By Amy Butler
I seem to be always scouting around for theological metaphors — you know, fast-and-ready ways to talk about that mystery we like to call God. I do not consider this tendency of mine an exceptionally unusual talent. Rather, I think it’s all about survival. After all, I happen to have a job in which I am required to come up with something at least vaguely thoughtful-sounding to discuss from the pulpit every Sunday morning, and it seems like Sundays never, ever came around so fast until I started preaching every week.
This involuntary theological-metaphor-creating reflex of mine can lead to some very strange things, such as the newsletter column I once wrote about my six-year-old-son catching a slug and creating a home for it in one of my plastic food-storage containers. (At the moment I cannot think what deep theological point I was trying to make, but I do remember that it made sense to me at the time.)
Whenever I find these metaphors or illustrations, whether they make sense to anybody else or not, I hurry to write them down. There are notepads in my car and next to my bed and almost everywhere else in my life so that I can take note of such inspiration. Who knows when next a good metaphor will come in handy?
Since I always relish the discovery of a good theological metaphor, I was looking forward the other night to watching a movie recommended to me by a colleague. “The theological themes run deep in that one!” he’d enthused. Anticipating a gold mine of potential sermon illustrations, I turned on the DVD player and curled up on the couch to take it all in.
The long and short of this story is that, for the life of me, I couldn’t find one theological metaphor there. Not even one! The movie was pretty good as movies go, but even I, Queen of the Obscure Reference, couldn’t begin to invent even a vague theological connection. I’m still stumped.
I got to thinking later that perhaps the colleague who recommended the movie made a mistake. Or, maybe he’s crazy? Or maybe I’m crazy? All of these options are possible, of course. But I think it’s more likely that there was something in that movie that touched a place in his soul and called to his mind a profound experience he’d had with God.
I’ll have to call him and quiz him about his perspective, but in the meantime I am remembering the holy and solemn challenge faced by all of us whenever we struggle to describe relationship with God. The intensely personal and individual ways God’s Spirit weaves in and out of each of our lives touch, challenge and transform us — but they are never exactly the same as anybody else’s.
This is, of course, the great mystery of walking with God. However, please note that it does pose a significant challenge for those of us who talk to, say, whole congregations of people about relationship with God. This leads to the sudden, alarming thought: What if the theological parallel I see so strongly falls flat for everybody else?
I think I believe that, right there, in the space between what we experience and how we communicate it, stands everyone in our communities of faith. Right there, stretching across the divide, are lives and lives that touch our own life and help us see God in new and unanticipated ways.
See, I liked the movie, but I think I might be more successful at uncovering theological narratives in that movie after I hear my friend tell me where he saw God when he watched it. Though the movie didn’t seem exceptionally theological to me, I do know that I regularly recognize God at work in the life of my colleague. Perhaps he can translate for me, and maybe I’ll be able to see it then. In fact, I’ll bet when I hear his story it will spark a memory of my own story of engagement with God’s Spirit, and together we’ll remember again how it is God works in our lives and our world.
Then I’ll explain to him what exactly it was that I learned about God from the slug in my Tupperware.