Who's Your Daddy?

Sharon and I are thoroughly enjoying our 10 week class, "In Pursuit of Jesus." We are team teaching the class and, this won't be a surprise to most of you who read this blog, we are using music and video and interactive experiences to help the students see the life of Jesus more clearly.

Yesterday we were talking about Jesus' parables and how he used stories that made sense to the first hearers. One of the participants made our point for us when he pointed out his own failure to "get" the Parable of the Lost Coins until he understood that each coin is a day's wage. We used his confession to make the point that while the parables are great (and inspired), we need to translate those stories into stories that make sense to our contemporaries, even as Jesus did with his. We then showed a 2 minute clip from "Remember the Titans" in which the lead character, a football coach (played by Denzel Washington) newly arrived at a high school, is being confronted by one of his football players who begins demanding spots on the team for his friends. The player's leverage, he thinks, is that he is the "only all-American you've got." The coach then proceeds to firmly put the player in his place. The coach tells the player to say goodbye to his mother because when he gets on the bus to go to training camp he will only have his "brothers on the team and your Daddy." Then he asks the question, "Who's your Daddy?"

We then assigned the four groups in our class to decide how that scene illustrates truth about God or about what it means to belong to God's family. After a few brief moments of panic, the groups began to brainstorm and then we could hardly get them to stop.

And even better, in the long run, than what they recognized about God and His family in that one brief clip was the "ah ha" moment of seeing how the truths God has revealed about Himself and his family can be translated into the stories of music, movies and their own lives as they seek to communicate God to their friends. Jesus often said, "The kingdom of heaven is like..." Jesus did not just keep saying the same thing about God in hopes that if he said it often enough, they'd finally understand. Instead he sought ways to connect what people did NOT understand about God and His family with things that they DID understand. It is not unusual, in the Gospel accounts, for him to tell two or three stories in the same conversation to try to come at the truth from different angles. His desire and goal was that his contemporaries would finally connect the dots. We have that same privilege. And if we pay attention to our own stories and the stories of those around us and the stories woven throughout our popular culture, we might be able to connect our friends to the One whose story matters most.