Now you’ve heard the highlight reel of our faith history from beginning to new beginning, well it was new as of 1,986 years ago. So, where’s the rest? No sequel? Is there no canon that continues the chronicle of the New Covenant in action after the gospels were written? There’s a lot more to be learned about both the glorious and the despicable behavior of latter day and present-day so-called disciples. These stories are important. So, why in the world would we think that God has stopped talking to us and inspiring us to tell the rest of the history?
Our God is living and active. And by the way, even if we get things wrong about God, someone can still learn from what we say and what we write in the future, even if it’s only to say, “I am going to try hard to do things differently.” Have we put ourselves out of the business of writing the next chapters of our faith history because we are afraid we’ll get it wrong? Or are there no new additions to our canon because we really don’t believe in a God who is still living and loving?
I have been all over this world: the arctic, the Antarctic, fourteen to sixteen-thousand-foot mountain peaks, and I have sat on the floor of the Pacific Ocean in a submarine. I have seen with my own eyes what God has made, and I have absolutely no doubt that God is living and active. You don’t have to go to such places to know that. So why then do we think that only this limited subset of writings about God is all that there will be going forward? If people are reading it less and less, and research indicates that to be the case, isn’t it possible that we have given poor instruction about how to use it? Or maybe the people need to hear stories that speak to them in their own contemporary context? Isn’t it possible that we have boxed God into a coffin by ending the story when it only was just beginning? Jesus did not come to start a church—his followers did that. Jesus started a renewal of life. When you read the stories about Jesus and pay attention to the way he told us to live, he didn’t say anything about church. He talked to people in deeply personal and practical ways about fulfilling their potential as children created in the image of God. That is the mission of the Christian!
What will the scriptures yet to be written say about our time? Will they talk about institutions who fought with one another over doctrine, or will they talk about how we walked hand in hand with each other to resurrect lands torn apart by endless war, how we worked tirelessly to teach people the skills and give them the opportunities to be lifted out of poverty. Will we welcome the stranger in the name of Jesus or will we be recorded as saying, “Sorry—no room at the inn?”
Speculating about the future is far less fruitful than building it. And I cannot even imagine anything more exciting than building the future and writing about how we worked with our creator to do it. Humans have gotten a lot of things wrong about God and about creation during our relatively brief tenure on Earth by geologic standards, but there are a couple really important things that we have gotten right. The first is that there really is one force so powerful and so unexplainable that it created and still enervates this universe, we don’t even have words to describe it. That power, that creative energy—that IS God. The second thing we got right, is that yes—there IS resurrection always and everywhere. It is still happening, and you need to write it down or record it in your smartphone or take a photographic image to remind yourself and your descendants what it looks like, so when things get tough, they know to look for resurrection and maybe be part of making it happen.
Our faith history tells us that people have always suffered from a failure of imagination, a lack of creativity, and a failure of spirit, and in spite of that—we are still here and we are still loved. And yes! We are still evolving toward the fulfillment of our potential to be compassionate, intelligent children of the light Because of resurrection, redemption—renewal. Be the story and then tell that good news. God is not done with this story.
Alleluia, Christ is risen!