are only clues. We are truly God’s new humanity, living as followers of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit to be effective agents of the Kingdom in this Present Evil Age.
