Living God's Story

Two profound statements about God and story rocked me last week. One statement came from my 5 yr old nephew; the other from two accomplished theologians. Together they have been a potent reminder to me of the need for Christians to live out the story of God in western cultural contexts.

1. From Joshua David Plumley (5 yrs old) - My nephew recently asked me to read to him from his children's Bible. I readily agreed and asked, "Which story would you like me to read?" He thought on this question a moment and said, "Um, Uncle Scott, I think there is only one." If you have seen the Charles Schwab commercials where two people are typing messages to one another until one says something profound, causing the other person to look off into the distance in pensive silence, then you can picture the scene from my story-time experience with Josh. His comment was a powerful reminder to me that the Bible is first and foremost a singular story, a story about a God who out of his love creates and redeems all things.
2. From Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart (Hope Against Hope, 1999) - Bauckham and Hart claim western cultural contexts have moved from the pre-modern (traditional) focus on the past and the modern (progressive) focus on the future to the postmodern (or late-modern) focus on the present. In light of the collapse of the secular myth of progress that began with Enlightenment focus upon human capacity to create and master nature and the future, Bauckham and Hart suggest that people have now largely turned away from hope-filled views of the future. Instead, people seem to be opting for a focus on the present time, trying to cram as much as possible into each present moment as an effort to extend the present and avoid any concerns of ultimate meaning in future or history. After making this diagnosis of western cultural contexts, the authors claim that Christians must tell a different story of hope. Not a story of hope that is based upon human capacity to master the future and create utopia, but hope in the promise of God to bring his kingdom in the new creation. Christians must tell a story of hope in God that is built upon a faith in God because of the things he has already done and a trust that God will complete what has already been started through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The authors concluded their work by calling Christians not just to tell a different story of hope, but to live the story by taking their identity in the story and by shaping all of their actions in anticipation of the end of the story.

From the mouth of a babe and from the pens of two theologians came this powerful reminder to me: I need to live out the hope of God in my actions, attitudes, and words every day. The most powerful witness in cultures that have witnessed the failure of hope and now live with skepticism to stories of ultimate meaning is to live a life based on the faithfulness of God to fulfill what he has promised: to make all things new as he brings them into his presence for all eternity.

In a way, this is all just a more sophisticated way of saying the same message I learned through a poem my mother gave to me as a child:
You are writing the Gospel, a chapter a day
By the things that you do and the words that you say.
People read what you write, whether faithful or true.
Just what is the Gospel, according to you?

Now to figure out how to live a life of hope, a life based on God's story, in a cultural context often preoccupied with the pleasures of the present moment. A difficult, but necessary task: to live God's story faithfully in, for, with, and against my local context.