Our quest here at Q is to learn what it means to live fully and love wastefully and each week we are invited to come alive!
Today we explored how we can often be missing the point, as this clip from Miss Congeniality shows!
It's been a week since England were beaten on penalties in the Euro 2020 football final. Anth speaks about how it's easy to miss the point of what went on in that penalty shootout and how there's a powerful metaphor that emerges from it, inspired by this social media post.
"Kindly let me help you or you'll drown!" Said the monkey, putting the fish safely in a tree.
The story of Chicken Run tells the story of a group of hens who plan their escape from a chicken farm.
In the time that Jesus walked the Earth, 8/10 people in the Roman Empire were slaves. This context highlights why the message Jesus brought spread so far, so quickly. What was Jesus' point?
"Jesus came to help us see everything differently."
"Jesus knew that the Jews had missed the point. They'd taken what began as a wonderful story of a different way to see the world and made it into an institutionalised religion."
The apostle Paul introduced the word "Grace" to help the early church avoid missing the point and to remind them of the good news of the gospel: That God doesn't need to be appeased!
We could argue that much of the church still managed to miss the point, replacing the common ancient ritual of throwing a virgin into a volcano to appease the anger of the gods, with Jesus, the sacrificial lamb, who was sentenced to die on a cross so that God's wrath can be appeased. Just like the birds in Chicken Run, we've tragically missed the point and have ended up living in the parade ground of a spiritual prison camp in some manufactured order that keeps us busy whilst doing nothing to empower us to fly.
"Beware the trough! Be a picky pecker!"
The feeding trough in Chicken Run is a powerful metaphor for the systems in our world with selfish agendas, feeding us what we want to hear for their own ends.
"I want you to be free-range chickens!"
The Apostle Paul wrote "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." If we've been freed, then we must ensure we don't then become slaves to another system.
So, what is the purpose of you?
John Shelby Spong tells us it's to live fully and love wastefully and this is the quest we're committed to as we seek to understand God in us, God with us and God as us.
That's true freedom and that's what it means to not miss the point.
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