The Stories We Tell - pt2
The Christian Story
By the mere fact that we exist is to know that we have been mentioned by God. We play a part in his song and story of creation and redemption.
Often, this is a difficult story for me to accept, I’m a natural skeptic and I often don’t know what I believe until I do. But I know myself well enough that it is because my natural mind hides from this intimate connection with my Creator that makes me trust this story all the more.
Stanley Hauerwas puts it this way.
Christians do not believe we get to choose our story, but rather we discover that God has called us to participate in a story not of our own making. That is why we are called into the church, as well as why we are called “Christian.” A church so formed cannot help but be a challenge to a social order built on the contrary presumption that I get to make my life up.
We are knit together when we accept that call of God to become part of his story of love and redemption. Christianity is not a system of belief; it is the way of performing the continuing narrative of God.
“I believe Jesus is Lord — but that is just my personal opinion.”
There is something profoundly wrong with that statement and I hope we see it. If not, we need to be reacquainted with language required to participate in God’s story.
As we become witnesses to this peculiar story, we are called to testify. This is where artists are vital to the telling. We are given a vision and revelation of hope that must be expressed to the Church. An artist can cry out against the injustice and hypocrisy because we already wander the margins, shouting from the wilderness. This is what Walter Brueggemann describes in his book The Prophetic Imagination.
The Prophetic Imagination
Imagination is necessary in the life of the artist. There is a tension between disrupting empire (both within the Church and without) and providing hope that can only be mediated in imaginative ways. I firmly believe it is the artists within the Church community that have the responsibility of jarring the slumbering. Not with arrogance but with desperate humility. I don’t have much use for the word “Christian” as an adjective, it just doesn’t make sense. And so I’m not advocating “Christian” art, but I am calling for Truthful art that will stir the souls that need to be stirred.
Truth-telling will subvert the powers-that-be and invite conversation and revelation and justice and love, punctuated by a call to beauty. It must be anchored to the collected stories we have been given in the Holy Scriptures. It must be anchored to the practices of the Church. It must be anchored to the Christ-centered community that shapes us. We are in this together and Jesus is in charge. Go and do; for if not you, who?
