The Lord’s Supper functions with a similar dynamic. It’s only by participation that we can more fully know the Jesus behind the material elements. It seems as though Jesus often reveals himself through meals. On the road to Emmaus he interprets Old Testament passages through the life of the Messiah. The two disciples don’t know who Jesus is until he breaks bread. This moment creates a great ritual realization. Eating leads to seeing. In the Eucharist, Christ doesn’t teach by mere words. He gives us something we can taste, touch, and see. The Word doesn’t stay as Word but becomes flesh. He meets his embodied people with his body.
From this we can tell that remembering is a mental act but also something more than that. Remembering the details of Jesus’s life and death are also ways of abiding in his life and death (John 6:53–56). Remembering takes us back to visceral reactions and deep emotions. If you were to remember the best moment of your life, I’m sure your heart would beat a bit faster and a grin would emerge on your face. There’s something about remembering that takes us back and produces bodily reactions. Likewise, if I were to ask you to remember the worst moment of your life, I’m sure you could feel the shame or terror of that moment as if it were happening right then. Remembering is an embodied and holistic action that re-members, puts things together, reconciles. Remembering Christ in the Eucharist is a kind of return in which Christ can heal us. Christ invites us to take himself into our very being, where he can put together the pieces that are broken and fragmented. To remember is to realize and recall that who I am is a process and a story in which God is with me during every act. By remembering, we invite God in to heal our broken memories.
Real remembering, deep remembering, is a kind of return: a return to the cross, a return to forgiveness, a return to Eden, a return to God. If we do the hard work of rightly remembering, there we encounter a healing truth.
Truth matters because the gospel matters. “Gospel” means “good news,” and the news needs to be true for it to be good. The premise of this book is that all spiritual formation finds its roots in the gospel of grace. This gospel must be known, stewarded, heralded, and, in the Lord’s Supper, remembered.
Martin Luther explains what gospel ministry is all about when he writes,
Here I must take counsel of the gospel. I must hearken to the gospel, which teacheth me, not what I ought to do, (for that is the proper office of the law,) but what Jesus Christ the Son of God hath done for me: to wit, that He suffered and died to deliver me from sin and death. The gospel willeth me to receive this, and to believe it. And this is the truth of the gospel. It is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consisteth.
Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.9
Knowing the gospel, teaching it to others, and “beat[ing] it into their heads continually”—this is what the truth tradition values. We need it. One way to define Christian ministry is as a regular reminder. We’re prone to forget, but spiritual formation is grounded in remembering the goodness of the gospel of God.
1. See especially Noll, Scandal of the Evangelical Mind; Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind; Blamires, The Christian Mind; Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds.
2. Noll, Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 3.
3. Mohler, “Scandal of Biblical Illiteracy.”
4. Officially, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism consists of five basic tenets: “1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. 2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. 5. Good people go to heaven when they die” (C. Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 162–63).
5. Niebuhr, Kingdom of God in America, 193.
6. Hauerwas, “End of American Protestantism.”
7. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 26.
8. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 4.
9. Luther, Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 206.
2
The Story-Shaped Life
FROM A DEVOTIONAL FAITH TO A DEEP FAITH
Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
—John 17:17
What are we to do? The question seems simple and innocent enough, but it’s actually complex. In his book After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre claims, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”1 He notices that the stories we tell give shape and meaning to our lives. We live a narrative life. It’s an undeniable part of morality: we can say what’s good only when we understand what story we are in. Stories provide the good or goal that we are to pursue.
Let me explain by drawing attention to a false story we tell ourselves. Stanley Hauerwas argues that the project of modernity is an “attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the story that they choose when they had no story.”2 I think Hauerwas’s description of modernity is probably the narrative that feels most natural. We don’t choose a story—nay, we ought not choose a story—until we consciously opt in. We are part of no story by default, and we have endless stories to choose from. We are individuals, and we are free. The presumption of this story is that I get to make up my own life. So when someone asks, “What am I to do?” the answer is, “Whatever you want to do.” No one can tell us what to do. There is no good for our lives that can be scripted. We are making it up.
