This is #8 in Crossing the Threshold series.

                                                Story

In the beginning…..Once upon a time…..A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, these are words that capture our heart because they take us into the world of story. Story is important; it is far more than mere entertainment. Story is a way of seeing, a way of understanding, and a way of knowing. Take your own personal life; without your family story how would you know who you are? Indeed people who have been separated early in life from their family story often struggle with identity until they find a new family story to inhabit. Story helps you find your place in the universe. It brings order to your life; it pushes back the chaos by placing you in time and giving your life a framework.

Story also helps you remember. The world is extremely complex, so full of facts and information. Story helps you take all that data and place it into “story files”; giving you the ability to remember people, places and events by the context of story.

Story is a language, a mother tongue. As a baby you learned to communicate with words like Mama, Dada, and baby. These weren’t just first words, they were placing you as a character into an already ongoing narrative. This most basic orientation to life came through story.

Everyone deep down intuits this; they know they are a character in a story. They may not like the part they have been cast into but they sense they were meant to be part of a story. That is the appeal and the power of movies and novels. Most people want out of their own ordinary story even if but for a few hours; so they escape into a fictitious story one that promises more. There is one story above all others that appeals to this “more” and resonates with in the heart. It is the heroic adventure*. Think of the movies you love: Braveheart, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Avatar, Gladiator, Harry Potter, Lion King, Robin Hood, Polar Express, Indiana Jones, Finding Nemo, ET, The Wizard of Oz, all of these and so many more have one thing in common. They all are about a hero who steps out of the ordinary world and into an epic adventure.

This is #7 in Crossing the Threshold series.

                                                   Journey

We live in a divided world. The sacred secular split goes deeper than just dividing what is sacred from what is secular. The split has divided heaven from earth, time from eternity, body from soul, and Christ from His church. God never intended for his world to be bifurcated (that means forked like a serpent’s tongue) that came from another source.

The end result is that the secular world lost the truth. They lost the one true God and his large story. Interestingly enough they retained a love for story, for narrative, the language of the heart. Look where everyone wants to go these days….the movies. If they cannot afford to actually go to the movies they will buy a large screen television and bring the movies home. Why? For most it is their moment of transcendence. For a couple of hours they can be caught up in something larger than themselves. Having lost God’s metanarrative there is little hope for something epic to be a part of. Movies will have to suffice and very subtlety becomes a form of worship.

The Church retained the truth but lost the story. Having confined the beauty, intimacy, and adventure with God to the past or future they have nothing to capture their hearts in the present. Reading the Bible like a scientific text book filled with doctrinal truth and biblical principles does nothing to quench the emptiness of the heart. Like the secular world they too live in a small story albeit a religious one, and they often watch the movies the secular world produces to give themselves a fleeting moment of transcendence. Indeed both sides want out of the mundane ordinary world because in their heart they know they were created for more.

In order to find this “more” we must go on a journey. First we need to enter the secular realm and dive into the story that captures everyone’s heart and imagination. When we have a good grasp of that story we will step over into the sacred realm and discover perhaps for the first time what God’s real intention was for his people. Finally we will weave the two realms back together. Our diagram of history (it was headless after the split) will finally be complete because it will at last have its Head.

So let’s begin where all stories do …..”Once upon a time there was a hero”

This is #6 in the Crossing the Threshold series.

                                                     The Church

How did the church come through this great rift? Unscathed? Did any of the Titanic survivors come through the sinking uninjured? Hardly! They bore the scars for the rest of their lives. Once again the church was divided, this time between Catholic and Protestant, a division which just seems to keep multiplying (think: Mainline, Fundamental, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Seeker etc.) There are volumes written by learned scholars on the impact of man’s reorientation from being one who worships a god to one who thinks he is a god. For our purposes we need to understand three major changes that occurred. There was a shift from the corporate to the individual, from the heart to the head, and from the objective to the subjective.

This great divide brought about a radical shift in allegiance from the corporate church to the individual. The Reformation led the way with Martin Luther’s “priesthood of all believers”. This was both a natural response against the abuses and corruption of the medieval church and a scriptural one. However, the ideas that glorified man coming out of the Renaissance and the movements that followed fed what was to be corrective in nature into something more far reaching. Very subtlety a reorientation was taking place that would lead people away from the corporate body to a more privatized and individualized faith. Not only did this affect their understanding of what it meant to be part of the Body of Christ, it also resulted in a diminishment of the Gospel.

