Scene I: An Unfinished Beauty

In the beginning…
Light explodes amidst darkness like a starburst.
Planets and universes spring into existence.
The elements are forged from pure energy.
Time takes it’s first breath.
In a far corner of this expanse a planet is being crafted.
Earth.
Sea parts from sky, ground parts from sea.
Rotations and rhythms begin.
Life.
A single cell. Then two. Then four. Then a green bud. Then a blade of grass. A tree. A forest.
Another cell. A fish. A flock of birds. A herd of bison.
A serene garden is crafted as a womb. Within it the shaping of human form.
The breath of life. Humanity awakes. Naked. Stunning. Without shame. At peace with themselves, at peace with each other. Laughing friends. Sensual lovers. Equal partners.
They explore. They dance. They run. Enchanted by their world.
Excited with their work.
They plunge their hands in the soil and enhance its capacity.
They name the animals and learn their ecology.
From the raw material around them they make art and taste culinary experiments.
Their environment is kind to them, and they are kind in return. Clean food, air, and water. Cool breezes, warm sunshine, refreshing rain. Rustling leaves, babbling brooks, singing birds.
The voice of the divine is among them.
Order as a person, shares the secrets of his architecture.
Wisdom embodied, shares her boundaries.
Love in person, embraces them.
They call themselves God.
Life and garden are a radiant beauty.
Better than perfect, because it is incomplete.
Not finished for observation, but active for participation.
A beauty with work to do. Inviting them to create, alongside their Creator.
Beauty better than perfect. Beauty pregnant with potential.
An unfinished beauty.

Scene II: Shattered

An ancient adversary to God enters the story. He seduces the woman to partake of a mysterious tree, promising that it will offer her the capacity to know all things, like God.
She and the man are convinced and eat.
Immediately their eyes are opened, not to wisdom, but to their own nakedness, insecurities, frailties. They feel shame for the first time. They hide. From each other. From themselves. They even attempt to hide from God.
This epic poem tells us of the consequences the humans face for their betrayal.
They too have become enemies with the adversary, symbolized as a serpent. There will be forces of evil that humanity must fight against generation after generation.
When they have children, there will be great pain involved. The generations will rise and fall in strife.
The woman will desire partnership with her husband as before, but he will seek to dominate her. The genders will be at war.
When they work, it will be toilsome and tedious. With sweat and blood they will work just to eat. Work will be about surviving, rather than thriving in creativity.
The earth itself has become a rival. It will resist cultivation and cut with thorns. Humanity and the planet will do each other harm.
They are told that one day they would also face death. Their bodies would return to the raw elements of the planet that they were originally shaped from. Each day is numbered from here forward.
The young couple enters into exile, away from the garden and away from the intimate connection with God they once knew.
They would now know the ache of wandering and yearning for that place of spiritual engagement and wholeness, that for lack of words, we sometimes simply call ‘home’.
The fall does not end here. It continues.
They have children. Cain kills Abel out of jealousy.
God declares that the blood cries out to him from the ground. Murder!
More people are born. One man takes two wives. Domination. He also kills someone, then boasts about it. Murders! Violence increases. Corruption grows. Oppression is widespread.
God seeks a fresh start, and drowns it all with flood, except a small sample of humanity, Noah and his family, carried in an ark. They start over. Humanity, ‘take two.’
But whatever sickness of soul was in their ancestors can also be found in them. It is not long before violence and oppression pick up again. Murders continue and pride is taken in it, until they call it another name: murder becomes war, and a new “proud” title for the murderer is given: warrior.
The first mass murderer- called warrior, uses his power achieved through coercion to build cities, and he unifies them into an empire. A tower was built as the crowning achievement of this empire- and it’s military and economic dominance. The tower reaches to the sky, waving human pride and violence in God’s face.
Having promised not to destroy humanity again, God honors his promise, yet shatters them by language and they scatter across the earth.
But that sickness of soul was carried with each of them, to their far corners of the globe. Each still carrying a desire for dominance, violence, power, and wealth- each carrying the taste of empire.
We learn from this epic poem that the story of the fall is far more than a solitary chapter, or even multiple chapters, we learn that it continues. This sickness of soul… call it sin, call it empire… it is within each of us. The fall continues. Every day. In every human heart. In every part of the planet. We are all falling. Even now. All broken. Humanity is shattered.

