Andy Cornett | living in the new creation

endlessly captivated by the person and work of the resurrected Jesus

Easter Sunrise

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photo: Robin Gale Cornett, 31 March 2013

Yesterday was our Easter Sunday service on the brow at Signal Mountain. Here’s an excerpt from the end of my short message. It’s title was rise, and mostly consisted of a working-through of 1 Corinthians 15:3-6, 50-58 and our freedom from sin, death, evil/devil – and referencing the lyrics of “Because He Lives (sung at the service).

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There is a name for rising up to this kind of life: FREEDOM. The glorious freedom of the children of God who know the mystery of faith: that Christ Jesus died, that Christ is risen, that Christ will come again.

This life is worth everything because he lives.

Some days I am standing near this road, waiting at the bus stop with my daughters – and I see the sun come up. Some days on my way to church, early in the morning, I will drive over here, stand on this wall, and look to the east – and watch a new day dawn over this city and community.

And as the sun rises, I see everything else – this whole valley spread before us. And I am reminded of the great quote by CS Lewis who said “I believe in the risen Christ like I believe in the sun – not because I can look at him directly, but because by his light I see everything else.”

And then I get to work. And I remember vs. 58 – the verse Paul uses to end this section. We work as fathers or mothers, husbands or wives, students or teachers, business or home, friends and family. And we work hard serving Jesus in His new creation, but we don’t carry the load. As Paul says – we give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord because we know that our labor isn’t in vain. We’re not trying to receive God’s grace as if we can earn it – other way around! We’ve received the grace of the risen Jesus so that we can get to work! This life matters in every exquisite detail.

We are working in the light of day because the Son us up, because Jesus the Son has lived, died, risen, and is coming again, and by His light we see everything. That’s what it means to rise up. That’s what it means to be part of God’s uprising in our little corner of the world. People are dying to see a life that rises up in freedom because the Past is forgiven, the Present is lived with no fear, and the Future is secure. I don’t just want to buried with my feet facing the East – I want to live facing Jesus, rising up because of the new life he has planted in my heart by faith.

on the importance of being unimportant

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Happy New Year, everyone.

To listen to some in the last two weeks, you’d have though the world would have ended by now. Whether goof-ball interpretations of the Mayan Calendar or shrill warnings about the fiscal cliff, we all heard that the End was Near. I started to mentally compose a Facebook status for Dec. 20 laying out what I would do it was my last day in the world: namely, I’d carry on the work and the loves God has given me.

That made me remember a secret wish of mine. All my life I have wanted to be in or at an “Important” moment in time. I’ve wanted to be a student present at that famous lecture, a participant at some historic rally, someone who ends up known for some legendary phrase or work, or just a guy who can bounce grandkids on my knees and say “I was there that day when …” There’s this yearning deep within me to be Important, to have people (or posterity) recognize that Importance.

But so far? Not so important. At least, not Important to the “Important” people who keep lists of such “Important” things. And the funny thing is, somewhere in the last 5 years (I can’t tell you where or when) I’ve become okay with being unimportant. More than okay, actually – committed to the importance of being unimportant.

Everyday is an apocalypse in the best and broadest sense of the word – an unveiling, uncovering – a revelation and disclosure. Every day is both a culmination of all that came before (bearing us “ceaselessly into the past”) and the first glimpse of something fresh and new and green, unseen and untouched. I am more and more convinced that the truly “important” moments remain unimportant to the most Important. I want to revel in the small things, to be present in each moment as if a gift is placed in my hands, to know the names of things and the read the signs like the changing of the weather or the light in each season of 6:30am bus stops. I want to reread good old books and not worry about keeping up with the new ones. I want to love a small handful of lovely people well rather than worry about whether I’ve spoken to the Important ones. I’d rather answer questions like “are you home tonight?” with a smile and nod than give affirmatives to Important invitations. I’d rather live a life of substance in obscurity rather than an anxious, Important one.

Importance is actually a temptation for me. It’s a temptation toward controlling my own destiny or writing my own story. It’s me placing Me on the throne of my heart, and to despise the unimportant or scorn the lowly is a tell-tale sign that something has gone wrong in my heart.

I don’t know if the End is Near, but I know that any day could bring it. Every day actually does as both an end and a beginning. But I know that the Lord is near, and our gentleness is to evident to all. Gentleness: that sounds like an unimportant thing – a thing not to be worried about, but sought with gratitude in your heart to God.

None of this is meant to discount what you or I do: our work and our loves remain terribly important when seen in the right context. At the end of the Hobbit, Gandalf says something remarkable to Bilbo: “Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you that, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you, but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”

It’s not up to me to determine what is Important, because I do believe that all my adventures and escapes are managed by another. What I want to say is that I’m quite alright with being quite a little fellow in the wide world.

So Happy New year, everyone. Let’s raise a glass and toast the importance of being unimportant.

How’s It Going To End?

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Jim Carrey as "Truman"

Did you ever see The Truman Show? The 1998 fictional film was about a phenomenally popular reality television show starring “Truman” (Jim Carrey). The catch is, Truman didn’t know it was a show – his whole life since birth (relationships, work, home) was minutely filmed in an artificial environment built to tell his story without his awareness. The viewers knew that sooner or later it had to come apart, and the question on their minds was this: How’s it Going to End?

