A Heroic God

Scripture being read in worship at King of Peace

The Bible is fundamentally a story of people's journey with God. Scripture is an account of human existence as told by God. In scripture, we see that God is taking the disconnected elements of our lives and pulling them together into a coherent story that means something.

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Story is the fundamental means of talking about and listening to God, the only human means available to us that is complex and engaging enough to make comprehensible what it means to be with God.

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In Abraham and Sarah, Cain and Abel, Noah and Shady Grove [a contemporary church], what we have is not first of all a heroic people, but a heroic God who refuses to abandon God's creation, a God who keeps coming back, picking up the pieces, and continuing the story: "And then..." "And next..."

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Here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church.

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An important gift the church gives us is a far richer range of options, commitments, duties, and troubles than we would have if left to our own devices.

~Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony