Jeffrey Heine: Alright. So this is our 2nd theological talk back of the summer. Hopefully, you were able to make it last month when we had, Mark Gillette and, we we were exploring the issue of how to read the bible. If you weren't able to make it to the previous one, you can find, the previous talk back on our website, rccbermingham.org and, and you can download it from there. So to introduce Mike, Mike Cosper is one of the founding pastors of Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, one of our partner churches within the Sojourn network.
The Sojourn network is a network of churches all across the US who partner together in planting other churches and caring for pastors. And so, Mike is, is is a part of that network and, was one of the founding members of of the church, Sojourn Community Church. He also serves as the founder and director of the Harbor Institute For Faith and Culture. So if you would join me in welcoming Mike Cosper.
Speaker 2: Hey. It's an honor to be with you guys. I've I've really enjoyed. I've I've spent the day here in Birmingham, and it's been great. It's been great to be here.
Most of my family is from the south, so it always feels, it feels like home to to eat barbecue and drink sweet tea, which I know is also kind of a cliche, so I apologize for that as well. Tonight, I'm gonna be talking about stories. And in particular, I wanna talk about the way that stories, the way that the way that our lives are shaped by stories, and the way that stories impact and affect us. And in a sense, to kind of try to draw a connection between the gospel, which is the defining story of of our lives as believers, and the the other stories that we're telling in the world around us, the stories of television and movies and books and the stories we tell when we're sitting on our front porches, hanging out with one another. So, so to kick things off, I'm gonna start with one of my favorite storytellers, a guy by the name of Cormac McCarthy.
So hang on while I find my page. So this this is a novel. It's called All the Pretty Horses. And and this novel, follows the story of a guy named John Grady Cole. And and it's set in a period of time just, you know, like many westerns, just as the west is dying, just as the way of the cowboy is disappearing, as, the the the rise of the pickup truck and the rise of barbed wire fences and and the loss of a whole way of life.
And what happens in this book is John Grady Cole heads south. He knows his way of life is going away, so he goes to Mexico in search of a place where he can use his skills and be who he is. And he falls in love, and he gets in trouble, and it's a it's it's an amazing story. And so here's a scene, this is, maybe 2 thirds of the way through the book, that that I think sets up our conversation very well. Also, there's some there's a line or 2 in Spanish.
Forgive me for butchering that as well. So so what happens, what happens is he he parks his horse. He parks his horse under a tree. He's on his way back to this hacienda where he worked for a while, and he's going to try to win back the woman that he loves. And as he sits down to to rest his horse for a bit, these kids show up and they line up in a row, sort of intrigued by this guy from the north, wondering what he's doing there.
So this is what this is what unfolds. They asked him what he's doing here. He mused on the question. They waited. I once lived at a great hacienda, he told them.
But now I have no place to live. The children's faces studied him with great concern. He thanked them and he told them that he had a he had a novia. He had a girlfriend, who was in another town and that he was writing to her to ask her to be his wife. Is she beautiful?
They asked. And he told her that she was indeed very beautiful. That she had blue eyes which they could scarcely believe. And he told them also about her father. That he was a rich hacienda while he himself was very poor.
And they heard this in silence and were greatly cast down at his prospects. The older of the girls said that if she was truly his novia and she truly loved him then she would marry him no matter what. But the boy was not so encouraging. And he said that even in families of the rich, a girl could not go against the wishes of her father. The girl said that the grandmother must be consulted because she was very important in these matters.
And that he must take her presence and try to win her to his side. For without her help, little could be expected. She said that all the world knew this was true. John Grady nodded at the wisdom of this. But he said that he had already given offense where the grandmother was concerned and could not depend upon her assistance.
And at this, several of the children ceased to eat and stared at the earth before them. It's a problem, said the boy. 1 of the younger girls leaned forward. How did you give offense to the grandmother? He said, it's a long story.
They said, we have time. He smiled and he looked at them and there was indeed time. He told them all that had happened. He told them how he had come from another country. 2 young horsemen riding their horses.
And that they had met with the 3rd who had no money to eat, nor food to eat, no money to no money nor food to eat, nor scarcely clothes on his back. Scarcely clothes to cover himself. And that he had come to ride with them and to share with them and all they had. This horseman was very young and he rode a wonderful horse. But among his fears was the fear that God would kill him with lightning.
And because of this fear he lost his horse in the desert. He then told them what had happened concerning the horse and how they'd taken the horse from the village of Encantada. And how he told the boy, he told how the boy had gone back to the village of Encantada and there had killed a man. And that the police had come to the to the hacienda and arrested him and his friend. And that the grandmother had paid their fine and had forbidden the novia to see him anymore.
I'll stop there and the story goes on. And he continues to sort of unpack what's happened so far. And and what's amazing about this book, what's amazing about this scene is that through throughout All the Pretty Horses, these different characters, John Grady Cole especially, this guy who's sort of a man without a place, a man without a home, finds himself in circumstances where over and over again, he's telling his story. He's telling people, this is where I came from, and this is this is where I'm going, and this is what's happened before. And and other characters do the same for him.
And again and again, you find characters, you find people sitting down and telling one another their stories. I start with this for two reasons. And 1, the the noise of the place may have have disrupted this. And the fact that I feel a little bit like Jerry Springer holding a microphone, may be disrupting this as well. But I but I wanted to start with this because what happens when we tell stories is is kind of a magic trick.
And, actually, scientists have have have been studying this for the last, you know, several decades. And and and there's something unique that happens when somebody starts to tell a story. And it's very different than what happens when somebody starts to give you a lecture. Certain parts of your brain begin to light up, and others other parts of your brain begin to kind of die down their action. And and if again, I'm not sure how much of this you're even hearing, but assuming that you're hearing this well.
If you were hearing this story, what what happens is your the the part of your brain that that is visual actually begins to light up, even though you're not seeing anything new. And and and you begin to map on your mind what's happening in the story, and and you're carried away into it. And and scientists and and psychologists and evolutionary biologists and many many different folks are try have tried to figure out over the last few decades why that is, and and what exactly is happening. We'll get to that in a second. The the other reason I I I wanted to start with this is because I think what Cormac McCarthy is doing in this book is is in many ways very similar, probably much more effective than than with what I'm trying to do when I talk about the stories we tell in in in my book, which is to say, why do we tell stories?