Today the Gospel is often presented as the means by which an individual gets “saved” so they can go to heaven when they die. It is rather like a glorified life insurance policy sold by energetic salesmen, and it is all about you. It is all about what happens when you die and where you go when you die and that Christ died for your sins. A gospel that emphasizes death more than life and sin more than godliness, Dallas Willard calls it a “gospel of sin management”. There may be elements of truth in such a gospel but the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the “good news” is about a whole lot more than you. As N.T. Wright says the good news was news about an event that actually happened, an event that changed time and eternity forever. The Resurrection from the dead of Israel’s Messiah Jesus of Nazareth meant that God’s project for renewing and restoring His entire creation was now going forth. The life of the age to come had now entered time and was being made available to all. The invitation was and still is you can be part of God’s new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17) by receiving Jesus the Christ (the King) and in so doing you become part of his corporate body the church. You enter a fellowship, a “royal priesthood” where sacrificial love replaces ego driven spirituality.

Not only did the great rift divide the church, it also divided human beings. In the 17^th century the great head heart split occurred when Dr. William Harvey dissected a human body and held up the heart as a pumping machine. The mass of tissue, blood and muscle became part of the evolutionary process and design while the Biblical heart, the seat of wisdom and the wellspring of life (Proverbs 4:23) was lost. If the heart retained any mystique, it simply became the seat of emotion. The human mind, the storehouse of empirical knowledge and scientific fact now became preeminent.

 This shift from heart to head infiltrated the church. Knowing God in the Biblical sense of intimacy (Adam knew Eve and she conceived) was replaced with knowing about God intellectually. This radical intellectualism led down a slippery slope to a modern day form of Gnosticism. Your spiritual life is now confined to your mind/spirit, which is “good”. Your physical body is only matter and is part of the fallen world; therefore what you do with is inconsequential. One day your spirit will leave it behind and you will depart this evil world for a disembodied existence in the heavenly realm. This is not orthodox Christian belief, but it is the mindset of many professing modern day Christians. 

The third shift I have suggested is from the objective to the subjective, and it is more difficult to define. Perhaps an illustration will suffice. When the elderly Rose comes to the end of her story about her time on the Titanic in the James Cameron film, she says of her lover and savior.” Now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me in every way a person can be saved. I don’t even have a picture of him. He exists only in my memory.” Jack has gone from being an objective real person to being a subjective memory in Rose’s imagination. And so has Jesus to much of the world. The transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World kept moving God out of this world. Like Jack slipping out of sight in the dark waters of the Atlantic, or a helium balloon floating away into the upper atmosphere, God was gradually being removed. He went from being a real presence here on earth, one that could be known through the sixth sense of the heart as the Comforter, Teacher, Advocate, Holy Spirit (which Jesus himself said was better than his actual physical presence …), to being by the 18^th century a remote god out in heaven, one that got the whole thing going by an act of creation but really was not interested or involved, to the god of today, who now exists only in the mind of the believer.

Most people can “see” Jesus in his first coming walking the roads of first century Palestine or hanging on the cross. They may be able to picture his second coming by envisioning him coming in clouds of glory. But where is he today? Right now? Well for most people the answer sounds much like Rose’s “there really was a person Jesus Christ (they think it is his last name) but now he exists only in my mind. The objective, real, present God who created the universe has now been reduced to a subjective experience that exists only in our imagination. How tragic. How fatal!

Crossing the Threshold series #5

v

                                             You Are Here

We now come to our “you are here” star and we find ourselves in what is called the Postmodern World. But what exactly does that mean? You know something is wrong when experts have a hard time defining it. Richard Tarnas says that you can’t really have a postmodern worldview because the postmodern paradigm is fundamentally subversive of all paradigms. Make sense? Or how about this one by Jean-Francois Lyotard postmodern is “incredulity toward metanarratives”, which simply means the Postmodern worldview is that there is no large story, no metanarrative.

So here is a picture definition of postmodernism that may help you understand the world in which you live. Watch the end scenes of James Cameron’s 1997 movie Titanic. After the Titanic sinks fifteen hundred people are left splashing around in the frigid dark waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. They are all desperate to save their own lives by clinging to whatever piece of wreckage they might be able to find. There you have Postmodernism. Remember in this world there is no metanarrative, no large story of God and his plan for saving and redeeming the fallen creation. People are entitled to their own private subjective spiritual beliefs; their own “piece of wreckage”, whatever they think might save them. However those beliefs cannot enter or interfere with the objective reality of the secular world. Hence the world is divided by man into two compartments; the sacred where you may privately believe in whatever god you want to and the secular where science is god and man is king.

