The Story
When I was in seminary I was introduced to the
idea of the story of God. Now this
wasn’t a totally new concept, people have understood the Bible to contain
stories ever since they were first written down, and the Bible is often touted
as The Story. What was new for me was
the idea of THE story. The story as I
refer to it is found in the Bible yes, but it is more than that, it also
encompasses our individual and corporate engagement with it, past, present, and
future.
Engaging The Story
My first name for this blog was going to be
Entering the Story. I liked it. It was short, and simple, and seemed to convey
what I wanted to get across, that as Christians we engage with the story by
entering into it, by becoming part of it and accepting it as our own. It was a phrase I’d used in seminary to
describe the life of faith, discipleship, and worship. But the more I thought about it, the more I
felt something wasn’t quite right with it.
At one level I didn’t want to limit this blog to a Christian audience. The
audience wasn’t the big issue though; something else was still nagging at
me. What I finally realized was the
phrase “entering the story” implied that at some point you are or were outside
of it. Immediately I knew that was
wrong.
Not long after my realization that I had a name
I couldn’t use I was driving down the road and out of the blue I was thinking
about The Matrix. Now this isn’t odd, random things pop into my
head all the time and leave just as quick, but this one lingered for a
while. And then it hit me, The Matrix was the metaphor I was
looking for to describe how we engage the story.
It’s funny how often I see The Matrix used to relate a philosophical or theological
theme. It’s a movie filled with great
metaphorical imagery and language. As I
drove down the road that day I was pulled into “the pill scene” where Neo meets
Morpheus. Neo is brought into an
abandoned apartment building and told that everything he’s ever known, or
thought he knew about the real world was wrong, a lie, a story created to
deceive him. He was born a slave, born
in bondage, born into a prison for his mind that he cannot sense, born into the
Matrix. Morpheus tells Neo that he must
feel like Alice “tumbling down the rabbit hole.” He offers Neo two pills and gives him a
choice, “take the blue pill and the story ends, you wake up in your bed and
believe whatever you want to believe.”
Take the red pill, “you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the
rabbit hole goes.”*
The Matrix had always been there whether Neo (or
anyone else) knew it or not. So had the
real world, the world that had been kept hidden form him by the powers behind
the Matrix. He was a part of the story
even if he didn’t realize it. But in the
pill scene Neo was finally given the opportunity to engage in the story in the
way that he chose and The Matrix was never the same again. The same metaphor applies to the story of God
and creation.
Whether we enter into the story isn’t the
issue. Everyone is a part of the story
whether they realize it or not, whether they believe it or not. What matters is how we engage the story and
the part we play within it. That is what
I hope to explore in this blog, the many and various ways we engage the story
of God and his creation, the story of sin and death, the story of redemptive
history, the story of incarnation, re-creation, salvation and everlasting life.
What to Expect
What can you expect from this blog? Who knows?
The possibilities are endless. I
really don’t want to limit it too much.
I’ve got some ideas in mind for early on if I can just get them all
down. Thankfully the title allows for a
wide range of topics. So we’ll see where
it leads. In the meantime take some time
to consider just how you’ve engaged the story and the part you play within it.
*The
Matrix. Dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski.
Perf. Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fishburn. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999.
Film.
Welcome to the blogosphere!
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