Why are we a storytelling people? Why are these different characters finding themselves in circumstances where they're telling the stories of their lives and telling the stories of the lives of people around us? And and I think these two things, this magic trick of stories that happens in our brain and and what McCarthy's getting at in in this book have something very much in common, which is they're they're trying to get at what it, in in a sense, what does it mean to be human? They're asking the same questions. Why is it?
Why are we wired this way? Another book, by a guy named Jonathan Gottschall really dives deep into these questions. The book is called The Storytelling Animal. And and Gottschall writes from a from a a secular perspective, a a non believing perspective, and and sort of tries to answer this question according to to biology and psychology. And and he really boils down the why of storytelling to to about 3 different ideas.
One is that, we evolved the capacity to tell stories so that we could know where food was. So you might set out one day and say, and go looking for food, and when you come back, you're able to tell the other people in your village, if you follow the river and you you go down, go down this this cliff's edge, you'll find that there's a herd of buffalo there, and and we can eat tomorrow. Right? That was an evolved capacity that gave us the the ability to to survive. Another theory is that storytelling is kind of like the feathers on a peacock.
It's a way of attracting a mate, that somebody who could tell a really great story could maybe impress his his primate friend, and they might procreate. Right? And then the third reason that's suggested for why we might have evolved the capacity for storytelling and the receptivity to storytelling is that wisdom could be passed along, specifically, wisdom about not hurting yourself. So for instance, there's an advantage for the caveman to be able to come back to his tribe and say, hey. Don't go in that cave.
I went into that cave yesterday, and there was a tiger there. Don't don't do this. But but Godshall is is pretty fair and and he's pretty fair specifically in that he says, you know, none of these reasons have have a great amount of of, have a great amount of evidence for them. They're all theories. They're all theorizing why this ability exists.
And storytelling really remains something that's so centrally human and so mysterious. And I think from a from a believing perspective, we have a really compelling reason to understand why we, as human beings, have this capacity for storytelling. And that's because we we worship a storytelling god. We believe in a god whose work in history is, in a sense, one long story that he's telling. And and what what happens in All the Pretty Horses, what what John Grady Cole is doing is he's framing his life.
Again, he's a guy. He's a man without a place. His world in the west is going away. The the barbed wire's coming up. The pickup trucks are coming up.
The way of the cowboy is gone. And he goes to Mexico hoping to find a place there, and what he finds there is he doesn't belong there he doesn't belong there either. He's not one of them. He's not one of those people. And so the only place he finds himself at home is in these stories that he continues to tell about himself.
He's able to say, this is where I came from, and this is where I'm going. And and what the story of scripture does for us is the same thing. What what God gives us in his revelation is a way of saying, this is who you are as a people. This is where you came from. And this is where you're going.
It's interesting when you start to look at the fact that, that 62% roughly of the Bible is written in narrative form. That that, that God who's giving us law and giving us a way of life and giving us doctrine about who he is and what he's done delivers it not necessarily in a a long list of propositions, not necessarily a long list of sort of catechism questions and that sort of thing. He tells us stories. He tells us stories about this is how the world was made. He inspires his people to write down their own stories of of his faithfulness to them, of how he has led them through deserts, of how he's revealed himself, in in times of exile, in times of crisis, how he reveals himself through his son.
And he gives us these stories in the gospels. A lot of theologians have have talked about the story of the bible as a whole as the story of redemption history. And and that's a label that that that's given to to kind of a 4 fold movement that we see throughout scriptures. And a shorthand for that is creation, fall, redemption, consummation. Creation, God made the world and he made it perfectly and he made it from nothing.
The fall, sin enters the world and this this perfect harmonious reality begins to break down. And in redemption, God God steps in to our broken world. And and there's sort of a twofold movement to redemption. 1st, God reveals himself to Abraham and to Israel and establishes his covenant with Israel. And then second, he fulfills that covenant in Jesus Christ.
And through through Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, he restores us to him and promises that one day, in consummation, all things will be made new, all things will be reconciled in Christ, and we will come home. And so what you have is you have a story for for Christians, a story that frames our world. It tells us this is who you are. This is where you came from. This is who you were meant to be, but sin has entered the world and corrupted it.
And in Christ, you can be reconciled to God. And because of what Christ has done, you have the hope that one day, all things will be restored, all things will be made new. And this is the story that that god's people have told in various ways and various components throughout history. Again, what's so interesting is that that just just as in All the Pretty Horses, you have people who are are living their lives and telling stories about their lives as they go through their days. The the bible actually works much the same way.
In in Exodus chapter 15, right after god, conquers the pharaoh and his armies, Moses turns to his people, and he tells them the story of what what literally just happened. He tells them the story again and says, look at what God has done. And he gives it to them in the form of a song so that they too can remember it, and they can tell that story, and they can they can pass that on to their children again and again. Stephen in in Acts chapter 7, when he's confronted and and when he's confronted by by angry people who are resistant to the faith that he's trying to spread, what he does is he tells them the story. He says, this is who God is.
This is what God has done. This is the story of redemption history. And this is where we find ourselves in the midst of it. Paul, in 1st Corinthians chapter 15, when he's trying to correct the Corinthian church and and draw them back to the gospel, he tells them, I passed this onto you just as it was given to me. And he tells them the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.
So so we're the storytelling people. We have a storytelling faith, and we have a faith that's built around this idea of that we we tell this, we live the story and we tell the story and we remember the story again and again. I apologize, the light is a little dark and I'm struggling with my manuscript. So I think I think the the the biblical takeaway from this for us is that God has hardwired us to be receptive to stories in this way. Again, you can look at the biology of it.
When somebody starts telling you a story, it's very easy for your brain to lock in on the story and to shut down other things and make that story come alive to your mind, your heart, and your imagination. And then in the scriptures themselves, you see, number 1, God gives us his story in the form of stories, of narratives, narratives of his his faithfulness to his people throughout history. And number 2, you have, within those stories, people recapitulating the stories again and again. And I believe what we can see is that God's wired us to be to be shaped by stories, to be formed by stories, to be drawn to him and connected to him through the stories that he is telling us about himself. Now, the way I think this begins to connect to cultural storytelling and to the the the world of stories around us, whether we're talking about TV and movies and and, or or we're talking about novels or or, again, the front porch, I think is really significant.
