Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Church.
Don’t get me wrong; Jesus is important. But I think the story of God is bigger than these Church seasons lead me to see. While Jesus is the climax of the covenant, we see this story of “God with us” beginning “in the beginning” and continuing throughout the narrative with the people of Israel, in both their exodus and exile and everything in between.
And then the story keeps going, continuing even today. Pentecost gives a nod in this direction, but this story of God’s New Creation, God’s Domination Free Society, the Ecology of God, the Open Source Network of God, the Kingdom of God continues to come to life in our world today.
Only when the story is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Church, we miss the broader context and construct that we see throughout the narrative of scripture and in God’s work beyond the first century and in our world and lives throughout history and today.
Remember, I do think Jesus is important. So I’m not saying he should be relegated to a tiny fraction of our attention. And I know we can foreshadow and flashback to the broader story, but to know where you’re going you have to know where you’ve been. You have to know the whole story; how it has unfolded and how it continues to unfold today.
Maybe it’s my Wrightian influences, but I’m a fan of Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, New Creation – a five act drama that continues to unfold and we find ourselves as actors in the fifth act.
Now I know I’m not going to shift the larger culture of the church calendar, but I hope we remember that Jesus is a finger pointing at the moon. And while the finger is important, it’s more important not to become too fixed on the finger instead of that to which it points.
(For more on this conversation, check out the facebook thread where it all started.)
