For most of us our world-view was formed by the great, seminal stories of Genesis from Creation to the Patriarchs – Creation, Cain and Abel, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. In the last two centuries these stories were either over allegorized (turned into psychological or philosophical stories) or over literalized as people have introduced all sorts of tortured, convoluted, mental constructions to turn them into factual histories. Neither approach is true to the Bible. In Mickey’s study of Genesis we are offered a third way, in which these formative narratives are treated as both fully true and fully meaningful, one text not divided or confused.
The Bible freely uses the metaphor of a race to describe our lives: “in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize” (I Corinthians 9:24), “let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (Hebrews 12:1), “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7), and, of course, “The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). From football players to NASCAR, Christian symbols and language are used and the language of sports mixes with Biblical and theological language. In the Wired Word we will take up the good and bad of what happens when religion and sport mix exhortations to effort, perseverance, and morality into a sort of Civil Religion.
See you Sunday,
Bill