And and to get to that, I wanna talk a little bit about creativity in general. To to look at the scriptures, I think there's there's 2 really significant moments of creativity that should shape the way we think about creativity in our own lives, and that's Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis 2. In Genesis 1, God makes the world, he makes the universe, and he makes it out of nothing. He simply speaks it into being. He says, let there be light, and there's light.
Let this happen, and that happens. Let there be this kind of creature and that kind of creature, and it happens. And you see this sort of unfolding reality, and it all unfolds simply as God speaks it into being. But Genesis chapter 2 retells the story of the creation of humanity. And and it frames it in a very different way than Genesis chapter 1.
Where where in Genesis 1, God makes something from nothing, in Genesis chapter 2, when God makes humanity, he forms us from the dust. So he forms us from the dust, and he breathes life into us. And suddenly, the dust becomes something new, something else. And and I think when we look at Genesis 1 and 2, what we see is that our own creativity as people who are made in the image of God is, in a sense, a mirror of the kind of creativity we see in Genesis chapter 2. And what I mean by that is that you and I can't make something from nothing.
Right? We can't speak anything into being. We can't imagine anything from nothing. What we can do is we can look at the creation around us, we can look at the world around us, and we can reimagine it. We can recombine things.
We can make them into something new. So for instance, you walk into a forest, and you see a tree, and you chop it down, and you build yourself a shelter, and you've truly made something new. Nobody nobody looks at a house and says, hey. That's a really nice pile of trees you have there. Right?
You you could go to an art supply shop when you walk out of here, and you could buy some canvas and some oils and some pigments, and you could recombine them and show them to somebody, and nobody's gonna look at that and go, hey, that's a really nice amalgam of canvas and oils and pigments, hopefully. Hopefully, they look at it and they say, that's a lovely painting of a landscape, or that's a lovely portrait, or what an interesting abstraction you have created there. But you've clearly made something new. You've taken something that was ordinary and and something that was raw material, and you've worked with it. You've, in a sense, breathed life into it, from your own imagination and your own being, and it becomes something different.
And this goes all the way across human culture, whether we're talking about the arts, and we're talking about things like music, where people, you know, at at one point, somebody heard the wind blowing through reeds, and they noticed that there were particular pitches, and they thought, hey, we can make sound. We could order that sound, and song was born. Or or we're talking about, much more complicated constructions where you take different metals and plastics and glasses and chemicals and petrochemicals, and you create an iPhone. And, again, nobody looks at that and goes, hey. That's a nice amalgam of raw materials.
People look at it and say, what a great what a great invention, what a great creation, what a what a great thing that we have. Great thing and terrible thing most of us would probably say about our phones. Right? So this is how human creativity works. We enter the world.
We enter God's creation. We work with it. We breathe life into it, so to speak, with our imaginations and our thoughts and our inventiveness, and it becomes something different. And this is really important when we talk about stories because, ultimately, stories work the same way. Stories are ultimately something that are born out of our own life experience, out of our own, out of out of out of the things that we've encountered and the stories that we've heard and the things that have happened to other people.
And what great storytellers do, whether they're George Lucas or Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy, what they do is they take these components of life lived, of real experience, and they reimagine them and they re recombine them, and they give us something new. And and they give us these new, in a sense, new creations that captivate our minds and and draw us along into the world of stories. And and so I think what's really important for us to to recognize as believers is that if we're if we believe that we exist within this framework of redemption history, if we believe that creation, fall, redemption, consummation is the shape of the world and is the story that each of us is living, then then I think we have to begin to wonder and ask ourselves, is it possible that all of our storytelling in a sense is riffing on and exploring those themes in various ways? I think one one way to think about this would be to look at a a passage like Ecclesiastes 311, where where God says that he's put eternity into the hearts of men. Or a passage like, like Acts chapter 17, where Paul finds himself in the midst of the poetry and the art and the storytelling of the Romans.
And and he looks at what they're doing, and he's saying, you know, you tell these stories, and you you worship these gods, and you write you make this art. You write these poems. And what what your hearts are longing for, you don't know, but it's been revealed. And so what I wanna argue is that that these themes of creation, fall, redemption, consummation, these are the ultimate themes of the human heart. These are the things we're longing for answers to.
These are the things we're longing to to understand and to comprehend and to shape our world. And and that becomes extremely evident when we begin to explore the kinds of stories that are being told in the world around us. So for instance, in in in the theme of creation, we find ourselves wondering, hey, how did we get here? Who are we and where do we come from? And how did we find ourselves in the place that we're in?
And and I think there's a a a few different themes that that that come along with this. So for instance, oftentimes when we explore this question of where do we come from, it's hard to separate creation and fall because most of us can acknowledge very quickly that the world is broken and not as it's meant to be. And so so one theme is this theme of sort of paradise lost. And 2 movies in my lifetime that have explored this in very, very similar, eerily similar ways, some film critics pointed out, would be Dances with Wolves and Avatar. Right?
Dances with Wolves are these movies These two movies both present us with a vision of a sort of pristine, perfect world that's been untouched, untouched by mankind or untouched by the Western world. And and what happens is that, that mankind shows up or the European settlers show up, and they show up with technology and with power and with ambition, and they corrupt it, and they destroy paradise. And paradise is lost. Another film that did this, I think, really beautifully was the movie The Descendants from a few years ago. And in the opening scenes of The Descendants, George Clooney basically talks about how how people think that because you live in Hawaii, your life is perfect.
What you find out very quickly is that here's a guy who who is actually the one of the descendants of Hawaiian royalty, and he's living in paradise. But his wife has been hurt in a boating accident, and she's in a coma, and she's going she's not gonna survive. She's not gonna recover. And not only that, shortly after she goes into this coma where he's not gonna be able to communicate with her anymore, he finds out that she's been having an affair. And and parallel to this theme throughout the movie, there's another storyline about how he and his family, again, these descendants of Hawaiian royalty, they own this pristine, untouched passage of land that's been undeveloped.
