Tag: New creation

The Neverending Story

I believe it’s better to understand #hell more like the NOTHING in The Neverending Story, a negation of creation. I think Karl Barth would like that.

I predict The Duffer brothers are taking that motif on for season 5 of Stranger Things. They’ve already tipped their hat to the Never Ending Story in season 2. The upside down is like the Nothing. It’s a negation of the right side up and all things good and wholesome. De-creating chaos breaks its way into our world and creeps in. In the last episode of season 4, it shows the upside down breaking into the right side up, much like the Nothing was destroying Fantasia.

The main ingredient to New Creation is imagination (thank you Lennon and Dr. MLKJ, and Uncle Paul himself of course). We have to imagine together to create the next new moment as the collective deity (cross the streams like in Ghostbusters). If we don’t do that, then the Nothing destroys everything. Even though it’s Nothing, it acts as a positive entity (oh the irony), feeding off the vacuum that is formed while we’re not busy new-creating. It always has to be kept at bay by our imagination, imagining a new future that we can create together that is not hell.

The only thing that has to happen for evil to prevail is for good people to do, well, Nothing. So in the Never Ending Story,, the human child had to give the Princess of Fantasia a new name. He spoke a new world into existence by calling her name. A speech-act. He manifested it. He believed in another future and made it true. All the sad things became untrue. Atrayu’s horse Artex was alive again and the snail people were also bodily resurrected. When the Earthling child spoke her new name into the dark storm it was a sacramental act of New Creation. Kind of like when God brought order out of the chaos in the beginning by speaking out into the void (the Nothing). And then Man gave names to all of the animals.

It truly is the Never Ending story that we’re all a part of. We’re born into it and we have to say our lines and play our part while we’re here. The Never Ending Story is The Epic of our existence, and we’re all in it. Throughout the movie the child reading the Epic slowly realized that he was a character in the book as well. Now that’ll preach. Say your lines. Say them like the future depends on it. Because it does.

Related matters:
“Somethin’ filled up my heart with #nothin’
I can #see that it’s a lie.”
#wakeup and #adjust #somethins #happening #here everybody look what’s goin’ down. “I know there’s #something goin’ on. “I know there’s #something goin’ on.” “I’m always searching for #something.”

New Covenant, New Creation

Jeremiah 31:27-34
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. In those days they shall no longer say:

“The parents have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.

But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt– a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

Jeremiah envisioned a covenant relationship with God that was directly from God as an act of creation and forgiveness of sins, putting all individuals in a relationship with him and holding all individuals accountable for their own actions (“but all shall die for their own sins…, No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.)

I believe the later Christian development of the idea of Jesus’ substitutionary atonement for the forgiveness of sins is an unfortunate solution to a problem that never existed: the original sin of Adam and Eve imputed to the rest of mankind. Jeremiah offers a solution directly from God that requires no intermediary or imputed/alien righteousness.

Like the original covenant, the new covenant was kicked off by an act of Creation by God, and Genesis creation language is here too: “God will sow human and animal seed”. And covenant language: “I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

I believe that in scripture, we find ancient beliefs which bear witness to realities that have always been true. What Jeremiah believes about Judah and Israel, I believe has always been true about all of creation. I believe that we’re all born into a covenant with a divinity that creates and recreates based on covenant faithfulness to love and forgiveness. Because forgiveness is necessary for existence and creation in the world we live in, right? I believe forgiveness transforms us continually into the Divinity that creates us, making us the Divine agents of New Creation.