In the last decade we saw a trend rise in recovering the importance of a Christian worldview. While nothing new, the challenge to think “Christianly” within a biblical framework helped people remember that thoughts and ideas are not neutral – they have a place within a larger story and help to move it along. A worldview itself functions like a set of lenses through which you see the world – and it’s made of cultural experience and social formation as much as any theology or adopted set of beliefs, ideas, or creeds.

I was fortunate enough to be taught to avoid the more “checklist-like” approaches (What does this worldview say about God? Jesus? About sin? Etc.) in favor of a deeper analysis that asked a series of fundamental questions:

  1. Who are we? What are we as human beings? Who are we really?
  2. Where are we? What is “this world” like? Where do we find ourselves?
  3. What’s the problem? What, if anything, has gone wrong in or with us or with this world?
  4. What’s the solution? What needs to happen? What are we being taught or encouraged to do? how do we change? grow? take action? move forward?

But now I think we need to add a fifth to this grid of questions for evaluating a worldview:

5. How’s it going to end? Or – where is this story going? Does it have a telos? Does it have an implicit or explicit goal? How’s it going to end?

Here’s my conviction – you cannot tell the Christian story of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ without making clear where the story is headed. Let me go further: if you can’t or don’t talk about where it is headed, you aren’t truly telling the Christian story. “Eschatology” – the theological study of the “last things,” the climax of history in the culmination of God’s story – isn’t that nifty category you tack on to your belief system or that thing you mention if you have time in a class or if someone gets courage to pop the question.

For Christians, what God has done in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ through his Spirit has broken into the middle of history from the end. This king of Israel, Jesus the Messiah, is also the world’s true Lord. The “now” we live in is always in light of the “not yet” that is to come, as we remember every time we pray that his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. So everything from our ethics to our aesthetics, our service to our singing has to be seen not only in light of how things got started but also what God is bringing about in the New Creation. This is the anchor to our hope. This is Paul’ argument in 1 Corinthians 15 – that there is real victory over death and sin and all its power, victory proclaimed now even as we look forward to that Day when the end will come and all there is but one kingdom – the new heavens and the new earth. Note that the whole chapter is bracketed by a declaration of the gospel (v3-4) and ringing exhortation to give yourself fully to the work of the Lord in light of his victory (v58).

So let’s start asking the question – how’s it going to end? Because we believe that reality is headed somewhere, that God is moving his story forward to a glorious climax. That vision, a sure and certain hope, drives us back into the here and now with the courage and faith to get to work.

A story that can’t or won’t talk about where things are going isn’t a Christian story.

Daniel Kirk on Hope

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Daniel Kirk on Hope:

The story Paul tells is one in which there is a sure and certain line to be drawn between the cross of Christ and the eternal hope that lies ahead. “Hope” is Christological, and begun by participation “in him.” Paul’s own work intends to “present each person mature in Christ” (1:28).

The transformation that lies ahead is begun now. It begins with the cross, is reenacted in the community’s cruciform life together, plays out in acts of faithful obedience and love, and resolves with hope being realized in glory.

The trick, it seems, is to hold onto all these things simultaneously: to be of sure hope, possessing Christ, while not embracing a triumphalism that neglects the cross; to be confident that we are a reconciled people, while still recognizing our need for transformation; to see the cross of Christ saving us, but not to leave it behind as we seek out how to best love and serve the world in which we find ourselves. There is no hope without the cross, but there is no maturity or love without it, either.

Along with a book I just read and a series I’ve been teaching to high schoolers, that quote above has helped me realize why my basic way of evaluating worldviews is inadequate. More on that to come …

on True Art

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“We have lost the essence of what it means to be an artist. True Art does not chase after novelty – it is a sensor quest for the new order of what God is creating, toward fully realized humanity. Using our senses, Art poses deeper questions rather than giving easy answers. To be truly human in a liquid reality, we must resist the culture of fear and cynicism. The World That Ought To Be is not a utopia, an unrealizable fantasy; it is instead created out of sacrificial love. To love is to quest for the World That Ought to Be. Love is enduring, and love uses all of our senses. Loves is generative, and will create the stage for the New to appear. The role of the artist in a liquid reality is to awaken all of our sense through creativity and love. Our quest will be to live more fully in the liminal zone between heaven and earth, the old and the new …

“With all the solid notions being washed away, as new fears creep into our consciousness, we must insist on reminding people that there is a Stage behind the stage, a Reality beyond the reality. And instead of reminding people of the cold earth, we need to awaken them to recognize the deposit of what is to come. There is a banquet waiting for us beyond the veil. If all is in flux, our task is to touch the fragile earth with the promise of heaven, creating the ‘still point of the turning world’ in the eye of the storm of life. The gospel of Jesus makes this possible.”

— Makoto Fujimura, “The Aroma of the New” in Books and Culture

(I’m posting this from New Orleans where I am working with teams of teenagers from 5 different states on something called the Restoration Project. They, too, are working toward the World That Ought to Be, the world brought into being through the New Creation in Christ Jesus.)