Scene III: A People of Hope

The story then takes an interesting turn. Instead of following the spiraling condition of humanity as a whole, it focuses in on one couple, Abram and Sarah. They are very old, and have been unable to have children, yet God promises that they will be the parents of a great nation. It is almost too much to believe, and they wait for years for this promise to come true. Then one day it happens, Sarah discovers she is pregnant- with both a son and with God’s promise of a different kind of world that this nation will help create.
Their son is named Isaac, he has two sons, Jacob and Esau, who feud with each other.
After a long separation between these brothers Jacob feels God leading him to reconcile with his brother. The night before the reconciliation is to happen Jacob literally wrestles with God, struggling fitfully all night, only to ask for a blessing. The divine being gives him the name, Israel, which means- struggles with God. From here forward God’s people would be marked by this identity- those who struggle with God.
Israel has twelve sons, including Joseph. Joseph’s brothers are murderously jealous of him. They sell him as a slave and fake his death to their father. Joseph is taken to Egypt where he becomes the manager of an elite household and then goes on to be appointed to a position in the royal court. A huge famine strikes and Joseph is wisely able to prepare for, and manage through it. He becomes the second in command over all of Egypt. Eventually he is reunited with his family because they come to Egypt to buy food during the famine. There is an emotional reunion and Joseph’s family move to Egypt.
Generations go by, and this large family grows exponentially until they number in the many thousands. A new pharaoh does not remember Joseph, and instead he sees these people as a threat and as an opportunity for his empire. He enslaves them and forces all of these Israelites to do slave labor. Their suffering is palpable.
As their numbers continue to grow, policies are put in place by the Egyptians to limit the Israelite population growth- by killing their babies. One baby is hidden in a floating basket and discovered on the Nile river by an Egyptian princess who is bathing. She adopts the child as her own and names him Moses. He is raised with all the luxury, education, and benefits that empire can offer those at the top of the pyramid. Yet he is increasingly uncomfortable with the oppression of his people. One day he sees an Egyptian task-master beating a Hebrew slave and he attacks the task-master and kills him. He tries to hide the body, burying it in the sand, but is found out and flees into the wilderness, a wanted man.
He wanders the desert for 40 years as a shepherd nomad. Until one day he encounters a voice within a burning bush in the middle of nowhere. The voice calls him to free his people from Egyptian control. Moses is scared and resists. But the voice is insistent. Moses relents and asks who he should say sent him, the voice replies, “ULTIMATE EXISTENCE”- or “I AM”. Moses faces his once-adopted family with a simple message: “Let my people go.” They laugh. Over the following weeks, God unleashes astounding plagues on the Egyptian perpetrators of empire. Darkenss, sickness, pestilence, famine, and death among them. Finally the Egyptians relent and the Israelite people are set free.
The Israelites move quickly away from Egypt towards the Red Sea. The pharaoh changes his mind and mobilizes his army to hunt them down. The Israelites are terrified and consider surrendering. But God splits the sea making an escape route. The Egyptians follow, but the sea pounds closed and swallows them.
The Isrealites are free! They go to a mountain where God gives them a law, sort of a constitution document, changing their status from an enslaved people group to a free nation. Their law is most peculiar, because it does not speak of how to raise armies or appoint kings. Instead it speaks of social welfare laws to ensure that the poor, the widow, and the immigrants will always be cared for. It speaks of how they can be self governing within tribal units and peaceful. It speaks of how they can integrate worship, justice, and celebration into the fabric of their everyday life. Best of all, God identifies them as his people, those whom will represent God’s identity to the world.
Yet they live up to their name, Israel: “struggles with God”, and struggle they do. First trying to shrink the image of God into a golden calf, an unintentional act of idolatry. Then they complain about the conditions of the desert where they are located.  Then upon reaching the new Promised Land they complain that the challenges of settling the land are too much for them. God allows the whole generation to die in the wilderness, before using their children to settle their new home.
In the final scene of this chapter of the story, we see Moses, days before his death, the last of his generation, standing on a mountain-top looking out at the promised land that he will not get to enter. He reflects on the journey of this people. There are many challenges ahead, battles, settlement… Then once they finally get settled and comfortable they will face their greatest challenge yet: will they continue to live these unique laws given by God for the benefit of others, or will they go the way of empire? It is a bitter-sweet moment for Moses. He is scared for Israel, yet carries the whisper of God deep inside, which continually reminds him that these are a people of hope.