This is the fourth post in the series Crossing the Threshold.

                                              The Modern World

Years ago I read the Introduction to Peter Kreeft’s book Heaven the Heart’s Deepest Longing. What I gleaned from that introduction helped me learn how to teach 2500 years of Western Civilization in about five minutes in a way people seldom forget. I use my body as a diagram.

Looking out at the ancient world there were two small people groups around the Mediterranean Sea that became the source for all of Western Civilization: the Hebrews and the Greeks. Think of these two peoples as two streams (my calves). One was the Classical stream from the source of Reason, the other the Biblical stream, rose from the source of Faith. These two streams became great rivers (my thighs!) The Greek stream flowed into the Roman river which created a world empire but remained essentially Greek in its mind. The Hebrew stream flowed into Christianity. Jesus did not create a new religion. He was the Jewish Messiah; the King of the Jews. These two great rivers came together during the Middle Ages (my torso) and created what can best be called a Christocentric world.

I like how John Eldredge describes this world in the book he coauthored with Brent Curtis The Sacred Romance

         “Once upon a time the Western World had a story. Imagine you lived in the High Middle Ages. Your world was permeated with Christian imagery. You marked the days by the sound of church bells and the weeks and months according to a liturgical calendar. You lived in anno domini the year of our Lord. It wasn’t football season it was Advent. Your role models were the saints, whose feast days were regular reminders of a drama greater than yourself. The architecture of the Cathedrals, the music, literature and sculpture all gave you a vision of transcendence, reminding you of the central elements of that great story. Even the everyday language reflected the Christian understanding of life’s story, expressions like God be with you, upon my soul and by Christ’s blood. Birth, death, love and loss all of your personal experience would be shaped and interpreted by that large story.”

The world had a large story; a metanarrative and everyone’s small story fit into that large one giving their life meaning and purpose. That world no longer exists, for the High Middle Ages was ripped apart by two movements: The Renaissance (my left arm) and The Reformation (my right arm).

Starting in the 1300’s Europe began to feel a number of “birth pangs”. The Black Plague rapidly spread killing one third of the population while wars, religious strife, economic depression, occultism, invasions from the east  and corruption within the fundamental institution of Medieval society the church led to a season ripe for movements of renewal. The Reformation longingly looked back to the river of Biblical faith. It wanted to cleanse the church, reform it and purge it of its corruption. The Renaissance which means “rebirth” was something entirely different. For what emerged out of the Renaissance was something that had never existed before in human history; a secular society. For the first time a civilization was being built on a foundation that had no spiritual life, no religion, and no god as a source for its formation.

The Renaissance was followed by other movements; The Age of Scientific Discoveries, The Enlightenment, the Democratic and Industrial Revolutions and by the time the Modern World emerged it was evident that man had been “reoriented”. No longer did he give allegiance to God; he was now the Captain of his own ship sailing along on a sea of secular humanism with the notion that progress and the wonders of technology could take him anywhere he desired to go.

The Victorian Dream had briefly tried to keep God in the story as a remote author saying that he gave man all these wonderful discoveries and technologies to build his kingdom on earth. But by 1900 belief in science, pursuit of raw power, and a thirst for glory, had ejected God from the picture altogether. No longer was man God’s steward of creation, his Genesis vocation, now he was his own god and he was out to conqueror the world.

There probably isn’t a more fitting symbol of man’s arrogance as he enters this new age than the White Star Line’s luxury ocean liner the Titanic. Named for mythological deities of ruthless greed and power the largest ship ever built was promoted as being “unsinkable”. Divided by economic classes into first, second and steerage, she was the perfect metaphor for what the industrial titans in her first class were actually doing to the rest of the world; dividing and conquering. On the night of April 14, 1912 she was making her maiden voyage crossing the Atlantic when she struck an iceberg and sank. The entire 20^th century might be viewed as Titanic’s descent to the bottom of the ocean floor. Wars, genocides, economic depressions, weapons of mass destruction, totalitarianism,….death and destruction of a magnitude never seen before in history.

This is the third post in the series Crossing the Threshold.

