[transcription from the first message of our fall series at un'ed.i.ted spirituality]
Wikipedia – as far as I’m concerned, is the final store of all human knowledge

It is the intellectual equivalent of a flash mob for me

Hundreds upon thousands of individuals contributing their part to a story bigger than any person could write on their own

The ultimate web 2.0 redefinition of what an encyclopedia can be
I love it
I use it for everything
I research everything from my messages to random common conversational disagreements to forgotten factiods that have slipped my mind and are driving me insane
It’s amazing—

For the record, wikipedia currently holds over 10 million articles
Comprised of over 1.3 billion words

An average of 4000 articles are added everyday
Each of those 10 million articles are edited an average of 14 times a day
Almost 57 000 people have contributed at least 10 edits on the site
And almost 2.7 million edits are recorded every single month
And at that pace you could forgive someone – perhaps me-
from starting to believe that all available knowledge will soon be accumulated in wikipedia – by the end of the week maybe

And that real research is for suckers

Because wikipedia is all you will ever need
But it can even start to feel there isn’t much left to be discovered in the world

Given a couple more days wikipedia will have it all anyway

Scientists believe they can trace history back 10 to the negative 43 seconds after the big bang
That is one million, trillion, trillion, trillionths of a second after the moment when all matter coalesced into the space no larger than a single atom and exploded into creation

You consider that and it can seem like there is very little left to the imagination at times

the problem with that is sometimes it doesn’t seem to leave any space for us to write a good story with our lives
What do you and I have to contribute?

Where wikipedia should feel like a smart mob with each individual contributing their piece to create something bigger than any one person

It can start to feel like your contribution doesn’t mean much in the face what’s already been gathered
Like you have nothing to contribute
Everything’s already been written
And this is part of what I think we’ve lost when it comes to spirituality in our culture

We tell the story of God likes it’s already been written

Like the book is closed
The story is over
It’s clinical and it’s sterile
its like a textbook and our place is to simply read and retain
Absorb and assimilate information

But never to participate
Or contribute
Or find our own meaningful place in that narrative

Because everything has already been written
____
But then thankfully we occasionally come across cracks in our knowledge base

Glorious little flaws in the way we have constructed the world around us

Things that remind us our understanding doesn’t go as deep as we might have thought

I sent out an article this week on the facebook update titled

13 things that don’t make sense
I won’t bore with all 13
Although you can still go read the article if you are as fascinated with random knowledge as I am

But one simple example

Placebos
We have no idea how or why they work
Don’t try this at home
But imagine you were to induce pain in someone everyday for a prolongued period
And then control that pain with morphine

And then a ways into the experiment you switched the morphine for, say, saline solution without telling the patient slash guinea pig

What do you think would happen
Well in most trials having non-medicinal saline solution pumped into your arm would take the pain away

Now we know placebos are powerful and most people would say it’s all in the head

But a guy named Fabrizio Bendetti was satisfied with that answer
So he actually did this to his patients
The lesson, beware Italian doctors
He took this a step farther
Once the saline solution was controling the pain he introduced a drug called naxolone into the experiment without telling the subjects
Naxolone actually counteracts the effects of Morphine
Now since no one was actually receiving any morphine Bendetti didn’t expect anything to happen
He just really like the idea of injecting drugs
Incredibly though
the nazolone started to counter act the effects of the saline solution that shouldn’t have been doing anything to start with

So now thanks to Bendetti doctors believe the placebo effect has some kind of biochemical basis

It’s not just all in your head
But now they are even more confused because no one knows exactly how or why or what is really happening
And it only took 24 patients in excruciating pain to figure out what we didn’t know

I only bring that up to remind us that there are still vast numbers of categories that don’t fit within the boundaries of what we understand
Things that haven’t been written
Things that we push to the edge of our experience or just simply ignore because we don’t know what to do with them

And maybe spirituality was always meant to fall into one of those categories

Maybe it was always meant to be more like wikipedia
(where everyone has something to contribute to the story)
and less like a traditional encyclopedia or less like a religion
(where everything is defined for us up front)

I realize that when we talk about the scriptures as a story we find ourselves in

It can be kind of esoteric and airy- fairy

It’s hard to put handles on that

But hopefully as we start to walk our way through the book of John during this series that will start to make more sense to us
I want to read you the open passage to gospel of John in a second