Scene IV: Married to a Whore

This second generation is led by Joshua to settle the promised land. They begin to build communities and push back the nations who would bar their presence. As they settle and plant and develop their economy they have a tendency to forget who they are.
The people of Israel begin repeating a cycle of behavior where they become oppressive and unjust to the vulnerable in their society and around them- in direct violation of their God given laws. When this happens their enemies close in on them. They end up crying out to God to rescue them, and God sends individual leaders to help. These national heroes, like Deborah, Samson, and Gideon- rescue Israel for multiple generations. But the cycle keeps repeating. Violence and oppression feeds violence and oppression. The perpetrators of violence, Israel, then become the victims, cry out for help, are set free, but quickly forget what they learned in the process. Then do it again. And again.
Finally the people of Israel want to end the cycle. They think the method of doing so is to appoint a king to raise a strong and ready army. God warns them that they are entering the path of empire, and that a king will only bring oppression home to them. The King will take the best of their land, possessions, their sons and daughters for his court and army and building projects. It is the ultimate act of rejecting God as their king. Israel was supposed to be different than the other nations, without a human king or standing military force, reflecting God’s character with their lifestyles of justice, celebration, and worship. But rather than proudly living this alternative way for the world to see, they get jealous of the nations around them and want a human king. Amazingly, God gives them what they want… either as an act of concession or punishment is debatable.
They have a series of kings, some decent, most bad. All oppressive and ruthless. David who is often considered their best king led a series of civil wars that killed more Israelites than the enemies of Israel even ever did. Then David turned the war on the surrounding nations and decimated them. Plus he had a seriously spotty record in his personal life. Yet he was their ‘best’ king. Solomon who rules the nation right after David in a window of peace because of David’s conquests, uses the time to amass a huge national treasury and builds huge government buildings- built on the backs of the Israelites who must provide the materials and labor. There is something familiar, de ja vu, about this form of strong-handed labor. It reminds them of Egypt. It reminds them of empire. They are becoming what they are meant to be a representation against.
At Solomon’s death the nation looks to Solomon’s son for relief from his father’s oppression. However, his son promises that he will only be harder and more ambitious than his father. The nation has enough and are split in two, 10 tribes in the Northern Kingdom Israel, remaining loyal, while two tribes in the Southern Kingdom, Judah, appoint a new king.
The story now follows dual story lines, North & South, each with their own king. These two kingdoms continue on the same trajectory. They fight brutal wars against their neighbors, and often against each other. Their kings try to make alliances with other nations, worshipping other Gods to seal the political alliances. God begins sending prophets to warn the kings and people of these two nations – the message: “Turn back! You are on a bloody pathway to destruction.” They refuse to listen.
Two great world superpowers, Egypt and Assyria are at war. Both want to fight the battle in Israel as a proxy, needing it as a pathway to get at each other. It is Israel’s chance to represent it’s calling as a peacemaker, but instead they ally with Egypt their old oppressors. Their alliance with Egypt is a direct betrayal of God who freed them and set them apart. One prophet, Hosea, tries to get the point across by marrying a prostitute as an object lesson of how God feels. Israel is repeatedly unfaithful. God is in anguish, yet is still willing to forgive if she will return. But despite God’s consistent and deep love for Israel, they continue to seek out other lovers. Hosea’s message ends by declaring that God is not through with Israel, that he will still one day re-gather his people, his lover… but for now, they have made their choice. The Israelites align with Egypt and go to war, Assyria decimates them. Slaughtering many, sending the rest into exile as slaves. The 10 northern tribes are never cohesively regrouped again.
The two southern tribes of Judah, last a while longer. Yet these Jews, ultimately make similar actions, leaning into political alliances to build their power, rather than representing an alternative vision of peace. A few generations later a similar scenario takes place and Judah finds itself at war with the newest global empire, Babylon. Babylon destroys their cities and sends their people into exile as slaves.
A new chapter in Biblical history begins here. The people of Israel, North and South, are scattered as slaves across the globe. Their tribal identities have been largely wiped out. Still, many struggle to keep alive their cultural identity as a people of God. A people set apart to offer hope to the world – hope of another kind of life. But it is a vision that is hard to live out as scattered slaves in exile in the midst of huge empires.
The story does not end here though, because even within exile we see God’s hand at work. Each rising national super power ends up having an Israelite with a major position of power. Jonah in Assyria, Daniel in Babylon, Esther in Persia. Just as Joseph had done in Egypt. Their power was used not to destroy the nation or to enslave others, but to rescue people from slavery, suffering, or famine. Perhaps, even in exile, this nation- Israel- those who struggle with God- are still showing an alternative vision of power used differently. Perhaps Israel was offering a blessing not by building the worlds greatest empire, but by serving humanity in spite of the world’s greatest empires.
Under a Persian king, a small group of Israelites are allowed to return to their homeland to begin rebuilding the temple and the city ofJerusalem. Then a few more waves of Jewish inhabitants return, and against all odds, we discover that this nation is poised to make a comeback. Despite their history of repeated unfaithfulness to God, God’s promise to re-gather them is coming true. God uses marriage language to speak of his relationship to them. Ironic. A God who, out of all the nations of the world, chooses to remain faithful to these people: God chooses to be married to a whore.

Scene V: Samples of Another World

The scriptures fall silent for 400 years. Alexander the great conquers the world. At his death his empire is broken into kingdoms led by his generals. This paves the way for Rome to rise and sweep the world in the footsteps of Alexander. The power of Rome grows, until it is the most powerful empire the world has ever seen.
And it is in this setting, in the shadow of terrifyingly great emperors, of unimaginable wealth and military might… that God makes his next move.
In a small village in a backwater town within the empire. He finds a young, minority, teenage girl- Mary. He gives her a promise like that he gave to Abraham. She would be the parent to the source of God’s blessing for the world. Terrified, she accepts, and sings of God’s ability to stand in the way of empire: To crush the proud, powerful, and wealthy, and to uphold the vulnerable, weak, and hungry.
Mary is rejected by her community as promiscuous. Her fiancé graciously protects her from death, and they enter exile together. When she gives birth, it is in straw poverty, homeless, in a cave. She puts the baby in a sheep’s feeding trough.
The Roman ruler of their region demands the execution of all young Israelites because they are seen as a threat to the power of the empire. This young family flees to Egypt, until it is safe to return. The life of this child seems to echo the experience of Israel as a nation.
They return to Israel and live in a tiny village called Nazareth, where they are a working class family. The boy- Jesus- grows, and shows startling abilities in interpreting God’s law, and a surprising level of devotion to God. He becomes a rabbi at a young age, and gathers an even younger group of disciples.
One day at a wedding; a cultural highlight for these Jewish people, cause for a week-long celebration; the host family is too poor to purchase enough wine for the celebration. Jesus’ mom asks him to help. His solution is not what anyone would have expected. He gathers huge water jars, and mystically transforms them into wine. This miracle, this sign, becomes the first of a sequence of signs that Jesus performs. They not only draw attention to Jesus’ teachings, but they themselves are a message. They align with his message that there is another way in which the world in meant to be lived. He calls this world, the Kingdom of God, which is in direct opposition to Empire. And in this Kingdom, there are many qualities different than the world in which we see around us. His signs give foretastes of the nature and character of this alternative world. This first miracle of water to wine at a wedding feast reveals that the Kingdom is a place of celebration, where new wine is drank with joy, as if at a wedding banquet.
His next miracles give more clues. Healing of the blind, sick, and crippled. Telling us that the Kingdom is a place of health and wholeness where there is not sickness. He casts evil spirits from people, revealing that the Kingdom is a place where we are at one with ourselves in heart and mind. He calms storms and walks on water, revealing that in the Kingdom, the enmity between people and their planet will be at an end. He feeds the masses with a few bread and fish, revealing that the Kingdom is a place where nobody goes hungry. He even raises someone from the dead, revealing that this new Kingdom world would be one where even death does not have the last word.
It is an unbelievable picture of how things will one day be. And it has a familiar feel to it, something echoing the conditions of the garden where this story began. Yet the reality in which his listeners lived was a world apart from this. The only ‘hopeful’ new world they could see was one that included the fall of the Roman empire, in order that they could rebuilt a Jewish empire. They were impressed with Jesus’ capabilities, but most misunderstood the deep meaning of these samples of another world.

