This we we talked to Ron about his story. If you know anything about Ron, you know its quite a story. Growing up in England and then moving over to Canada his story has tons of ups and downs. In fact in a lot of ways you could say that his story represents yet another one of us (or all of us) that are broken and out of order from the way that our lives should be. Follow his story deep enough and you will see some pretty broken moments that were inflicted on him and that were inflicted on others by him, just like all of our own stories. So in some ways his story is a perfect ending for a month where we talk about the way that our humanity is out of order and not the way God intended it.

Next month we are talking about God's relentless goal to put things back into order and bring his order back into his creation. So Ron's story is a perfect starter for next month also. We've all been watching Ron over the last number of years and his life amazes us. He's someone that we all look up to now and want to learn from in all sorts of ways. He's a beautiful example of God's order putting back the way it was supposed to be. God is slowly trying to put us all back into order, because we are all so horribly broken and out of order that we never function the way we are supposed to. So as we go into Decemeber let us remember that we are all out of order and in need to be constantly put back under the order of God on a daily basis. You can watch Ron's video below.

 

"God undertook the work of creation in such a way as to hand over the ongoing work to the world itself and to humanity in particular. This theme has growing prominence through the account until it reaches the logical conclusion that God can now stop work. God acts like an executive whose special task is to be creative, to initiate something new. When that is finished, she can move on. Or God works like a car manufacturer whose product will function reliably without needing service every few months."
--John Goldingay

Looking at the stories of the Flood and the Tower of Babel in light of the previous chapters in Genesis, it becomes painfully clear what happens to the sin found in chapter 3 when it is left to grow and evolve. God's description of the scenario during the flood is that everything intention from man was wicked. No longer is it crouching by the door, as it was for Cain. It has been allowed to become something that has penetrated the hearts and minds of men. Humanity, something created to do so much good, has grown into something so perverse. I imagine that the people of Noah's day did much of the same things we do today, getting married, having kids, working, etc. Scripture doesn't necessarily indicate that what they were doing was bad in and of itself, but that their intentions were bad. They chose not to be apart of God's plan and purpose for creation. So we
encounter a very disturbing and troubling text, where we find that God has regret about even created humanity at all. Which is difficult to understand about a God who apparently knows everything. I'm not sure what you do with passages like this that we come across, but sometimes with verses like this there is no tight, clean package that we can wrap it all up and explain God away. However we decide we want to reconcile this mystery, in the end God decides that his best option is to wipe humanity out in a flood and start all over again with Noah and his family. Fast forward to the Tower of Babel and we're in a similar situation. Humanity has found itself in a cycle. Now, however, humanity has congregated in the middle of a plain and decided that they are going to build a tower to heaven and make a name for themselves. So they are doing the opposite of what God told them to do in the beginning: Fill and subdue the earth. You can't fill the earth if you're remaining in one place. The work that God has left for us to take over Him, isn't getting done.

"Readers may well find the dynamics of their own lives reflected in Adam and Eve's [and the flood and the Tower of Babel] story. We too decline to fulfill the vocation God sets before us and decline to accept the limits God sets for us. We too prefer the knowledge tree to the life tree. We too yield to strange blandishments and lead one another astray. We too pay a price in our relationships with God and with our work, with our spouses and with our children. No doubt the storytellers' experience of these realities shaped their telling of their story. But it is here that the image of a once-for-all Fall is of particular significance. These realities are not how it was meant to be and not how it need have been if people at the beginning had
made different choices."
--John Goldingay

So we're left with the reality that we are faced with the same choices everyday. What happened in the fall is that we decided that it we wanted to decide what was good and what was bad. Instead of taking our cues from God about what is good and what is bad. This is still the case today. We can choose what is good or we can learn from God what is good and obey him and do what he says is good. The stories of the flood and the tower of Babel are a sober reminder of what happens when we continue to insist that we can decide what is good and what is not good. Thus we're faced with the same choices.

So what will we choose?

Read More...

After meticulously putting all things in their proper place in Genesis 1&2, the wheels fall off in Genesis 3 as things fall out of order.

God set boundaries in place with humankind's best interests in mind. However, in Adam and Eve fashion, we too seek autonomy from God and his terms plus we've got an independent streak in us that asserts that we can make it on our own. Left to fester, this autonomy and independence grows into a self focused and self pleasing fiasco. And it's here that we find the beginnings of sin.

Yet despite it all, Genesis 3 paints a picture of a God who deeply cares for his creation - and where death is warranted, He insists on life.

Some helpful words from last week...

"Our concern is not finally the origin of evil, the appearance of death or the power of the fall...it is rather the summons of this calling of God for us to be his creatures to live in his world on his terms." (Walter Bruggemann)

"Even when sin is familiar, it's never normal." (Platinga)

"Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God."
(Abraham Joshua Heschel)

Read More...

There was a movie that came out a few years ago (The Bourne Identity), it was the first instalment of a trilogy about a guy named Jason Bourne. The main character, played by Matt Damon, finds he is suffering from amnesia; forgetting virtually everything about his life up until the point we meet up with him at the beginning of the film. The movie is essentially about him desperately trying to figure out his identity by piecing his life together based certain events and scenarios. At one point he's sitting in a diner late one night with a girl he has just recently met and as he's talking to her you can feel the frustration coming out in his voice.

[Paraphrasing] "I know the man at the counter is about 240 lbs., the waitress is left handed; I know where all the exits are; I know that the best place to look for a gun is in the glove compartment of the truck outside and that I can run flat out for half an hour at this altitude. How can I know all this and not know who I am?"

Here is a man who has been cut off from his story and cut off from the narrative of his life. And what we find in the pang of Jason Bourne's frustration is familiarity; a stark realization that I know that frustration, I have felt that dissonance, I have felt that lonliness, I am Jason Bourne. I know the emptiness that hollows life out when you know all these different things you're capable of doing and being, but lack the understanding of where you fit in the grand narrative of life. All of Jason's actions were void of meaning because he could not place them in the on-going story of his life because he didn't know it. His dilemma is often our dilemma: ‘who am I and what is my story?'

What ends up happening when we get to this point, asking this question, whether we're conscious of it or not, is that we begin to construct a story for ourselves. Whether it's adopting the story our parent's passed down to us or developing our own based on systems of thought we've come into contact with, we try to find a narrative for our life in order to give meaning to the way we live it and the things we do. This narrative vastly affects the way we live our lives. Now for the past few centuries, western civilization has adopted the philosophy that each person creates their own stories that we all find our own meaning and we choose our own narrative and create our own purpose in life. As a follower of Christ however, we believe that our meaning is revealed to us by God our Creator. So we follow the bible and what it says about our story because we believe that the Grand Narrative that the bible is telling us is the only one that will give us our true purpose as human beings. This is why a study in Genesis is so paramount. It is the beginning of our story, the story of a God who creates people to have a relationship with.

Now if I understand myself to be a creation my life should be lived in a somewhat different manner than if I were to believe that I am the most recent stage of the evolutionary process. If I were to believe that entropy and other laws of physics win in the end and all of life decays and breaks down, my life would carry with it a drastically different meaning than if I would to believe in a God that has the ability to reverse the effects of entropy and chaos.

At the Story we as a community want to wrestle with the grand narrative that Scripture teaches us so that we can learn to live lives that embody a coherence with that narrative. So we continually go back and rehash and retell what God has revealed to us through scripture because we need to constantly be reminded of who we are.

Read More...