But first let’s put this book in context

John is writing at the end of the 1st century

This is a very late book, probably one of the last books in the Bible to be written
And as such he has a very different approach than the other gospel writers
The other guys are writing history
Not in the way we might write a history book today, trying to get all the details

But they’re trying to capture the most important moments in Jesus life as they happened, or at least as they remember them

John on the other hand is writing theology
He’s writing to make a point about Jesus
If Mark was written in the mid- 50s within a couple decades after Jesus death
And the Luke and Matthew follow in the 70s and 80s

John is writing in the late 90s a full 60 years after the time of Christ

And he’s reflecting on everything the church has learned and developed and hypothesized about this man Jesus
And he’s trying to capture that in a form that brings us along for the discovery

Just listen to the language that John uses he writes here his opening words

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

_John 1:1-14

So John is writing with an agenda here – to make a point about Jesus
To sum up a half century of theological exploration and development that has happened since Jesus’ death

And look at the language that he uses here
It’s certainly not the language of a text book or a history book
I mean what does his writing sound like to you?
To me the best parallel I can imagine is something more like a fairy tale

“In the beginning” sounds a lot like
“Once upon a time” to me

In fact the comparison runs even deeper than the language of the text
In the Jewish culture the bed time stories, the fairy tales of the Hebrews were the old testament scriptures

And by the time John writes most of the Jewish population has been hellenized

That means they have been integrated into Greco Roman culture

They lived and worked within the Roman economy
They adapted to Roman culture
They even wrote and spoke Greek most fo the time
In fact John is writing in Greek rather than Hebrew
And the most popular version of the Old Testament at that time was a Greek translation
We call that translation the Septuagint
And it was the primary old testament text in the early church

You can push that even farther because in the Greek tradition books didn’t have catchy names like they do today

They were called by, usually, the first 3 words of the first sentence

So when John is choosing his first sentence, it’s an important decision
And he makes a pretty ballsy move
Because he lifted the first three words from what book? The Septuagint
He’s just titled his book, for lack of a better contemporary equivalent… the Bible… by John

He’s framing the story of Jesus in the same terms as the stories of the Jewish tradition
He’s placing the story of Jesus in the canon of Jewish family history
He’s connecting the story of Jesus to every thing important to the Jews that has come before
And he does that not by giving us the details
But by presenting us with a story

Now think about what you need for a good story

First he sets up a protagonist
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God

So the hero of our story is God

And then he builds a context for God to operate in

He says, though him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made
So the stage for this drama is epic

It’s creation– all of it
Everything that is

You and I and everyone else you meet
Or wherever else you go

Is the stage for this story John is telling us
And then he builds up the anticipation

He was the light
and that light that brings light to all men was coming into the world

But we still need a conflict – something to drive the story

And so he writes this, he says, he came to the world but the world didn’t recognize him
He came to his own but his own did not receive him

Now an interesting thing here
Because John sets this conflict up in a very personal way

He says He came to his own
The word is “idios” and he uses a form of the word that is passive neuter
It means his own stuff – what he owned
Remember John has already said that he made the world – so it is his own world

But then he switches things up a bit and he says his own did not receive him

Now this time it’s a masculine plural possessive form of that same word

This time it means his own people – or his own family, that’s who didn’t receive him
He came to his own world but his own family didn’t receive him
John is trying to pull his readers into the emotional context of this conflict

That God would come into his world in a way that risks his own safe position

I mean if you want a good story then the protagonist has to risk something right?
This is the batman superman problem
Batman is a regular guy who wants to stop crime so it’s easy to root for him – to see yourself in his story

But Superman is, well Superman
He can’t be beaten, he can’t be defeated
Sure he’s got his one weakness to kryptonite but really do you ever feel like Sups isn’t going win?
And where does all that kryptonite come from every week anwyay?
Well John’s trying to tell a story about God
So how do you make God a compelling, relatable hero?