Scene VI: A Sensual Love

Jesus has shocking teachings. His inaugural message begins in his home village. He reads from the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, who declares that one day God would send one who would bring healing, freedom, and good news to the poor. Jesus stands up and says to the gathered crowd, “Today, in your presence, this scripture is fulfilled.” Jaws drop. This young man is declaring that he is the chosen one? The one sent by God to fulfill the promise given to Israel all those years ago to be a nation that would benefit the whole world? What audacity! They try to kill him. He escapes.
As Jesus’ teaching ministry steps up and he gains a rapidly expanding audience people sit up to listen. He repeatedly challenges the status quo of the religious, governmental, economic, and military authorities of his day. His teachings center on this mysterious Kingdom of God that stands subversively at odds with all power structures of this world in both hearts and social systems. He teaches that this Kingdom is invading our world, it begins small like a tiny seed, and through death and burial, sprouts and grows until it overcomes all other structures. Kingdom versus Empire. Both start in our hearts. Both end up being projected into our world. We must choose between them. People don’t get it. His disciples ask what kind of financial reward they will get once they take things over.
Jesus teaches that the Kingdom of God is like a wedding party a father throws for his son, but none of the invited guests showed up, so the frustrated father decides to open it up for anyone and everyone. He will have a celebration; there is food to be eaten, wine to be drunk, and music to be danced to. The party will go on, with or without his first guest list. It is about Israel’s rejection of God, and God’s resulting open invitation to the world. People don’t get it. His disciples ask when Rome will be overturned.
The religious leaders try to trap him, they ask him to summarize the essence of God’s laws first given to Israel through Moses. Jesus says simply to Love God with the whole of who you are. And the main method of doing that is to Love your neighbor as yourself- because God’s image is in people. People ask, who is this ‘neighbor’ we need to love. He shocks them by illustrating in a story about a Samaritan that it is anyone in need, even if they are your enemy, or have a different ethnic, religious, or social background. People don’t get it. His disciples ask if he could destroy a village of Samaritans who insulted them.
Jesus challenges those who sold out to Rome, by publicly calling them hypocrites. Jesus challenges those who want to bring bloodshed on Rome, by declaring that the Kingdom is not one of violence. Salvation, he teaches, is not the growth of the Israelite Empire over the Roman one, but rather, Salvation is this Kingdom bringing the end of Empire in any form all together. People don’t get it. His disciples buy swords for the war they expect Jesus to start.
Jesus declares that God is the sustaining force in the whole universe, and that God is love. Wealth, power, social status, and dominance are the forces of empire- and they seek to craft a world that is run by these forces. The nations, kings, and warriors in power trade places over time, but Empire remains through it all. Alternatively the Kingdom is about love, peace, justice, and beauty. It is completely ‘other’. People don’t get it. His disciples ask if they can be high-level generals once the war begins.
Jesus continues to teach about this God of love. The people nod. But somehow they are able to keep love in an abstract corner of their mind, separate from the empire they want to build, even though it necessarily requires coercion and violence. Jesus speaks of a love that is not abstract. A love that is concrete and challenges social systems. A love that is physical and embraces the poor. A love that is active and bravely martyrs itself for peace. Jesus speaks of a love that is more than an idea. It is a Love that has an identity in God himself, and thus must be applied in this world God created. It is a love that enters our hearts, replaces the sin or empire within, and is then projected out into how we see and interact with the world. It is love we can see, touch, taste, hear, and feel… it is a sensual love.

