Over the next few weeks, we will be working through a series called New Beginnings – our only series this semester separate from the rest of the church! This series is based on some of the ideas and contents found in the book Everything Is Spiritual by Rob Bell, where he unpacks the idea that in an increasingly disconnected and polarized world, everything is connected and fits together as parts of a whole. Throughout this series, we will focus on how we – as individuals, as communities and as humanity – follow the continuous path forward into new adventures, new chapters, new realities, new versions of ourselves that bring us closer to who God created us to be.
It is at the end of what we think we know to be certain that new things begin. You don’t make the varsity team, or you don’t get the role in the play you hoped for, or you don’t have the job you imagined or live in the neighborhood you grew up in – you don’t have the life you thought you would or had planned. You’ve worked hard, you followed “the plan,” and people told you that if you followed the plan, it would all work out. But best plans fall apart, and you’re left with this question: now what?
I think curiosity is underrated. There’s a humility that is baked into curiosity. You don’t know – that’s your starting point. Curiosity starts from a place of openness, driven by an itch for something new, a hope that there’s something else out there. In many ways, curiosity is the engine of life – questions bubble up from somewhere and they don’t go away. Sometimes that curiosity develops into something more – a calling, an invitation, an imagination of what could be.
Some things speak to us, and they never stop speaking. Longings, places, desires, hopes, dreams, questions about what our lives could be and where they might go and who we could become – sometimes, once they’ve started speaking, they never go away. It can be terrifying, and sometimes lonely, not knowing what comes next, or what the cost will be, or how you’re going to figure it out, or how it’s going to pay the bills. But the fear doesn’t make the calling any less real, any less insistent, any less exciting.
It’s really easy to get stuck thinking that “this is just the way the world works, this is just the way it is, this is how it has always been so this is the way it’s always going to be.” Curiosity’s questions draw us out of the known of what is, toward what could be – imagination is taking those questions and finding new answers: new ideas, new visions, new solutions free us from the same old patterns, the same old systems, the same old problems.
There is this myth that has existed for as longs as humans have called the myth of redemptive violence – it’s the belief that when someone wrongs you, the way to make it better is to wrong them. “an eye for an eye” and what have you. They say something mean about you, you say something mean about them; they bomb us, then we bomb them. Redemptive violence never, ever makes things any better – there’s no justice in it, only revenge. What the myth of redemptive violence actually does is keep the harm in circulation: back and forth the harm goes, without anybody ever really learning anything. At the heart of the myth is a lack of learning, of new thinking – of imagination.
That imagination, that belief that things could and should be different is the revolutionary truth at the heart of the story of Jesus: Jesus is executed by the powers that be, Roman and Jew, for insisting that there are other ways to change the world than how it has always been: love; solidarity; generosity and compassion; praying for those we see as “other” and choosing to live life alongside them.
This has been the power of the teachings of Jesus for two thousand years: he insisted, then and today, that we don’t have to live like this. The violence can end. We can stop the revenge and bloodshed and all the responses that never do anything but keep all the harm and pain in circulation. There are other forces at work in the world, more enduring and powerful.
You might say, ok, I get it, that’s nice in theory but that’s not really how the real world works, we don’t get to change things because we want to, it’s not that simple. I’m just one person, we’re just a small group of people, living in Fort Worth and the world is way more complex than it was back then.
Jesus was “just a guy” that lived two thousand years ago – fully divine, yes, but also fully human. And to insist that this is just how it is, this is just the way the world works is to fail to see that the great invitation of being human is that we get to change how it is. Jesus’s calling to us, still today, is to carry on the legacy of creating a world that looks less like “just how it is” and more like God intended – full of kindness, compassion, empathy, grace, peace, mercy and love.
It’s not simple. It’s certainly not easy. But all of this is connected – all of us are connected. Small movements over here, in my life, in what I’m doing, in the world I can create, can cause massive shifts over there. But you have to start somewhere. Throughout the course of this series, we are going to talk about:
- the process of how we move forward, of not settling for what is and instead imagining what could be;
- how, not if but when the outcomes of our work are outside our control, how we adapt and start again; and
- when we find ourselves at the end of one chapter, how those ends generate new beginnings.
We hope you and your family will join us in the Justin for this series – we are very excited to see where our conversations take us. See you Sunday!
Matt Britt
Director of Youth Ministries
