Theological Reflection: “Story” is the realm of the Father.
“God” is a tricky word in our modern era. It is a word found in every language and civilization, broad enough to speak of what Paul Tillich called “the Ground of All Being”, and yet vague enough for us to paint God with any number of ideologies. In this country, our government even decided to write “In God We Trust” on money in 1956, but it’s not clear which God we mean. Too often the ambiguity serves those who use the name of God to serve their agendas and convince the rest of us it is divinely ordained. But that is a message for another day.
In the West our concept of “God” is at least, if not more, influenced by our Greco-Roman heritage and thinking than the God of the Hebrews, the God-revealed-in-Jesus. We often speak of God with the “omni’s” - God is omniscient(all-knowing), omni-present(everywhere), and omnipotent(all-powerful). While these definitions of God aren’t wrong, they can often lead to conclusions that God is immovable and either in control of everything (the divine chess master) or incredibly distant from the mess of humanity (more akin to Zeus up on the mountain). This God doesn’t feel, doesn’t seem invested, isn’t approachable. God is so perfect, God cannot be close to us.
However, the scriptures start the conversation around “God” in a radically different orientation, one that I think is far more faithful and dynamic. I like to see this vision of God in two maxims:
God is with us, and
God turns curses into blessings.
By rooting our understanding of God here, we are opened up to a definition that begins with closeness and activity. “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”, the psalmist prays, and we trust this is a good thing. These two maxims make God a god, not only of space, but of time. This God moves with us through history, is intimately active and invested in creation. God’s sovereignty is not control in the sense that God makes all things happen (including evil), but ability to take the brokenness of the world that would normally spell out death and instead bring forth new life.
Too often in the Christian household we are presented with opposing visions of God. Either God is a weak, permissive God who is powerless to do much about evil, or God is a powerful controlling deity who has a lot to answer for when it comes to the atrocities of the world. Either God is loving and merciful, or God is righteous and just, but God can’t be both.
Again, the psalmist: “Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other”. I hope what I’m offering in this definition of God is one that can hold together those qualities we find diametrically opposed in smaller visions, because it is the definition we see most exemplified in Jesus. The prophet Isaiah declared that he would be called “Immanuel” - God with us - because that’s how God want us to know God. His name is Jesus - “The LORD saves” - because he didn’t come to explain why there is evil, but to do something about it.
Why does this matter? Because the way you see God affects the way you see everything else around you.
Story is the realm of the Father, Who is intimately with us on the journey and turns curses into blessings. This is true for human history, and it is true for your personal history. Learning how to read your story as the Father has worked in it will help you understand how the Father desires to work through it for the sake of the world.
Kye Wall erupted out of her seat in our tenth grade English class and boldly declared to the universe, “sometimes black is just black!”, to which our teacher quietly retorted, “Miss Wall, black is never just black.” We were reading The Scarlet Letter and discussing the symbolism of colors in literature.
Your English classes may have been some of the finest theological training you ever received, without knowing it. We write stories, we are drawn to stories, because we believe on a deep level we are living a story. Interpretation of various novels and fanciful tales in grade school, if we approach it well, actually becomes a journey of discovery of the human story. We can apply some of those essential elements of story to our own lives, and in doing so we connect the dots as to how we got to this moment in the first place. Sometimes black is just black in real life, but more often than not there are core truths to be sussed out we may normally be ignorant to. Let’s consider three elements: setting, plot, and conflict.
SETTING
All stories begin with “setting”. This is a culmination of a myriad of factors that establish the background for the main characters in a story, the origin that shapes people right from the start. In my undergrad training, I was fascinated by the ongoing discussion of how nature and nurture shape our earliest years of development. Most experts agree that it is a combination of factors that were there before we were born and how our parents engaged with us in the first few years of life that form us. None of us spring forth from a vacuum, a blank slate waiting to be written upon by our own free will. There are many factors that contribute to the settings of our stories, but I want to focus on three interrelated ideas: Culture, Family of Origin, and Faith. As you learn to read these three ideas through the lens of the God Who is with you and turns curses into blessings, you will come to know what bears reinforcing and what bears redemption.
Culture
Not only are we born into a family, but our families are born into cultures. This is the cumulative knowledge and worldview of a particular people in a particular place in which, although there can be exceptions and diversity, there exist some common strands that create a common story. Culture is present in our national identities, our race or ethnicity, our language, our arts and institutions. It can even be defined by our socio-economic status and shared struggles, or our agreed-upon etiquette in how we relate to one another. No person is exempt of being a product of their culture; even Jesus was shaped by his first-century Jewish worldview, which is markedly different from, say, The Israel of his ancestor King David or the wandering Hebrew tribe of Moses. Many of the problems we face arise from a blindness to our cultural reference points or an assumption that our way of seeing the world is the only way. Many of the gifts we have to offer the Kingdom are a result of our culture as well - John’s vision in Revelation of “every tribe and nation and tongue”[9] testifies to the goodness of diverse cultures rallying around King Jesus.
Even generational difference can be seen as a kind of culture that shapes our expectations of life. For example, in this country at least, the post-war “Greatest” or “Silent” generation were marked by a primary value of “loyalty”. Their children, the Baby Boomers, tend to gravitate towards “security” as they are the first generation ever to grow up in the nuclear age - all this could disappear tomorrow at the press of a button. My own generation, the Millennials, give preference to “authenticity”, often as a reaction to the falsity we perceived in our parents’ narrative of safety and consistency. Imagine how each of those primary values shape our approach to God and our expectations of the Good News of Jesus. You can hear it in our worship songs and in our sermons, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Our current moment in history is unique in that many of us are not the product of one monoculture, but a living Venn diagram of many. We are connected across national boundaries and ethnicities, largely in part to the ease at which people can move around the globe since the industrial revolution and, more recently, the advent of the internet. Being a “third culture” kid is a new kind of culture - straddling two or more worlds, not entirely belonging to one or the other. Some of us have families from different backgrounds, while others of us (like myself) have moved from one country to another, shaped by both.