Scene VII: Announcing a Mystery

Yet Jesus made many enemies with powerful people. When one stands up to the power structures, there will be consequences. Even one of Jesus’ own disciples betrays him and with a kiss identifies him to guards who have him arrested in the cover of night.
He is brought before the High Priest and other religious elites. They give him a trial, frame him as guilty, and send him to their Roman overlords to press for a death sentence. Jesus’ disciples mostly desert him once he is arrested, his closest disciple, Peter, even denies having ever known him. Only a few female disciples, like Mary of Magdala, stand by him through the end.
He is sent to Pilate for questioning. Pilot wishes to wash his hands of the case, realizing it is a Jewish religious set-up, and no crimes truly worthy of death have been committed. But the people are persistent. The religious leaders incite a mob to demand Jesus executed. Ultimately Pilate bends to the will of the masses. He orders Jesus beaten and crucified.
Even on the cross Jesus acts and speaks out of anther source, one deeper than normal human behavior. He forgives the soldiers who are crucifying him.
From the cross he quotes the psalms, “Father Father, why have you forsaken me?” It is the opening line from a Psalm of David, a Psalm that reveals at the end that God has not forsaken him but will rescue him.
Jesus dies. It is a dark afternoon. A soldier thrusts a spear into him, confirming that Jesus is dead. His body is taken down, wrapped, and placed in a tomb. Night falls, and Sabbath begins. Everyone waits… His disciples are shocked and in hiding. An agonizing day goes by. Each of Jesus’ followers question if they had been fools for being swept up in his movement. Sabbath ends as the sun sets.
Early the next morning, one of Jesus’ lead disciples, Mary of Magdala goes to his tomb. She finds it empty. She encounters Jesus. Alive! She announces it to the other disciples. They do not believe her, until Jesus reveals himself to all of them, and then to over 500 people. He teaches them more about this Kingdom invading our world. Then he tells them that he must leave, but will send an Advocate to support them in spreading this subversive new Kingdom. He ascends and is gone.
They are left reeling with excitement and full of a thousand questions.
Why did Jesus have to die?
What did it do for us? How?
Is it really possible that Jesus was the embodiment of God?
What does it mean that God would show such solidarity with us as to enter our world?
What does it mean that he came not as a emperor or warrior, but as a poor and rejected martyr?
To what extent should we imitate Christ?
How should we willingly sacrifice for others?
Do we become more like God in that process?
Many questions they wrestled with. But despite having far more questions than answers, they passionately shared what they did know: Jesus was dead, and now is alive! They were announcing a mystery.

Scene VIII: A ReVeiled God

These followers of Jesus huddle together in prayer and anticipation of Jesus’ promised Advcoate. 40 days after Passover, the day of Pentecost arrives. It is the day celebrated as the day when Moses had first received God’s law, inaugurating Israel as a nation.
On this day they have a deeply mystical experience. They begin speaking in foreign languages that they had never learned, and people from all over the known world are present and hearing them speak to them in their native tongues. It is full of symbolism. This new gift from God, this Advocate or Divine Breath, Pneuma, is not a law written on stone… but a source of courage, empowerment, and a moral compass that can engage our hearts. It marks the birth of a new people of God. The unifying of languages speaks to a reversal of the scattered languages God had enacted on humanity to slow the spread of Empire. This new people of God, united under the Way of Jesus, are a movement for humanity… not a movement loyal to a single nation or creed.
Each of these people bring very distinct ideas about God and understand Jesus through the unique filters of their own cultures and contexts. They fixate toward various images of God.
Some see him as warrior, others as peace-maker.
Some see him as a victorious lion, king of all… others as a sacrificial lamb, slave to the world.
Some see him as the national God of Israel, others as a universal God of all humanity and creation.
Some see him as very near, closer than our own breath… others as very far, holy and transcendent beyond comprehension.
Some picture God as wrathful and requiring just payment for sin, others see God as compassionate and forgiving without measure.
Some see God as completely sovereign and in control over all activities, others see God as taking a step back and allowing humanity to make its own decision and choices with free-will.
Some see God as a ‘him’, and as a provider, protector, and father; others see God as a ‘her’, a lover, a nurturer, a mother; others see ‘God’ as beyond gender entirely.
What is fascinating is that none of these pictures are without support from the scriptures. Some see this as awkward at best, and at worst capable of inciting a crisis of faith. Some say there must be solutions to these tensions and mysteries.
But others see it as exactly what we should expect when an infinite entity like God begins to self-reveal to a finite creation. The overabundance of God’s identity and personality would swamp our senses, and each of us would only be able to grasp some aspects of it that we understand or are drawn to based on our own life experiences.
As we learn more and more about God, we discover that we understand God less and less. Like a growing light in the midst of darkness… it allows us to see more clearly, but as the light gets brighter and brighter it begins blocking our sight until we are blinded by its brilliance. Growing in knowledge of God is like this, as God becomes more clear and close, and as we get to know God more and more, we simultaneously discover that we know less and less than we had realized.
Thus even as God reveals himself to us, he is simultaneously concealing himself in that very revelation. God revealed and concealed, a ReVeiled God.