                                                 Homo Spiritus

Now we can start with our history lesson. Let’s take the year 1400AD. You can use “1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue” if it is easier to remember; a few years won’t make a difference for our purposes. In all the time before the year 1400, for as long as man existed on planet Earth he lived in a “sacred” world. By this I mean he had knowledge of something wholly other than himself, a different order of being, and a power before which he knew he was nothing. In other words a god. Opposite this god, this sacred, was the profane which simply meant darkness, chaos, an abyss. So it was natural that man wanted to live in as close proximity to the sacred as possible. Therefore he would consecrate every aspect of his life; food, sex, work, home, everything to his god.

Werner Herzog produced the documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” in which he went deep into the Chauvet Caves in Southern France to film the oldest known cave paintings by Homo sapiens. Herzog says we really should call the early cave dwellers “Homo spiritus” (one spirit) rather than Homo sapiens (one knowing) for there is clear evidence of religious ceremony within these most ancient caves. Think of that; from the beginning of time man has been a worshipper and has lived in a sacred universe.

Thousands of years after the men painted the cave walls in Chauvet the Apostle Paul stood on Mars Hill in Athens and gave his famous sermon recorded in Acts Chapter 17. Speaking to all the Athenians he said “…I observe that you are all very religious in all respects” (NAS). This is not what is so typically thought of today as St. Paul making an “evangelistic” call to a crowd of non-believers so they can “get saved” and go to heaven. He is telling them that “yes you are all religious men ( for there is no other kind) and you live in awe of the gods because you have statues everywhere to please them…in all respects you make every part of your world sacred. Now let me explain to you, your own statue to ‘an unknown god’. There is only one true god who has now made himself known through the incarnation, death and resurrection of his son Jesus Christ. It is he that I proclaim to you”.

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkein believed that the step from paganism to Christianity was not that great a step, for all men believed in a god, in the sacred, in something more than themselves. All men were worshippers. No the great chasm was the one that separated the Christian World of the Middle Ages and the Modern Western World. We must now explore that rift in order to bring us to the “you are here” star on the map of history.

This is post #2 of the Crossing the Threshold series.

                                                  The Sacred Secular Split

We live in a divided world. It wasn’t always this way. We will get to how it became divided shortly, but it is important to understand the division and how it affects your life today.

The Modern Western World has two basic compartments; the secular and the sacred. Some people try and live their entire life in one compartment or the other; most of us however go back and forth without ever thinking about it. Let’s take what you “do” for example. Work, school, entertainment, neighborhood activities, vacations, sexual intimacy, all go into the secular box while things like worship services, bible studies, prayer meetings, volunteering for the homeless, and mission trips all get thrown into the sacred compartment.

It isn’t just what you do that gets sorted into one box or the other. It affects everything in your life; the music you listen to, the art you appreciate, the books you read, the movies you watch, everything is labeled and sorted sacred or secular. I know some people whose voice changes depending on which box they are in at the moment!

You see the division is not just confined to the external world. No, the division goes deep into your internal world dividing you at the core of your being. Sensing something is not quite right you may try and bridge the divide by taking the sacred box into your secular world; saying a prayer at work for instance. Or you’ll bring your secular world into your sacred box by inviting someone to go to church with you. But neither of these constructs ever seems to work very well and there is a reason why. The world was never designed to be divided into compartments of sacred and secular. When you go along with this man made order you are going against the design of the world’s creator. You are going against God.

Several years ago I taught a class called Crossing The Threshold: A Journery into Transformative Worship. I wrote notes to go along with portions of the class and am going to be sharing them in the next few weeks on this blog . If you want to listen to the talks and see the other notes handed out in class they are all under the Teaching page on this site.

                                      Orientation

When you start out on a journey it is important to know the place from which you are starting; that is if you have any hope of finding the place to which you are going. Take the giant map in the shopping mall for example. You first need to find the star that says “you are here”. Once you discover it, you can orient yourself and find where you are and where you are going. Or remember how you spent an entire day of orientation in a new school, where you were given the lay of the land so to speak. After that day it was possible for you to navigate the maze of classrooms and winding halls. Even the most famous road trip, Dorothy’s trek down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City began with orientation from the good witch Glenda. It wasn’t enough for Dorothy to know she wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

To orient means to set right by adjusting to facts; to put oneself into correct position or to acquaint oneself with the existing situation. Unfortunately most people never receive an orientation lesson to life. No one says to you, here you are on the map of history and tells you what that means or why it should matter to you. After all history is just a boring subject often taught by boring teachers who rarely connect the subject to your personal life. It is flat, dull, in the past and irrelevant to your life in the here and now. Or is it? Could it be that history is more like a story with an author, a plot, a setting, a theme and characters? Christianity maintains that history is His story; God’s story. If that is true wouldn’t it be important to know where you are? To know what part you play so that when you step out onto the stage of history you can play it well?

