I’m loving our current series on Matthew’s Gospel at Creek Road… the catch is that it might make blogging here a little more irregular than usual over the next 10 weeks.
It’s a series not just inspired by reading Matthew’s Gospel and noticing how much supernatural stuff is happening around its ‘epic’ story; it’s not just inspired by observing that Jesus follows the ‘Hero’s Journey’ common in many epics, it’s not just inspired by Charles Taylor’s analysis of the problem with disenchanted modern-western ‘secular age’ life, or by Tolkien and Lewis’s writings on the Gospel being ‘true myth’… it’s not just a series featuring some pretty fantastic (in every sense) graphic design stuff… It’s all of that… and it has a kids spot series thing with dragons! Cause in some sense the Gospel story is the ultimate dragon slaying story (I mean, seriously, read Revelation — that’s what Jesus does).
You can check out the talks from the series online, and the kids spots, and here’s 13 ‘studies’ written for our Growth Groups… plus some of the team will write blog posts like this one from time to time. Like this one I wrote this week. I’ve often been defensive when people have suggested that Christianity is akin to the belief in fairy stories; I recently decided to embrace it, this post explains why.
“Atheist philosopher A.C Grayling is one of those who wants to dismiss belief in more than the natural world as the equivalent of belief in fairy stories as though that’s a bad thing. He sometimes calls himself an ‘a-fairyist’ because “this properly implies that there is nothing supernatural in the universe – no fairies or goblins, angels, demons, gods or goddesses.”
No magic. No enchantment. Nothing to answer the longing of our heart for something more, except, perhaps, technology and science. It’s a soul-crushing story. And man-made technology can’t deliver on the desires of our god-made hearts. Technology over-promises and under-delivers. You just have to walk into a crowded space full of people alone-together; captivated by smartphone screens and desiring to be anywhere-but-here, or look at how technology is used to make us more efficient killers, or more brain-addled addicts, to see that technology crushes hope and desire as much as it might answer them.
The story of the Gospel answers our longing for meaning beyond simply the natural; in Jesus, the fully divine, fully human, hero we our desire for life to be enchanted is met with the one who shows us how the natural and supernatural overlap and are completely inter-woven, rather than separate streams of reality.”