Scene IX: Passion for Compassion

These followers of the Way explode across the pages of history. They seek an inner transformation to become more like God, more like Jesus- by taking up Jesus’ worldview. It leads them to stand in opposition to all of the things in this world that violate humanity and creation from how they were originally intended in the beginning.
They stand against people being at war with each other- things like violence, poverty, domination, oppression, inequality, rape, and injustice.
They stand against people being at war with themselves- things like addiction, apathy, self-destruction, shame, hiding.
They stand against people being at war with the planet- like environmental pollution, cruel treatment of other creatures, stripping the planet of resources in destructive ways.
They stand against people being at war with God- by trying to deny truth, beauty, justice, and spirituality and substituting it with Self and Empire as replacement gods.
They sacrifice their livelihood to take care of the poor.
They sacrifice their social positions to refuse to go along with the violence of institutions that have become corrupt- whether military, business, state, or religious institutions.
They sacrifice their very lives to take care of the sick when a plague strikes the Roman Empire.
Through the pouring out of their time, resources, energy, blood, sweat, and tears… they pave the way for a way of life that captivates the imagination of exponentially growing numbers of followers.
God’s people have a history of unfaithfulness, an unfaithfulness that often continues into the early church and on into today.
Yet this is a God who is continually willing to renew his vows with us. We run away, again and again. And he is ready to replace the wedding veil on us and draw us back into intimate connection. We invite the world to this wedding celebration. There is a party to be had… and we work to prepare for it.
Seeing the world through Jesus’ eyes. Identifying with the poor and oppressed. Resisting apathy and selfishness. Reaching out to a world to restore it. Fighting for the ultimate ends of beauty, justice, relationship, spirituality… Love.
We have been given the baton to advance the way of life, death, and new life that Jesus models. This alternative to Empire. This Kingdom. It inspires in us a passion for compassion.

Scene X: Holding Our Breath [with Hope]

We, the gathered ones, or Ekk-le-sia in Greek- sometimes translated ‘church.’ As we gather, we carry on certain purposes. We inspire each other towards worship of this mysterious yet intimate God. We unify in friendship and relationship with each other. And we live with a sense of mission towards our world.
As we travel this life and faith, and study the promises written in the scriptures… we see that we are to live with a focus on this life and world, but with knowledge that there is something else to come as well.
One day, when the time is right, this enfleshed God, this Jesus, will walk the planet again. We see in a prophecy at the very end of the scriptures that all things will be renewed, just as they first were.
There is a prophecy of a city, but not like the decaying urban ghettos that our cities are… it is a city, that is really a collection of gardens- a layering of Eden’s for not just one couple, but for all of humanity. In this garden there is a tree. The same tree we saw in the beginning of the story. We are told that its leaves bring healing to the nations, and all wars, striving for dominance, and empire are ceased. We join together is a wedding feast, where we drink deeply in celebration. We see God face to face, as Adam and Eve first did. We stop hiding, we take off our masks, our fig leaves… without shame. The planet is renewed and restored, its scars from strip mining and pollution healing like the scars on Jesus’ hands and feet.
This promise brings us back to a place where we can take up our original place as co-creators with God. Taking the raw elements and potential of this planet and work with it to create the best works that have yet to be conceived. The most inspiring art and music has yet to be seen and heard, the grandest architectural achievements have yet to be walked in, the greatest culinary achievements and the best wines have yet to be tasted. There is much work to be done in this garden, but not the work of restoration that we know in this life. Instead the work is sheerly the creative opportunities that we were first intended for. It is an unfinished beauty restored to us.
There are also scriptures that speak of a form of punishment for those who do not live the Way of Jesus. A punishment for those who refuse to help the poor, sick, hungry, and vulnerable. A punishment for those who give into the Empire in their hearts and support its projection into our world. For Empire is the direct enemy of Kingdom. The images of this punishment are vague and frightening. It’s exact nature and duration are unclear, and thankfully avoidable.
So, we live with passion towards this life, and anticipation of the next. It is a risk. There is mystery, we do not know exactly what happens after our final heart beat, what happens after our final breath. But we see the promises in scripture, the renewed world and resurrected bodies it points to- the return to the garden. It is a beautiful image of our world made new. It is one worth dreaming of, and so even though it still feels world apart from the reality around us we close our eyes and hold our breath (with hope).