just a thought...about metanarratives...

metanarratives have been lost in our society and in our cultural. i know this isn't a common term for most. the best way i can explain it is that a metanarrative is about the "larger story" that our lives are really about. instead of buying into the quality of the whole,  we tend to submit to the smaller in-between-the lines-text of our selfish existence. how unfortunate is this for both our lives, our churches, our world? this is the death of purpose. the inward thinking of our society has lead to the pursuit of our stuff, our desires, our wants, and our satisfaction. but how can we neglect the world and its aches, hurts, and slavery? if we begin to neglect these people, what else have we neglected? i submit that we have missed love. we have missed truth. we have missed wholeness. we have missed Jesus. note that Jesus consistently pursued the greater missio Dei (mission of God). he is constantly in communication with the Father, regulating his situation and submitting to the command of the Father. let's just begin to think about how often that his personal story was shadowed by the story of redemption that the Father set forth from the beginning in Gen. 3.15. what if we did the same? submitted to the thelema Theou (will of God) at every thought, action, and decision...wait, even every relationship. i believe that this is the key of the metanarrative. that is relationship and love. it is dripping from every page of Scripture and every wound that Jesus bore. Jn. 13.1 says that Jesus "loved them to the end." this does not mean that he loved them until he died. it means that he loved them to the end of time, to their completion, to their ultimate result. later in that passage, Jesus sums up the metanarrative so poignantly. he says, "a new commandment i give to you, that you love one another, just as i have loved you, you also are to love one another. by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (Jn. 13.34-35) i was recently reading a book that  was discussing this very idea. the book is The Three Hardest Words by Leonard Sweet and it is about the words "I Love You." Here's what he says about metanarratives and love: "If the metanarrative is about anything, it's about live. And more specifically, it's about love as the form and function of life. To put life and love in their necessary context, the metanarrative tells us not only who we are, but also who everyone else is - helping us understand and live well in relationship with the 'other'...It is the story of "I love you" like no other love story. (p. 24)

so i dare you live in metanarrative and not "subtext" (as Sweet calls it), where we are function and living in love and not in selfishness and anthropocentricity. our philosophy should be as Cameron Crowe's epic film Elizabethtown says concerning life and failure. "Loving life, loving you" is the only way to live. 

-peaks out.