Minister’s Musings

In S. E. Hinton’s powerful book about gangs, we are invited to see “the Outsiders” in a new light. Ponyboy belongs to a gang – he is a “Greaser.” The Greasers are locked in combat with the richer “Socs” (socialites) in a continuous round of violent revenge.

As we enter the hardscrabble world of the Greasers, we discover that these young men receive the support and acceptance within the gang that they don’t receive at home (if they have a home) or from society at large. In this story, it is the Greasers who perform a major sacrificial and heroic act that forces the entire community (and us, the readers) to reexamine the lenses through which we see these young men.

Within the story as well, the gang members are forced to reexamine their views of each other as they discover their common humanity. Sunsets, they discover, look the same on both sides of the track.

Artists help us to see the world differently. I’ve just spent two days in the Minneapolis Institute of Art looking at art from early medieval icons to the latest modern art. Those early icons with backgrounds of gold invite us to imagine life suffused with the light of God in whom there is no darkness at all. Later pictures show us the everyday life and dignity of working people. They were painted at a time when society thought that it was only the lives of the rich and well-born that were suitable subjects for “art.” Abstract art wants us to see color and patterns in a new way. Even those crazy pictures of Picasso (not my favorite artist by a long stretch) still have interest by trying to show different perspectives of a 3-dimensional person on a flat surface in those days long before computers allowed us to rotate objects in space.

The Bible wants us to see the world from a different perspective as well. When we hear the story of a people who escaped bondage and built a new society, we see that there is more than a political angle to that story because they tell us plainly that God was leading them through Moses, that God made a covenant with them and gave them a new identity and that part of that new identity was not to create the old model of Egypt with the rich taking from the poor, but a new society where sharing and rejoicing together was uplifted. The story of Jesus is not simply about the life of a good man who was unjustly put to death (although it is that as well), but about how God enters into human life, suffers with us and triumphs over the worst that the world throws at him. This is a different perspective of Jesus than a simple biography can give.

We need this different perspective in today’s world. Like the world of The Outsiders, society can sometimes be unfair, brutal and make us think that we have no dignity. But God’s Word, God’s story about us, puts human history in a new light that shows us that the whole world is holy because the whole world is created by God and loved by God. That we are precious in God’s eyes because God was willing to take the worst we can dish out and love us through that from death to life. The Bible gives us a new perspective on our lives.

I hope each one of you will dig deeply into God’s word this year, through personal reading, through Bible study, through hearing God’s word (CDs of the New Testament will be available for everyone and their friends on Rally Day) and through worship. May each one of us grow in faith as we see ourselves and our world through the eyes of God.

In Christ,