And they have the opportunity to sell it and and to make a fortune. But to lose this this connection with something that's perfect and and untouched, this this paradise. I think it's all of these movies sort of point to the to the fact that the human heart knows that we've lost something. We've lost touch with a world that was made to be perfect, with a world that was made to be in harmony, both harmony with us in nature and harmony with us in one another. Another version of this would be sort of the Promethean myth, which obviously in Greek mythology, the Promethean myth was this idea that that human ambition sought to seek the fire of the gods, and from that comes all of the all of the suffering, all of the suffering of humankind.
That's a myth. That's a that's a theme that that that, first of all, is very resonant with with resonant with Genesis 3, where Satan tempts Eve by saying, hey. You can be like God. You can have this godlike power. And this is a story that gets told again and again.
Frankenstein was one of these famous stories where doctor Frankenstein, which was the subtitle of the book was actually the modern Prometheus. He longed for godlike power. He wanted to create life from nothing. But but probably a more contemporary, relatable example is actually the Spider Man stories. Pretty much every villain in the Spider Man movies doesn't start off as a villain.
They start off as somebody who wants to, use technology to advance humankind or to build a super army and bring peace to the world. And, of course, their their hubris overwhelms them. They create some terrible evil, and the only thing that stands between us and and them is Spider Man. And and what's interesting about the Spider man myths, the Spider man stories as well, is that Spider man himself was not was not created by human ambition. Nobody sought out to make Spider Man.
He just happened. A radioactive spider happened to bit him, happened to bite him. So you so you have this sort of providential theme that runs through those stories and and how human ambition is trying to, is overwhelming us and is gonna destroy us. But somehow, providence steps in to protect us from from that kind of an evil. Another theme that we see in storytelling is is sort of deeper explorations of the fall.
Deeper deeper explorations of why it is that good people do bad things or find themselves in terrible situations. And I think the 2, probably largest phenomenon that explored this theme in recent years would have been Breaking Bad and Mad Men. In Breaking Bad, the the show starts, and and you have this character who's pretty much an innocent. Right? He's he's pretty much a harmless, ordinary guy who finds himself in this situation where he knows he's gonna die, and and he wants to do what he can to protect his family, to protect them from his own death and from those consequences.
And so he, in a sense, takes a bite from the forbidden fruit. He decides he's gonna start making meth, and and the consequences unfold in this in the seasons that follow as he reckons with his illness and makes all this money and does increasingly horrifying things to, to to provide for himself. Mad Men is, again, one of these stories that that starts off in the very first episode and introduces us to Don Draper as a as a very fallen character, as somebody who's deceptive and who's living 2 lives, and and on the one hand has this sort of Manhattan playboy life that he lives. And on the other hand, he has this this wife and children at home. And and what that show does in in sort of this cyclical way is begin to explore his world and where he came from and where these decisions, how he found himself in this place and what the decisions were along the way that that led to this duplicitous life that was way more duplicitous than we thought as the story as the story goes on.
And it's way more sad and and and heartbreaking. And what I love about mad men is that is that madmen confronts us with this reality that our fallenness is both something that is deliberate and and is about choices that we make, but is also something, somehow about suffering and about loss and about the suffering of this guy, Don, who lived this miserable, horrible life. That brings us to, to redemption stories. Our our our culture is full of various kinds of redemption stories. One sort of broad theme for this is is something called the hero's journey.
And if any of you, if you studied stories in college, you probably, at some point, were confronted with Joseph Campbell and the whole hero hero's journey theme. And basically, what this what Campbell argues is that you can look across the cultures, you can look across the world, and what you see over and over again are these same themes, of of a of a hero who's confronted with this great evil and goes on this incredible journey in order to be able to reconcile himself, or reconcile his people, or whatever the case may be. On the one hand, you you you you often have these sort of superheroic kind of characters like Superman, somebody who, again, was sent away from his own homeland and becomes this redeemer for all of mankind. But you also have these, what I would call sort of mustard seed and and underdog hero kinds of stories. And the best example of this is is probably the Lord of the Rings.
Because you have a character like Frodo who's literally small, who's literally somebody that nobody would consider heroic or formidable in a battle, who goes into the the darkest places in the world and confronts the darkest evils that confront us. Another theme when it comes to redemption stories is is something that I've called redemption redemptive violence. And this is one of the ones that I think, excuse me, that I think Christians are often troubled by, but but it's something worth exploring. Why why is the world compelled by the violence of a show like Dexter, or by the violence of a, of of the films of of Quentin Tarantino? And what's at the heart of those stories?
What's at the heart of a story like True Grit, which again is a very dark, incredibly violent story? And I look at these movies, and and what I see is is this, in a sense, an acknowledgment that, number 1, the world is not as it should be, that there's this tremendous injustice that's going on all around us all the time. And number 2, there's a there's a price to be paid, and it's often a a bloody price that needs to be paid in order to reconcile the the injustices of the world. And and while we might cringe at the violence and while it it may not be our taste and we may not find it entertaining, isn't it interesting that we find ourselves telling stories about bloodshed that are meant to to bring some kind of justice and some kind of resolution. For Christians, that's top of mind.
We believe that that god had to die, that he had to shed his own blood to reconcile humanity to himself, that blood had to be spilt to reconcile the darkness to the light. Last but not least would be sort of the this theme of consummation. And I think what the easiest place to look to sort of find, you know, how this theme shows itself would be in fairy tales. Fairy tales often end with the very same phrase. You see it at the end of almost every classic Disney movie, that they all lived happily ever after.
After. But there's this idea that at the end of certain fairy tales, this kingdom has been restored, and there's peace in the kingdom, evil's been driven out, and everything's gonna be made right. And, again, it's this this this question to ask for ourselves is, why do we tell these stories over and over again? Why are we coming back and and repeating these stories and recreating them? The fairy tale, the modern fairy tale is actually the romantic comedy.
Right? And and if you don't believe that we're telling these stories over and over again, just look at the films of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. They literally made the same movie three times over. Boy meets girl. There's some tragedy.
There's something that's gonna keep them from each other. They have to overcome this obstacle. And at the end of the movie, they find themselves. And you know, at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, what's the word? It's magic.