Fellow pilgrim you and I are going on an amazing journey over the next few posts. This journey will take us out of the ordinary world, crossing the threshold into a very special world. We will meet interesting characters, cover vast amounts of terrain, have a few awesome encounters and return home like all good pilgrims do having been transformed by our adventure. But we need to know where we are. We need to find the “you are here” star on the map of history.

Years ago I went to a Christian counselor and one of the most helpful things I learned from him was what he termed "Styles of Relating". He had studied material from Dr. Karen Horney on the three predictable styles of relationships one adopts as a survival method to overcome pain in childhood. The three styles are: move away, move toward, and move against. The styles are pretty self explanatory. Move aways are people who detach in order to survive; they become independent, self controlling and self reliant. Move toward are people who have to have control of another relationship for their security and self worth. And of course move against are those individuals who have to dominate and rule whatever situation they are in.

I remember hearing a lecture by Dr. Neil Anderson where he gave the example of three sons born to an alcoholic father. Each son he said would respond differently. One would remove himself ( move away), one would appease or pacify ( move toward) and one would fight ( move against); hence the three styles.

The counselor I was seeing explained these are unhealthy styles of relating and the answer involved giving up my style and adopting a healthier life style by which I could respond to another person appropriately. Sometimes that would mean submitting, sometimes it would mean detaching, and sometimes it would mean over coming; in other words learning to do all three when appropriate.

But is it that simple? I think not. First let me say I found the understanding of these styles most helpful. It brought great clarity in my own personal life.However I think there is a better way of seeing these styles and more importantly a better way out of them.

As the counselor said these are "unhealthy" "neurotic" "compulsive" ways of relating. I would  say they are "fallen" ways of relating. These are the styles humans have succumbed to because of the Fall. They were never God's original intent for how we relate to Him or to one another.Yes I need to stop doing them but I don't think the answer is as simple as adopting " A healthy attachment to another whereby I can move away, toward or against when appropriate". Correcting fallen behavior by behavior modification never works. No matter how hard I may want out of my old move away self; all the moving toward and against "when appropriate" simply does not work.

The answer is I must die and be raised to a new life whereby I am adopted into Christ. This is what the Apostle Paul was saying when he wrote these words " I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me" ( Galatians 2:20).

So what does this look like really? And how might I better understand this?I think the first place to start is with the understanding of two narratives; The Ego Story and The Theo Story. You will live in one or the other.

The Ego Story is the fallen story ( narrative) we are all born into with the "I" at its center. The best definition of sin I know is incurvates en se....life curved in on self. I must die to this story and be raised in Christ to The Theo Story. It is important to note here the differences between the two.

Ego Story: Author- Me, Actor- Myself, Director- I

Theo Story: Author- God the Father, Actor- Christ the Son, Director-The Holy Spirit

The way in which I come into the Theo Story is by being adopted into Christ Jesus. I am restored to God the Father in Him. I become a Christian ( which means little Christ). This makes me a co-actor with Jesus. This is my part in the grand narrative. Its not all about me anymore; I have died and been raised to live in union with Him. It is His life....His story.

So how does this connect to the styles of relating?

The styles of relating are connected to my old fallen self. I need to understand that as a new creation in Christ I must now grow in Him, grow up  to His full stature. This will mean not only looking to him as an example but more importantly habituating his practices so they seep into my very being; transforming me and conforming me into His image.

What are His practices? They are what the church has called " The Three Offices of Christ"; Prophet, Priest and King. Every Christian whether they understand it or not is called in Christ to be a prophet, a priest and a king. It would take volumes to unpack the full meaning of what I have just written but for my purposes here I want to suggest this: The three offices of Christ are the reality to which the three styles of relating are the perversion of. Move away is a distortion of prophet, move toward is a distortion of priest, and move against is a distortion of king.

