Vol 3:3 Competing Fictions and the Mission of God

I am writing this week from Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, VA in which I am participating in a pastor’s conference focusing on God and Mammon: Reframing Stewardship Amidst Abundance, Scarcity, and Conflict with Walter Brueggemann being the primary presenter. 

Last night Brueggemann said something that got my attention – we live in a society, an empire, that necessitates that its citizenry embraces a narrative of accumulation.  This narrative of accumulation involves a spiritual attraction to money and demands our loyalty.  Our North American empire tells this story so pervasively through media, through advertising, through the political and economic systems, through the military machine, making it so visible that we all want to be part of it.  In order to maintain this narrative of accumulation as the only viable narrative, the Empire states that all other narratives, all other stories are fictions – even the Gospel.

In fact, the Gospel is a fiction, by the norms of the Empire.  The Empire claims that it has the only truth – the truth that perpetuates the narrative of accumulation.

So how do we who seek to participate with God in God’s mission respond?

Brueggemann states that we need to display a different narrative –we need to challenge the epistemology (or way of understanding) of the Empire.  We are called to live out our being human, under the rule of Christ, in missional communities in radical different ways which reveal a different story, a different vision – in fact, embracing God’s Story and Vision, so that in our living, our speaking, our doing of all that we do, what is revealed is that the narrative of the Empire, the narrative of accumulation, is indeed a fiction in light of the narrative of the Gospel, in light of the active mission of God in the world. 

In that the Empire seeks to make its fiction real, God’s missional people commit themselves to partner with God in living in such a way as to unmask the falsehood and deceptive nature of the Empire’s narrative. It is about making a spectacle of the principalities and the powers, which Jesus did by embracing the violence against him and against humanity thrust upon him on the cross.

This involves more than merely declaring that the Gospel narrative is a better narrative.  In the face of the narrative of the Empire, we are being called to live as a community of character (Stanley Hauerwas’ term) that so lives out the Gospel narrative that it puts on display the system of death that is inherent in the Empire’s narrative of accumulation.  It is not merely finding God’s mission in the midst of our culture, but to so participate with God that we demonstrate, in the power of the Spirit, that God’s mission in the midst of culture actively re-creates humanity and creation, so that humanity is no longer subject to the powers of sin and death. 

Perhaps a first step in doing so, as the people of God in North America,  is in confessing our collusion with this narrative of death, this narrative of accumulation, this narrative of the Empire – for we have found comfort in this narrative.  Confessing and living out the narrative of the Gospel – the only narrative of life – in contrast to the narrative of the Empire will be a costly confession, a costly living out of our discipleship.

But only such a costly discipleship will unmask the fictional nature of the Empire’s narrative.