And they hold hands and they walk off into the sunset. Everything's made right. Everything's restored. It's the way it's supposed to be. My friend Martin Bond refers to this as the, the gospel according to chick flicks, That that in in our in these romantic comedies, there's this sense that if we can just get these 2 people together, if we can just restore this broken love, this broken relationship, that everything's gonna be made right and we all leave happy and our hearts are warmed.
Because we long for that. Again, I think across the board in these stories, we long for answers and we long for where redemption stories point. We long for justice to be paid and to be restored. We long for a sense that the world is gonna be restored and made right and that we really are gonna live happily ever after. And so we keep telling these same stories again and again and again rooted in this kind of a hope.
One other example of of kind of a redemption story, that I love and and I'm troubled by tremendously would be reality television. And in particular, reality television of the form, that features people like Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton or Honey Boo Boo. They're all the same. Right? And they're all the same because they feature people who who essentially have no talent.
Okay? And and and I don't mean that harshly. Kim Kardashian Kim Kardashian in an interview actually once said when the interviewer basically asked her, hey. What's your talent? Why is it that you're famous?
And she said, you know, a bear in the circus can juggle and he has talent, but that doesn't make him famous. Do you know what I mean? Right? It's the greatest quote ever. Right?
It just describes our world. So so why so why do we obsess? Why is the world maybe not we. Maybe we're all smart enough not to obsess over Kim Kardashian, But I don't I'm sure that some of us watch the show. So so why is the world obsessed with the Kardashians?
Why is the world obsessed with Paris Hilton? Why are there people who literally today make their living posting Instagram photos, right, and get paid to wear certain clothes and different things? What what does that mean? And I think what it is is that somehow these these figures, I like to call them icons of desire. And what I mean by that is that we look at them and we look at the life they live and the things they possess and and the reality that they sort of embody.
And and to us, that's the good life. That's what we all long for. We look at them and we think, you know, if I had what they had, then I'd be happy. If I had the fame, if I had the wealth, if I had the glory that that embodies who they are, I'd wanna be happy. I would be happy.
I'd be satisfied. Because they embody everything that our culture is telling us will make you happy. Wealth will make you happy. Sex will make you happy. Beauty will make you happy.
Fame will make you happy. Being married to Kanye West will make you happy. What whatever it might be, They embody something that we long for, and we think that once we once we achieve those ends, we'll be satisfied. Our hearts will be satisfied. And and one of my one of my favorite things to bring to to bear on this is is actually, c s Lewis's essay, The Weight of Glory.
Because what Lewis says is Lewis says that this hunger in all of us, this hunger for glory, this hunger for fame, this hunger for recognition, that someone would look at us and tell us that you're beautiful and you're glorious and you're worth celebrating is at the heart of what it means to be human. Lewis says, that longing is right. That longing is what you were made for. You were made to carry a weight of glory, a burden of glory, and you long for it. But then he says the most wonderful thing, he says he says, but we we don't settle.
We we settle all the time for lesser glories than the one that's offered to us in Christ through his redemption. He says, we're like kids playing with mud pies in the backyard when somebody's offered us a holiday at the sea. The mud pies in the backyard is the fame and the sex and the reality television show. And the holiday at the sea is a God who looks at us and says that that he accepts us, and he welcomes us as his children and he wants to restore us to his restored world and his restored kingdom. So again, I I look at these stories, and and I'm not saying, to be clear, I'm not saying that every single one of these stories is an allegory, and that every that Jesus is the hero of every one of these stories and that these stories are all secretly Christian.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that the human heart, the storytelling heart is is unable to escape the gravity of God's story, Is unable to escape the gravity of redemption history and longs desperately longs desperately to have answers to those questions. Answers that only the gospel truly provides. So we have to ask ourselves to what end are we telling these stories? What's the goal?
What happens culturally? What happens in us? What happens in our world when we're telling these stories? And I think I think the reason we're compelled to tell these stories is is is a is a a few fold. 1 is this frame.
1 is this idea of framing up our world. So so the point of Mad Men, I think the the reason, Matthew Weiner created Mad Men and told the story of Mad Men is to try to make sense of the brokenness of the world and of the disappointment of the world. He he talks about this. He want he talks about how he wanted to tell those stories to expose misogyny and to expose the the culture of of of wealth and how vacuous and hollow it actually was. He's framing the world and going, this is who we really are.
And it's dark, and it's sad, and it's broken. Like John Grady Cole, I think we also also tell stories because we feel ruthless. We're looking for a way to say, this is who we are. This is where we came from. This is this is what our lives mean.
And so so even in our mythologies, even in our our grandest stories, our our superhero stories, our romantic comedies, all of these, we're we're framing up stories that tell us this is who we are, and this is what life means, and this is what we long for. And maybe it's justice, or maybe it's romantic love, or maybe it's, maybe it's simply to be wanted, simply to be desired. You know, one one of the one of the themes of movies that that that I've always found interesting is this theme of sort of the the nerd makes good. Right? 30 Rock actually did a whole episode sort of mocking this, where Tracy Jordan, at the beginning of the episode decided to put on a pair of glasses and rename himself Augbert the nerd, knowing that one day he'd take the glasses off, and suddenly everyone would realize that he was beautiful and he'd be popular.
Right? But you have a ton of movies, Can't Buy Me Love. There's dozens of movies that explore this theme of somebody who's undesirable, who one day finds themselves desirable. And what we're doing in each of these cases, again, we're framing the world. We're saying this is the good life.
This is what will satisfy you. This is what will make you happy. We're talking about consequences as well. We tell stories, one of the one of the the, I think one of the most important genres of storytelling that sort of emerged in the last 100 years is is the dystopia. There's many of them.
There's there's George Orwell's, there's George Orwell's stories. There's there's Alice Huxley's Brave New World. There's The Hunger Games. There's The Road by Cormac McCarthy. These stories that that are looking at the future and are saying are hubris and are our infighting and our selfishness and our our our need to sort of please ourselves, regardless of the consequences to the world around us, is leading us into a dark, dark place.