Now lets go back to where I started. The counselor tells me I am a move away so I need to learn how to move toward and against "when appropriate". What does that look like? If this is all I know may I not just do it all in a fleshly way using another fallen behavior to compensate or balance my move awayness? Does this not leave me in The Ego Story?

How much better it would be to say for instance; your weakness is in exercising authority and of knowing you have "a voice". You need to study how Jesus operates in his kingly office. Go through the gospels and pay careful attention to how he leads and exercises authority.

Practicing his offices is one of the ways we "put on Christ" ( Romans:14) or are clothed in HIm ( Galatians 3:27). We study him with the intentionality of a disciple. We leave the old ways of fear and control behind and step into the freedom of following the one True Human, in so doing we become truly human ourselves.

In 1998 I went to see the movie Titanic. At first I’ll be honest I didn't’t want to see the movie. I remember dropping my sixteen year old daughter and her girlfriend off at the theater and saying “I know how that story ends”! Eventually I succumbed to the pressure and went to see the movie….six times (lots of pressure). I was undone to say the least, and so were many others making Titanic not just a blockbuster but a phenomenon.

James Cameron did the impossible; he captured the epic sinking of Titanic while weaving a beautiful love story over it to capture the human heart and the human tragedy. From the haunting opening scenes of the actual footage of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean to the touching scenes of Rose’s reunion with Jack at the end; the power of the movie was well for lack of a better word…titanic.

The Titanic was in the news the other day; it was the anniversary of the discovery of its resting place. This is not what propels me to write on Titanic today, no it’s another story much in the news these days. I am referring to the story of refugees from Africa and the Middle East seeking asylum in the West which has been so poignantly personified by the horrific tragedy of three year old Aylan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed up on Turkey’s shore.

So what is the connection?

Titanic in its historical context was a floating palace; the symbolic culmination of the “Gilded Age” while at the same time being a technological wonder presaging what was thought to be a new epoch of material acquisition unknown to man. She was thus a metaphor for the world at the beginning of the 20^th century sailing along in a bright blue universe. And like that world she was divided into three classes; First-, Second-, and Third-class or “Steerage”.

To grasp the full meaning of the word steerage I quote from Wyn Craig Wade’s book The Titanic: End of a Dream:

“The Titanic carried accommodations for a potential 1,024 third-class passengers, the vast majority of whom would be emigrants. Depending on the booking, portions of third-class quarters could be converted to freight and baggage compartments--- a tradition lingering from the days when “steerage” had meant exactly that. In the 1860’s, for example, it had been legal to transport human beings to one shore and then carry cattle in the same quarters on the trip back. One shipboard notice of that era adjured first- and second-class passengers “not to throw money or eatables to the steerage passengers, thereby creating disturbance and annoyance”. Things had now changed considerably. American immigration laws still made it mandatory to keep gates securely locked between third-class and other passengers; the policy was intended to limit the spread of infectious diseases.”

If you have seen the movie Titanic you will remember those locked gates. The ship is sinking; those in steerage are desperately trying to escape the incoming flood and those locked gates are keeping them trapped in certain death. In one memorable scene Rose and Jack break through a wall and are told by the official steward in a neat and tidy uniform “That’s White Star Line property….You can’t do that”!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxiJ80lr3Mg

And there is the connection. Every time I hear the First-class Post Modern West say to those in “steerage” trying to escape the flood of death sweeping over the third world “You can’t come in here; you’ll have to go back”. I think of Titanic and those locked gates.

The “unsinkable” ship went down. She was a portend not to the heights to which man in his pomp could ascend but one to which man in his arrogance and greed must descend. Her corroded ruin on the ocean floor is a prophetic picture of the 20^th century’s descent into wars and destruction the likes of which the world had never known.

So here we are today in 2015. The Third and Second Worlds have been under water for some time. Those on the upper deck have ignored the tragedy below while taking tea and listening to music. But we cannot ignore it anymore; the flood is coming. This is not a religious, political, cultural, economic, or east –west problem. When a three year old boy created in the image of God washes up on shore like a piece of “steerage” it is a human problem. Something is wrong with humanity.

So if my hope were in humanity to “fix” the problem I would be lost. But it is not. For just as James Cameron could not write a screenplay simply about the disastrous sinking of the Titanic and the loss of 1,522 souls, but had to write a larger story of sacrificial love; a love so powerful it transcended death….so did God.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. John 3:16-17