You remind everyone that to love is to risk
To put yourself out there – means you take the chance of being rejected

And it doesn’t matter whether you can create a universe with the blink of an eye
If you want to love – you have to take a chance

So we’ve got a protagonist, a context, conflict
What else do we need for a good story

We need a resolution
And look at how John writes this, he says
The word become flesh and made his dwelling among us
Eugene Peterson translated it this way
He says the word became one of us and moved into the neighborhood

And to all who received him, to those that believed in him, he gave the right to become children of God

___
Now the interesting thing here to me
Is that he ends the story the same the same way he started it

With a choice

He starts the story with a choice that God makes to create
And he ends it,
by pointing to a choice that we make about where we will put ourselves in the story
See this is the thing about faith and spirituality

It can never become a story that is finished and written and over and closed

Because spirituality is built on the concept of a choice
Listen when you think all the way back 10 the negative 43 seconds after the moment of creation

You have one of two logical absurdities to choose from

Either
All matter coalesced into a space no larger than a single atom and exploded into a universe beyond comprehension
On its own
Or because someone chose it

And the truth is both are legitimate choices to make

The problem for me – is one doesn’t leave me with a good story to be a part of

If you choose to believe that all that there is to this universe is matter and energy
You don’t have much of a story left to live
Because in the end, when all is said and done, all you are left with is physical determinism

And any appearance of choice that seems to exist in your life can be reduced down to simply an illusion of the almost infinite number of variables that are at play in your existence
it may seem like you and I can choose but it’s only an illusion
Because if we could construct a computer large enough to calculate all actions of all of atoms in all of the universe

To play out all the ways in which they collide and gather and create molecules then cells then organisms

To calculate all the variables of our interactions and memories and the neural pathways they’ve created in your head
If we could determine all of the biological factors that go into something as complex as you

If we could do all that
And matter really was all there is to the universe

Then we could determine exactly how you would react and respond and appear to chose in any given moment
Everything would have already been written as a simple function of very complex math

Or.. you can choose to believe in choice

That God choose to create
That God choose to set in motion a series of events (how every that looks for you)
that has resulted in you sitting here tonight with a choice about how you will respond to him
And this is the story that John presents to us as a narrative to find ourselves in

He says there is side to this world that will never be able to be contained within a text book or an encyclopedia or a religious system that determines for you the end of your story

Because that is still unwritten
In philosophical terms we call this the Kalam cosmological argument
It actually comes from a form of dialectical argument common in Islamic study
(thank you wikipedia)

But it argues this
Everything that begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe has a cause
that cause, whatever it is, is what we call God
Now Kalam gets you no where near a Christian narrative about God

But it sets in motion the idea that life truly can meaningfully be about journey and discovery
And that the questions you ask and attempt to answer and are important and valuable and real
There’s screen writer’s guru named Robert McKee

If you’ve seen the movie Adaptation which is a fantastic exploration of the connection between life and story

He is played wonderfully by the actor Brain Cox
Well McKee does these screenwriting classes
In real life and in the movie

And he’s notoriously cranky and mean and sarcastic to his students
But tons of people attend because he’s a guy who understand the craft and has demonstrated that by writing a lot of really good material

If you’ve ever wanted to be a screenwriter
Read his book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style, And The Principles Of Screenwriting”

I haven’t read it yet but I’ve always wanted to
And apparently it is THE book to read on the art of screen writing

Anyway, he says this in his book

The story teller’s selection and arrangement of events is his master metaphor for the interconnectedness of all the levels of reality, personal, political, environmental, spiritual. Stripped of its surface of characterization or location, story structure reveals his personal cosmology, his insight into the deepest patterns and motivations for how and why things happen in this life. It is his map of life’s hidden order.

Now read through the prologue from John’s gospel again

Because that’s exactly what he’s doing
He strips the story of its surface
It’s characterization and location

And gives only the structure to what he’s going to flesh through the rest of his book

And this is his personal cosmology
That you and I began with a choice
And will likewise define ourselves with a choice
____
Look, for us to honestly place ourselves within the larger narrative of Christianity

Yes we need to be cognizant of what has already been written
We need to be students of history and theology and philosophy
It’s a lot of homework being a Christian
We need to learn from those who have walked this path before us
But at the same time we need to keep ourselves conscious of the books that have yet to be written

The spirituality of Christianity is this incredible book store
That spans ages and dynasties and cultures and personalities
But at the same time holds this empty shelf reserved for all the stories that have yet to be told
All the books that have yet to be written

Books that can only be written in each of our lives
As we engage with the story of creation
As we find ourselves in the narrative of the kingdom of God
Something that maybe was always meant to be more like a collaboration or more like wikipedia than we ever imagined the church could be.