We're trying to awaken our hearts to where are we going, what is the world that we exist in, what is this frame. The second is, so so the first reason is to frame up the world. The first reason we tell stories is to frame the world. The second reason we tell the stories is to reaffirm values, to reaffirm, to one another the way we think that the world actually works. So again, love stories.
This is a great example of it. Why do we tell love stories? Because we think love matters, and we wanna pass on to other people that we believe that love matters. And so we tell love stories, and we move their hearts, and we move their imaginations, and you walk out of a love story. You walk out of a movie that tells a story of love thinking, I wanna fall in love.
And and there's something about passing on a value that happens when you tell those stories. The third is to move, to transform someone, to to to move them into a different place. And this is something where where culturally, I think we're seeing this all the time. I think one of the things that's happened in the last just the last 15 years when it comes to sort of sexual ethics and values in our culture, we've seen a tremendous shift. We all have to acknowledge where the wherever you may be on the spectrum of this, we've seen a tremendous shift in the way our our culture values human sexuality and understands things like, like homosexuality and transgenderism and all of this.
And at the heart of that transformation culturally is not a rational argument, but it's been storytelling. It's been the fact that in our television and in our movies, we've told compelling stories that have made us more compassionate for people who are different than us and and have made us able to see different lifestyles and different ways of being and and understand them as far more normal, far more relatable, far more comprehensible than we would have otherwise. And and this really gets us to the power of stories because stories work at us, again, they work at this affective level. They work on the on the level of the imagination and the emotions. And they work on us on a way that sort of bypasses, oftentimes, the the rational mind, the ability to to think.
They work on our hearts. And so we find ourselves compelled by stories and moved by stories, and and stories can can do this for good. So so when uncle Tom's cabin is written, this this was a story that that did this for good. It moved the hearts of the nation with compassion for their African American brothers and sisters. But they can they can also do this for evil.
Germany had a thriving film business in the years that Hitler was in power, and it was driven by a propaganda agenda meant to dehumanize those who were not part of the aryan race. It's a powerful thing. And the power of story is the power to transform and to change our hearts. The last version of this, I'll I'll point out, is that advertisements are meant to do this. Advertisements are designed to move you and to transform you by by telling a story that's a compelling vision of the good life.
One of my favorite versions of this is a Ford commercial. You've probably seen it. It it it starts off with these sort of dreamy scenes of 4 people driving in a truck out into the desert. And the narrator with sort of this classic Hollywood cowboy voice says, A man. A man and his truck and his few buddies.
And he goes out to the desert and they unload these these these motorcycles, and the the narrator, you know, talks about a few rough landings and, a few sore vertebrae, but it's all gonna melt away on the drive home. And so do you see these scenes and they're riding motorbikes in the desert, and then they load the motorbikes back up and they're driving back. And you know what the commercial says about the truck? Nothing. It tells you nothing about the truck.
What it does though is it tells a story about the kind of life you can live if you own this truck. This adventurous life, this masculine life, a life in community, a life where you're doing the kinds of things you you're doing the kinds of things that these people are doing. And and the good life that it's presenting is not this really functional truck that that gets the jobs done that you need done and is fuel efficient, is gonna last a long time. It's simply a vision of a life that is that is compelling, and it works on the level of the heart and the imagination. And this commercial won tons of awards because the advertising business knows this, that as Jamie Smith once said, if your imagination is hooked, you're hooked.
They don't need to convince you rationally of anything. Again, sorry about my vision. I'm just trying to keep up with my own manuscript. Alright. Bypassing our imaginations.
So so for us as believers, what does this mean? What does all this bring us back to? And and and what what can this tell us about our own faith in our own world? And I'll say just a few things on this, and we'll take a break. The the first thing is that if we're storytelling creatures, then we need to be very attentive to the kinds of stories that we're allowing into our lives.
And I don't mean this in a in the sense of sort of a church lady warning that the devil's gonna get you if you watch too many movies or and you watch too much television. What what I mean is what I mean is I believe we have Christian liberty to watch all kinds of things. But I think that what what we're obligated to do is to never watch anything thoughtlessly. That as we watch films, as we watch these things, we need to begin to ask ourselves, what is the story that they're telling? What's the vision of the good life that's being put in front of us?
And how are we how are we being compelled? What are we being invited to? What's the promise? What's what's the vision of salvation? What's the vision of redemption that's being put in front of us?
The second thing is, I think we need to pay attention to our own stories. And what I mean by that is both our life stories and the story of faith that we're telling. For for the church, throughout most of the life of of the church, the church was a storytelling culture. It was a culture that gathered every single week and it remembered that God is holy, that we are sinners, that Jesus saves us and Jesus sends us. And that's a story that that forms the church and that forms you and me, and that should ultimately be the story that frames up our own lives and make sense of who we are.
But I think oftentimes, as Christians, we're so, we're so wrapped up in in getting the facts right, in studying doctrine, and in studying the the details of the bible, and the the historical origins of a passage, and breaking things down grammatically, we sometimes lose sight of this big picture. And we sometimes lose sight of the fact that that we're oriented, that that all of these things which totally matter, completely matter. I'm not saying doctrine doesn't matter. All these things which matter make their most sense when they're framed within the bigger story that gives us this compelling vision of who we are, of who God has made us, and and of what God is doing, of where we're ultimately going. If if the trajectory of history and the trajectory of the culture as we're looking at it today is right, things may get much more difficult for Christians than they are right now.
That may not happen. Things could shift, but that may be happening. And if that's the case, then I think the greatest resource that we have as believers is the story of the gospel. Because it's a story that doesn't just end with you and I getting saved and becoming friends in this community, as much as that matters. But it's a story that ends with, at the end of the day, God reconciling all things to himself.
And then we have a greater hope. We have a greater hope that that can surpass the suffering that might come in a difficult culture, in an awkward relationship at work, in, in political oppression or whatever else. The power of stories is is ultimately one of the gifts God's given us, and he's wired us for them. And he's wired us for them so that we would be rooted in him and rooted in the work that he's doing. Thank you guys very much.
I think we're gonna do the break now.
Jeffrey Heine: Alright. So we're gonna take, a 10 minute break. Take some time to think about questions. Think about things that you'd like to engage further as we go into a time of q and a in about 10 minutes. Thanks.