But the story of not having a story is still a story. It’s like a man thinking he has freedom to buy whatever he wants in a grocery store. In a sense, that’s true. But he is limited to the options in the grocery store, and those choices were made before he got there. We’re not as free to choose as we think we are. We’ve inherited the story even if we didn’t choose it.
In literature, a tragedy is defined as a serious story where all relationships function in a power struggle. There is no happy ending. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and we need to be mature and look at the grim reality in the face. You were born. You will die. Find meaning between point A (birth) and point B (death), but meaning and purpose will not outlast you. Depend on no one. Trust no authority or tradition. You only live once, so make choices that make you happy.
But what if we don’t live in a tragedy? What if it’s not up to us to find meaning, purpose, and pleasure? What if the true story is more of a comedy and less of a tragedy?
In literature, a comedy is not necessarily a funny story, if by “funny” we mean that it makes people laugh. A comedy is a story with a happy ending. The narrative may contain sadness, but we find reasons for hope even amid trials and suffering. It’s a different story than the modern one that we have no story until we choose a story. In this comedy, none of us is the main character in the story after all. At best, we pass by as extras. In this Christian story, we don’t have to fight to discover or find love. Love finds us.
And if love finds us, then we are not heroes raging against the competition of the world like characters in a tragedy; we are ordinary people, connecting with one another and all creation through the love that inspired the stars. This story causes us to give a different answer to the question, “What am I to do?” It lays out a different vision of the good life.
In order to live well, people need to be shaped by a true story. In another context, Hauerwas writes, “No society can be just or good that is built on falsehood. The first task of Christian social ethics, therefore, is not to make the ‘world’ better or more just, but to help Christian people form their community consistent with their conviction that the story of Christ is a truthful account of our existence.”3 The purpose of this chapter is to sketch that true story of Christ and show how this truthful account of our existence narrates the way we live and what we are to do.
THE FRAMING NARRATIVE
I love the way Dorothy Sayers connects doctrine (dogma) and story (drama). She says,
Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—dull dogma as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.4
Along the same lines, C. S. Lewis calls Christianity the “true myth”: it’s the orienting story in which all other stories find their purpose and fulfillment.5 We love rising tension and battles between good and evil. We all have a desire to be redeemed and healed by an act of sacrificial love. There’s something primal about these paradigmatic stories. Lewis argues that all good stories reflect the ultimate story: Jesus Christ conquering sin by laying down his life in love. All lasting and meaningful stories are modeled after that first “myth.” The problem is not preaching or dogma or assertions of truth. Dogma is not cold and stale. Dogma is the life-giving force of the universe. When the church retreats from the dogma contained in the drama, it’s no wonder the world is uninterested in what we have to say.
Sayers continues,
It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.6
The Christian story is the most beautiful, compelling, rich story in the world. Our dogma is anything but boring or irrelevant.
It all started with God creating “all things visible and invisible,” as the Nicene Creed says. The pinks of the sky at sunset and the taste combination of carne asada tacos both have their origin in the good God of the universe. God creates all things for the purpose of returning praise to himself by our enjoying what he created. He made a cosmic playground for us to enjoy, and he invites us to participate in pushing back the chaos and ugliness of the world and to join him in spreading order and beauty and peace. The sense deep in our hearts that we were made for adventure turns out to be true: God invites us to participate with him in the redemption of the world.
Yet rather than live under the good care of our Creator, we try to be our own gods. We listened to the devious voice of the serpent rather than the gracious voice of God. I don’t think I need to explain this part of the story very much. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong. Things are not the way they are supposed to be. Children are trafficked. Workers are exploited. People are homeless. We feel isolated and disconnected from others. Our closest relationships—those with family members, spouses, friends—are sometimes racked with conflict and anger. And I haven’t even begun to mention the conflict within our souls. The guilt we carry and the shame that burdens us feel unbearable at times. We don’t feel at peace in our own skin. We don’t do what we want to do, and the things we know we should do seem impossible (see Rom. 7:15–20). No matter how hard we try to change, no matter the methods we use or the people we ask for help, it feels like we’ll always be helpless and hopeless. Who can save us when our main problem is ourselves?