For example, I spent the first five years of my life in Northern Ireland, which is in itself a blend of British and Irish culture. After we emigrated to the United States I lived for eight years in Michigan, and then the rest of my life from age 13 on has been spent in what I would call the “shallow South” - Virginia, two stints in Florida, and in Tennessee. All these cultural references points swirl in the background of my understanding of my own story; they influence how I perceive myself and the world around me, often without me realizing it. The more I have learned how to interpret the setting into which I was born, and the ensuing chapters of my life that have shaped me, the more I can appreciate what God has been doing in terms of highlighting the gifts I inherit from each place, and the blindspots I may have that cloud my judgement.
Reflection:
What are some key cultural markers that explain your background - race or ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, etc.?
What are some values in those cultures that you are proud of? What are some vices you recognize may be short-sighted or inhibitions to you as you grow beyond them?
Family of Origin
My biological family is the more local expression of the culture or cultures into which I was born. My parents instilled in me certain values and assumptions about the world around me in ways I’m still learning to interpret.
We imprint upon our parents from day one, perhaps even while we’re still in the womb. Our first awareness at birth is that “mother” is the source of all our needs, and before long, we become aware of “father” in the room(often the obstacle we have to overcome to get back to “mother”), and then siblings and grandparents and so on. As we’ll discover in the section on personality, we develop tactics from a very early age to have our needs met based on the feelings of basic loss we experience at birth. Our parents shape our understanding of “self” like few others will. In our family of origin (biological or otherwise) we receive messages of acceptance and belonging, but also messages of neglect, abandonment, and sometimes abuse. These messages create a trajectory for our lives in that they set up our expectations for all other relationships, including the one we have with God. This is why God as “father” is a welcome image for some, and a point of pain for others.
While never an avid comic book reader, I’ve come to love a lot of the shows and movies that have arisen out of the super hero phenomenon. One development in the myth-building of comic book heroes and villains in the past fifty years has been how their families of origin shaped the decisions they make later in life. In many ways, heroes and villains are living out of the stories of loss and abandonment they felt as children, whether the death of a parent or an abusive situation. They are trying to answer the questions, “who am I? And who do I belong to?” in how they shape their vocations. We tend to replay these early stories in our current relationships and our work, trying to make the present moment turn out the way we wish it had with our families of origin.
Reflection:
How would you describe your childhood experience with each of your parents or guardians?
What were some of the key values instilled in you by your family of origin? What are some of the blindspots you now recognize, things you might feel you were lacking or haven’t served you well in adulthood?
Faith
Alongside the shift from mono- to poly-culture as a norm in contemporary society comes the common story of drift from one room in the Christian household to another. It is becoming increasingly rare that someone is born into a particular faith tradition and stays there until they die. There is an increased awareness of the other ways of approaching faith within the Christian family, in part spurred by our recognition of one denominations limitations in encapsulating the whole Christian faith, and often from a disillusionment in those limitations or potentially damaging beliefs and practices. Especially for those of us who have grown up in the Church, understanding our story as we move from one room to another helps us to sift through our spiritual inheritance, considering what beliefs and practices are worth holding onto and what requires we let go.
The Franciscan spiritual leader Richard Rohr offers us a beautiful paradigm here: “include and transcend”. We are rather short-sighted when we think in growth we merely leave behind one form of faith to take up another; to do so is to ignore the incredible impact those forms have had in shaping us on a primordial level. It is more accurate, and I would consider healthy, to acknowledge our inheritance, blessing what we can bless in the story God has woven through us, while always seeking to grow beyond the limitations of certain systems or beliefs. The goal isn’t to leave behind one way of following Jesus, but to evolve into a more faithful way. And this requires we take careful stock of where we have come from.
Our first image of God stays with us throughout our lives, even if we don’t believe in God anymore. It is wired into our spiritual DNA subconsciously, and so much of the work of growth is naming those early portraits so we can expand our vision.
Not only does charting out our spiritual journey help us understand where we are now, it also encourages us to look beyond our experiences up to this point and become curious as to how other Christians approach belief and practice. In my own life, I have learned to bless my origins in the Anglican tradition growing up, and the lessons I learned as an adult entering into the charismatic renewal Vineyard church. Both expressions of Christianity have shaped me, and also encouraged me to seek out what is happening in other rooms in the household. As a pastor it has become a large part of the way I lead, helping my people see other ways of following Jesus from brothers and sisters around the world and throughout time. And I hope we’re better for it.
Reflection:
Consider each room in the Christian household you have traversed in your journey with God. What are a few key beliefs and practices that would sum up your time there?
As you look over those lists of beliefs and practices, what do you see blesses you into greater faithfulness to King Jesus? What have you learned, or are you learning, to let go of in order to seek a more beautiful way?
Conclusion
Pete Scazzero is a former pastor who develops paths for understanding the emotions that swirl beneath the surface of our spiritual lives. He often says, “Jesus may live in your heart, but grandpa still lives in your bones”. A significant part of the journey of discovering our calling, and indeed finding the healing and health God desires for us, is learning to look back wisely in order to look forward with clarity. By learning to see the table that has been set for us, we can then begin to name the plot of our lives as God turns curses into blessings.