Speaker 3: So this is a question that's sort of riffing off the earlier evangelism question. My, like, suspicion is that most of the people in this room would not, like, turn to the 4 spiritual laws in evangelism. But I, at least in my personal experience, often find myself kind of just confused as to how to like practically embody this sort of storytelling gospel account. And and so I was wondering if there are any like resources just that you would recommend. I know you said like case by case basis, and I think that's certainly true.
But just to become sort of better storytellers of about Jesus of Nazareth.
Speaker 2: Oh, man. So I'm gonna blow it on the top of my head giving you some giving you specifics. There's, yeah. There's one by Jack Miller that I can't think of the name of that it's my favorite. It's a short book.
I'll look it up. This is gonna sound really lame. I'll look it up and post it on Twitter later. I'm at Mike Cosper. I promise that.
But the second thing I would say is what's most important I think in with regard to this is to tell your own story. Like share your own experience and be vulnerable. What And what I mean by that is talk to people about your darkness, Talk to people about what what what led you to the cross. What would have been low moments in your faith. How has your faith comforted you in suffering and in hard times?
Sharing sharing your personal narrative is I think the best and the and the most powerful way to to really open doors conversationally with people. And it's less threatening in many ways. Where I think the the trying to give them the meta the redemption meta narrative, Often, it's often very difficult. It's just often very difficult in in this in in the circumstances to do that in a way that's really compelling. And I don't think that's the first the first job.
I mean, that you see that in the book of acts. You see these guys giving these meta narratives, But these are also guys that are eyewitnesses to the resurrection so it's their story too. So in in a sense like one way, I remember one person, pastor one time said, the act the the the the testimonies in the book of acts are there the ways that they witnessed are are witnesses to the resurrection. How are you a witness to the resurrection? In your own life, in the lives of people around you, focus on those stories and share those stories.
And and that may be your best window into those kind of conversations. So. More questions? Anybody? 1 up here.
Speaker 4: So I'm gonna feel bad because mine will be significantly less spiritual than than the others were. But as the Marvel movies have, you know, continue to have success as Netflix continues to change things, do you see do you see a difference in as stories get more and more serialized in how that will affect how we tell them and interact with stories, with that more long form storytelling Yeah. Yeah. Kind of coming more into the popular fold.
Speaker 2: It's hard to hear. I just wanna make sure I heard you right. So as stories become longer form, more serialized, how does that change? Does it change? Yeah.
I think I think the opportunity of it affords You know, when you listen to actors talk about this I heard an interview with Paul Giamatti who's currently on the show 1,000,000,000. And, you know, they just renewed for a second season. They did 10 episodes the first season. And what he said is he said what I love about this is not that we get to tell We're not telling different kinds of stories necessarily. Like you could do 1,000,000,000 in 2 hours.
You just can't go as deep. So what what these serialized things kind of do, these long form things kind of do, is they really open up the opportunities to go into deeper and darker places. Again go back to mad men. That was what made mad men so profound. The Wire would be another example of this.
The The Wire took you on this journey that that a 2 hour movie never could, and that the 1 hour sort of serialized format of network television crime dramas never were willing to go into, which was to humanize the good guys. Sorry. To humanize the bad guys and to villainize the good guys while maintaining very clearly, these are the good guys and these are the bad guys. The good guys are drunks and they're adulterers, and they'll do anything they can to get a conviction. They'll flaunt the law.
They'll they'll they'll do whatever they have to do. They'll destroy marriages. They'll pass out drunk on railroad tracks. Like the the cops in the wire are very troubled souls. And meanwhile, the the drug dealers, while being drug dealers and murderers and people who are vile and despicable, were very human.
And you couldn't help but feel compassion. I mean there's a scene there's a scene in in in in a late season where, where one of the the gangster assassins, this girl named Snoop, she has her come up and she has her moment where somebody is gonna kill her. And and right before she dies, you know, she looks at the guy who's about to shoot her and she's like, how do I look? Do I look okay? And he goes, you look good girl.
And then he shoots her, you know. And it's this it's it's heartbreaking. Like like again, as bad as this character was, the brilliance of the storytelling is that you saw that this was somebody this is a person made in the image of god and they're troubled and they're dark and they're they're doing horribly evil things. But you also can't help but feel compassion for them, in the midst of that. So I think that's the opportunity serialized stuff of, affords.
I don't know that Marvel works in the same way because Marvel is so encapsulated in the way they tell their stories. They seem to be able to end each movie with the exception of the teaser at the end, after the credits. They seem to end most of their movies with a real sense that, okay, the wormhole's closed and we're eating shawarma now. Everything's okay. It's not quite it's not quite I I haven't seen civil war, I I must confess.
I know it's supposed to be the best one. But, but I hear that. I mean, they are doing that to a certain level. I I'm a little disenchanted with the commercialism of it. But that's just, you know, it's Disney, Star Wars.
It's all commercial now. Just shut up and love the movie I suppose. Yeah. That's what Disney wants. It's the same old l Jackson told a o Scott.
So Another question? More questions? We're done? Oh. Here we go.
Down front.
Speaker 5: Would you have any thoughts for us on thinking through the difference between maybe a guilty pleasure versus this is pure trash, I should not watch this at all. Yeah. Anything on that spectrum?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So so I have an analogy that I think helps to to frame this up. There's there's sort of there's sort of there's a polarity here. At one end of the poll, I would say is sort of the Dana Carvey church lady, you know, who's she's prudish and she's convinced that satan is behind everything and and and she's a Pharisee about not just what she watches but what everyone watches. Right?
She's looking out for that. The other end of the spectrum is what I would call the over anxious teenager. Right? And this is like the kid in the youth group, who's sitting with his girlfriend and every single youth group gathering he asked the youth minister how far is too far. He wants to know how far he can go.
What can he get away with? I think both attitudes are to be avoided. And and so it really in many ways it boils down, well I'll I'll come back to this. In many ways it boils down to conscience. And it boils down to conscience in that we need to look at our own hearts and go am I the over anxious teenager who wants to know what can I get away with?
And and what can I, you know, how can I sort of feed on trash and and, you know, the whether it's whether it's, you know, this this goes across the board whether it's the films we watch or the way we engage on social media, the things we're clicking through? Is it is it this this eagerness to sort of scandalize the mind and stimulate the mind and all of this? And then on the other end of the spectrum is the, the the church lady who's so afraid of encountering something that's gonna corrupt her soul. Right? That that she won't watch anything that that deals with darkness or violence or any of those things.
And so to the church lady you wanna remind, hey, the the bible is full of stories that are very dark, that that deal with violence and and murder and sexuality and all of this. And it explores them, in a way that exposes what it means to be human and in the darkness of the human heart, and the power of redemption. And then at at the same time you wanna warn the anxious teenager, this is not the good life. The good life is not a life of lust and and and all of this. Now, where I wanna put the pin on is is on 2 fronts.
One is sort of the, you know, I can't remember which one it was but there was this the supreme court justice who said, I know pornography when I see it. Like we we know when something crosses that boundary, and and if we don't have a sensitive conscience, and we're just searing our conscience, we need to go to our community and go hey, I don't know where my I don't I have no sense of boundaries anymore. I'm not I'm not disturbed by anything I watch. That's a clear sign that your conscience is seared and and you need to be concerned. But this is my this is my big thing on this is, you know, in my childhood, like I grew up in in a pretty fundamentalist home, hardcore Southern Baptist home, and so the rules were very clear about violence and sexuality, violence and nudity.
Like these these are the things, the borders we don't cross, certain words can't be said in all of this. What's dangerous is that if we're not focused on the heart and on what these things are doing to the heart, then then we'll say, you know, we'll say no to this show because of nudity and sexuality, but we'll say yes to half a dozen h, HGTV shows that are feeding a kind of consumerism, and a kind of lust, and a kind of discontentment. My favorite example of this is actually extreme home makeover. Like I don't think they do it anymore because most of those people had to sell their homes because they couldn't pay for the taxes on them. But at the end of this show, they they do all this work on the house and they'd send the family off and they'd come back and the, you know, what was the last three words of it each episode.
Right? Move that bus. And the bus drives out of the way. And what happens next is if you really think about it, incredibly disturbing because people drop to their knees and they cry and they throw their hands up in the air just like they would in a revival service. It's worship.
It's redemption has arrived. Thank God my dreams have come true. I have the American dream, the perfect home, everything in front of me. And so so for me I think I think when we deal with this question of what's in, what's out, what should we watch, what shouldn't we watch, we really have to come back to how is what is the story of the good life that's being presented and how is this affecting my heart? Is this, you know because you can watch HGTV and and watch it like Jeremiah going, oh my gosh.
I can't believe what the world has come to. That we believe this is the good life. And you can watch it and be sucked into the story and and find yourself going, you know, if I just had a better house, if I just had a renovation, then I'd be happy. Because stories do that and and love stories do that. That's the that's the power of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.
Like, true love is gonna make us happy. They're they're all these visions of the good life. And the, when you think of the the happy ever ending, happy ever after endings of so much reality television, it's really disturbing. And it's really incredibly shallow, the hope that's being held out for us. So, that's a very long answer to your question.
I think we have to be way more sensitive than we are to far more than what what what Christians often focus on which is language, violence, sexuality. Questions? More questions? We got one more? One more question?
We got time for one more.
Speaker 6: One of my favorite things about stories is how they help us build empathy. So what are some books or shows that you would recommend to Christians to help build more empathetic hearts?
Speaker 2: Shows, books to build empathy. Okay. Great question. I might need to think a minute. So so a book that I read, I'll start with this one and let's see if it leads to others.
A book that I read a few years back that that that very much changed my, my perspectives on the world. I'll I'll name 2. 1 was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Now that's a horrible book to recommend to anybody because it's a 1,000 pages long and it's small print and it's a novel with almost 400 footnotes in it. It's obnoxious to recommend this book to people.
So I'm first to admit that, But there it is. And and the reason that book was really life changing was the the whole book is about addiction. And it's about addiction on a on a really broad on a really broad broad plane. The way that we're addicted to entertainment, the way we're addicted to sexuality, and then the way we're addicted the way we have a culture of addiction around drugs. And he really goes he he was Wallace was an addict himself, had been through various stages of rehab, and depression, and and hospitalization, and all of this.
And so it's a deep dive into the world of an addict, and a deep dive into the world of people who are chronically depressed. And it broke my heart. I mean it broke my heart for for for people in those circumstances. It helped me to understand relationships I had with people who were in those places. It was it was profound.
A much more, easily consumable book, is a book called The Queen of Harlem. It's by Brian Keith Jackson. And it's a story of an upper middle class, African American kid who graduates from college. He's grown up wealthy, he's grown up kind of with everything. He went to Stanford, and he's about to go into law school.
And he decides to to take a break between between his studies and to go to go live in Harlem, to go experience what it's like living in Harlem. And the book takes place in the nineties. This is long before, like, Harlem now is pretty is gentrifying pretty fast. It's a pretty expensive place to live. This is long before that.
This is when Harlem was Harlem. And it it just describes his experience as sort of a fish out of water in this place, the experience of being a young African American man in the city, experiencing race and prejudice and and stereotyping and questions of identity that me as a white guy who grew up in middle class have never had to wrestle with and never had to reckon with. There's this really profound moment in the book where, again, he's he comes from wealth, he's got credit cards, he's got access to resources. There's this moment in the book where he finds himself in midtown Manhattan with no money and, like, without even enough money to get a subway ride to go back to his apartment. And so he's gotta walk like a 110 blocks.
It tells the story of him walking this 110 blocks, being a tall, athletic black kid dressed like, you know, any other black kid on the streets with no money and no resources. And he starts playing out these fantasies in his mind of, you know, knocking somebody down and taking their money from them and and and playing on the fear that he very clearly sees in the eyes of people who see him as a threat because of the color of his skin. That was a book that was really profound for me as well. Just some questions of race and identity, and again, things that I've not had to reckon with. Toni Morrison's books, every single one of them will wreck you if you've not encountered those questions before as well.
Yeah. That's just a handful of examples.
Jeffrey Heine: So Alright. Join me in thanking Mike Cosper for being with us tonight. Thank you so much.