The Longing for Story
“Nobody really finds meaning in life by sitting down with a set of ethical principles and saying, ‘I want to live this way,’” Keller says in the sermon. “In the last 10 years [in our own culture], academics have rightly begun to rediscover the centrality of story. A person finds logos—[a reason to be]—by taking their little life and bringing it up into something bigger, a greater cause, a larger story.”
When John writes, “We beheld His glory,” to a Greek audience, he startles.
“What John is saying is the logos is a person,” Keller says. “The divine word—the thing you were created by and the thing you are created for—has become a human being.”
Keller points to J.R.R. Tolkien, whose thinking led C.S. Lewis away from atheism to the truth of Christianity.
For Lewis, the great stories of dying gods and great sacrifices from ancient cultures inexplicably moved him to embrace hope, longing and beauty in what he understood to be a pointless world. He confessed to Tolkien of a deep longing stirred by great myths. How can this be, he asked his friend, if the stories are lies “though breathed in silver.”
In response, Tolkien asks Lewis to consider the “one true myth.”
Keller summarizes Tolkien’s proposal: “When it comes to Jesus Christ—the story of His birth, death and resurrection—you don’t have one more story that points to a greater reality, you have the reality to which all the myths have been pointing. The day He was born, the day the word became flesh and dwelt among us, the myth became a fact.”
Begin With the Story’s End
“We have to remember the Bible is not just a belief system or a ticket to heaven,” Gabe Lyons says. “The story of Jesus helps us understand that Christians have a role to play in the world. We get to participate in the renewal of all things that God is working out over time.”
In the desire to engage the culture with the Bible, Lyons founded Q Ideas, a learning community mobilizing Christians to advance the common good.
“We want to create a place where we can better understand our cultural narratives and engage them in ways credible to the culture and also faithful to the Gospel story,” he says. “When we work with others, Christians or not, in activities that cause society to flourish and justice to advance, we participate in the kind of redemptive work Jesus wants us to engage for His glory.”
In the shared ground of a broken humanity desiring redemption, dialogue opens, and Christians find new opportunities to point to the Author, extending invitations to imagine the Gospel story as really true.
