Living Story Grace

I’m preparing to teach a story intensive in Arkansas.  One of the hard questions we will consider is what it means to live a life of faith.  Here’s an excerpt from my story guide.

Scripture recounts stories of the founders of faith floundering in faithlessness as they try to wreak some control in the havoc God seems to be making of their lives. Take Abram and Sarai for example. How many times did the faithful father of all nations cover his fanny by telling a king Sarai was his sister? What about the famous fertility incident, in which Sarah schemed to bring the promised child through her maidservant? The good news of God’s story of grace is that he does not allow us to remain long in our narrow narratives.

Let’s quickly review the story of grace as we discussed it in Chapter Three to see how our faith founders. God creates the cosmos, including us, in His image, with dignity and for delight, with differentiation and for dominion. In this beginning chapter of redemptive history, humans lives in a state of shalom, in which our worlds not only work but flourish – intimate relationship, productive work, and fruitful mission – all of the things we were made for – rule the day.

In the next chapter, Adam and Eve, succumbing to Satan’s suggestion, decide they know better than God what they need for life and beauty. They consciously rebel against God’s command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Taking and eating, they immediately gain greater knowledge: they see that they are naked and they feel shame. In the ensuing moments, the Edenic world crashes around them and they turn to hiding, blaming, and shaming to try to restore the equilibrium lost.

In the Author’s kindness and wisdom, Scripture does not wait for the gospels to announce the good news. God intervenes immediately, searching for his lost couple in the garden, asking an astounding question, “Where are you?” The all-knowing God of the universe knows where his children are, but it is the nature of God to pursue us in our feeble attempts to flee His exposing gaze. God brings us out of hiding not to scold us but for the gracious purpose of inviting us back into relationship.

Even as God explains the curses on creation and humanity that follow as consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin, He announces the plan for redemption, telling a story of a coming chapter when Eve’s offspring will crush Satan. Immediately, God begins the process of restoring brokenness for His beloved children. In a preview of the story of the ultimate covering blood to be spilled, God kills animals to provide sufficient protective garments for Adam and Eve. In a further act of protection, he expels his children from the garden, lest they eat of the tree of life and live forever in the drastic state of the Fall.

Our Fall of Faith
What does this story have to do with our struggle with faith? Everything. We bear the branding of our foremother and forefather. Like Adam and Eve, we are not always content with shalom, with a world working in harmony and flourishing in fruitfulness. We can be tempted to believe that God is holding out on us, that somewhere someone is enjoying juicier mangoes than the ones we purchased at Walmart. (They probably are.) We grasp after false promises of greater shalom both when our world is working and when it isn’t.

When Adam and Eve’s world comes crashing down, they once again grasp for ways to save themselves from further humiliation, shame, and loneliness. When our worlds are wrecked, whether through our own doing or through external forces, we often turn to other gods that promise to restore shalom, if even temporarily. We try more: shopping, eating, yelling, or going to church. We try less: numbing, withdrawing, retreating, or hiding. Whichever route we take away from a life of faith: flight or fight, our faithful God pursues us and invites us to redemption.

Seriously, this is what you’ve been waiting to hear:
From Bruce McRae’s introduction to his translation of Walter Marshall’s The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification:
“Grasp the main idea, which he expresses over and over again, relying upon his vast knowledge of Scripture: ‘You are more sinful than you can imagine! The doctrine of Original Sin is true! You cannot reform your own flesh! You cannot become a better person by your own strength no matter how hard you try! But cheer up! If you are a Christian, you have come into union with Christ. Through faith in Jesus Christ you are forgiven. Through faith in Jesus Christ you are sanctified and made holy. Through Christ, you are new creation! The Holy Spirit lives in you! Therefore, pursue the life of faith in Christ with all diligence!”

1 O my people, listen to my teaching.
Open your ears to what I am saying,
2 for I will speak to you in a parable.
I will teach you hidden lessons from our past—
3 stories we have heard and known,
stories our ancestors handed down to us.
4 We will not hide these truths from our children
but will tell the next generation about the glorious deeds of the Lord.
We will tell of his power and the mighty miracles he did. Psalm 78:1-4

The Bible is a story, and it is full of stories. Psalm 78 gives us the command to tell our stories – the stories of the glorious deeds of the Lord. The Hebrew words used for story here and in other places in the Old Testament, mashal and chiydah, suggest puzzles, hard questions, riddles. Indeed, the story of the Bible and many Bible stories are, like our own stories, quite puzzling. What sense does it make that a sinless God would love a sinful people so much that He would send His sinless son to die for us? That sentence summarizes the gospel story, and it simply doesn’t make much rational sense.

When you think of the beloved Bible stories, a lot of them are puzzling – God tells Noah to build an ark for a flood that has not yet occurred; David commits adultery with Bathsheba but is presented under the title: A Man after God’s Own Heart; a man who stoned Christians is struck blind and when he regains sight he decides to spend the rest of his life suffering for the sake of Jesus Christ (the apostle Paul). Yes, biblical stories are full of paradox, seemingly opposite realities, and that should tell us that the same is true of our stories.
Another thing that the words mashal and chiydah suggest about our stories is that they can be both simple and profound. Psalm 78 suggests that stories contain two levels. On one level, the story relates events that occurred in space and time. Too often we stop telling stories at the surface level: we tell the story of how truly rotten our day (or our life) was, but we don’t pause to reflect on the second level. When we remember that our stories are authored by God, we pay attention to sign-ificant realities of our stories.
As Brent Curtis and John Eldredge point out in The Sacred Romance, God is not merely the author of the story but the central character: “Just what if we saw God not as Author, the cosmic mastermind behind all human experience, but as the central character in the larger story? What could we learn about his heart? The story that is the Sacred Romance begins not with God alone, the Author at his desk, but God in relationship, intimacy beyond our wildest imagination, heroic intimacy. The Trinity is at the center of the universe; perfect relationship is the heart of all reality.” If God is the author of our stories and also the central character, then our stories are signs pointing to God, showing us and the world something about who God is. As we study our stories, we begin to see that God is a hero who came to save, perhaps not in the time and the way we would have wanted. We also come to see ourselves as the beloved He has come to save. Behind the simplicity of every story is the profound reality of God.

Continues to be a good time to wander in Brueggemann’s The Message of the Psalms. Here are a few paragraphs on “new orientation.” Make sure to read the Psalms mentioned after the quote — if you’re like me, you can get stuck on just the words of the author and forget the Word of the Author!:)
“But obviously the move into disorientation is not the only move made in the faith of Israel or in the literature of the Psalms. While the speaker may on occasion be left ‘in the Pit,’ (as in Ps. 88), that is not the characteristic case. Most frequently the Psalms stay with the experience to bring the speech into a second decisive move, from disorientation to new orientation. That is, the Psalms regularly bear witness to the surprising gift of new life just when none had been expected. That new orientation is not a return to the old stable orientation, for there is no such going back. The psalmists know that we can never go home again. Once there has been an exchange of real candor, as there is here between Yawheh and Israel, there is no return to the precandor situation.
Rather the speaker and the community of faith are often surprised by grace, when there emerges in present life a new possibility that is inexplicable, neither derived nor extrapolated, but wrought by the inscrutable power and goodness of God. That newness cannot be explained, predicted, or programmed. We do not know how such a newness happens any more than we know how a dead person is raised to new life, how a leper is cleansed, or how a blind person can see (cf. Luke 7:22). We do not know; nor do the speakers of these psalms. Since Israel cannot explain and refuses to speculate, it can do what id does best. It can tell, narrate, recite, testify, in amazement and gratitude, ‘lost in wonder, love, and praise.’ (123-124, The Message of the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann) Psalm 76, 87, 103, 117 are examples that include new orientation.

I’ve got orientation on the brain. Yesterday I began the day attending high school orientation with our youngest son and ended the day 451 miles away from home where we will take my eldest daughter, second child, to her college orientation. Strange as it may seem, theology is often a good coping mechanism for DISORIENTATION for me. So no real surprise that my mind went back a long way to Tremper Longman’s teaching on the Psalms (How to Read the Psalms). He first told me about Walter Bruegemann’s categorization of the Psalms in terms of disorientation, orientation, and re-orientation. Here is part of what Bruegemann wrote:
“Creation here is not a theory about how the world came to be. That is not how the Bible thinks about creation. It is rather an affirmation that God’s faithfulness and goodness are experienced as generosity, continuity, and regularity. Life is experienced as protected space. Chaos is not present to us and is not permitted a hearing in this well-ordered world.
Elemental certitudes are known to be operative in the world. The nomos holds, and there is as yet no inkling of anomie. Experientially, of course, such certitudes have behind them previous awareness of disorientation, for that belongs to human experience. The process is continually dialectic. But formally, these psalms tend to disregard such previous experience and begin anew.
The function of this kind of psalm is theological, i.e., to praise and thank God. But such a psalm also has a social function of importance. It is to articulate and maintain a ‘sacred canopy’ under which the community of faith can live out its life with freedom from anxiety. That is, life is not simply a task to be achieved, an endless construction of a viable world made by effort and human ingenuity. There is a givenness to be relied on, guaranteed by none other than God. That givenness is here before us, stands over us, endures beyond us, and surrounds us behind and before. The poetic speech of the Psalms is our best language for such givenness, which is not initiated by us but waits for us. There is a coherence that provides a context for our best living. Whenever we use these psalms, they continue to assure us of such a canopy of certitude — despite all the incongruities of life.”  from Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms.
Want to explore some of this?  Try reading these aloud and meditating on the glory of what God has done:  Psalm 145, 104, 33