Anyone who spends anytime with me knows I love comic books.
I hit my stride with them when my family lived on the island of Okinawa, Japan back when the earth was still cooling and the dinosaurs had recently gone extinct. It was 1979.
We had access to just one American television channel and, after school, the only thing on was General Hospital. Yes, if you’re old enough to remember the Quartermain’s, I know all about Luke and Laura. My best friend Jason and I alternated between that and watching Star Wars, which he had on BetaMax (ask your parents). Otherwise, we read comics – Jason was big into Spiderman. I loved the X-Men.
Superhero stories were spectacular and fueled my imagination. Before Hugh Jackman ever drew his claws as Wolverine on the big screen, I was captivated by the storytelling that came out once a month, when a new issue of the Uncanny X-Men was released.
When superhero movies first came out, the stories and special effects were reflective of the times. Christopher Reeve’s Superman was dazzling, and he epitomized the Boy Scout Man of Steel revealed in the comics. The stories were campy, and almost every movie was a solo film. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy changed things tonally, as the films gave a more serious consideration for how a vigilante like that might be experienced in the real world.
The X-Men films were good, but they lived in their own world, without the likes of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, or Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
By the time the Avengers came onto the scene fifteen years ago, it was spectacular. Things were shifting. The fact that Marvel was bringing heroes and worlds together was electrifying. I feel no shame in admitting a tear came to my eye the first time Captain America and Iron Man shared screen time.
Psychologists say life is best understood as a story. Story is the primary way humans create meaning, coherence, and identity out of seemingly random events. Through narratives, people organize experiences, link past, present, and future, and gain agency over their personal growth.
Our stories are uniquely ours; no one has had your life experiences, and your skills, talents, and quirks make you distinctly “you.”
This leads to a question…what story are you in?
Story is how every tradition orients its people. Like it or not, the world has been built on stories involving some kind of Creator. To be sure, the story that we’re all here because of cosmic chance has gained popularity in recent years, as has a more “customizable” form of spirituality where people are free to believe what they want.
This is easy enough to understand, given that so much of monotheism has emphasized a God who is external. And yet, huge swaths of the planet have been shaped by the three monotheistic religions.
Western civilization was founded on Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian values. The Jewish Torah gives law and covenant – God speaking to humanity, shaping a people through sacred obligation. The Quran gives recitation and submission – God speaking through a prophet; the divine word descending into human language. The Bhagavad Gita gives divine counsel – God speaking alongside humanity in its moment of deepest crisis and paralysis.
And then there’s the Christian Bible.
The Gospel makes a significantly different claim. In the narrative of Jesus, God enters the human story. God takes on a body, a name, and belongs to a family. God is a carpenter. God experiences hunger, rejection, grief, and death. Jesus walks the path from inside the human condition – fully God and fully human – all the way through to its darkest end and out the other side.
This is what makes the Bible story unique among the world’s great narratives: it is not primarily a story about what God requires of you. It’s a story about what God became for you – and what that becoming makes possible in you.
For most of my life, the story I was in involved dying and then learning if I’d lived a good enough life to make it into heaven. I didn’t go to church, didn’t talk much to God…I didn’t like my odds. To be clear, much of my life had been focused on God…but I’d been searching for something – a bridge of sorts. I had no idea where I would find it, when I would recognize it. Through thick and thin, I believed with all my heart it was out there.
It sounds dramatic to call it a quest and by most standards, my life was completely unsensational. If value is measured in relationships, professional or financial success, I was woefully average.
And then, in the first month of the pandemic, a strange thing happened.
I saw what I’d spent my entire life looking for.
I saw the “compelling why” that was going to lead me into the Bible story so I could figure out how to get out of the Bible story. Growing up with the idea, the belief, that God is outside you…well, that makes it extremely difficult to participate in Jesus’ story.
I realized, as much as I had observed Easter in the past, and intellectually understood the idea behind the Resurrection, I wasn’t living from inside the truth of His story.
It is a far more daunting prospect to reconcile the opposing idea – that God is within you.
In the weeks ahead, I’ll share more updates about my forthcoming book, Resurrection: Breathing with God due out this summer. I’ll also be peeling back the curtain on the accompany course, Resurrection: Crowned with Christ.
The story of Jesus is the promise of everlasting life.
What story are you in?