Happy Halloween!  In light of the holiday I want to take a look back at one of my favorite films – The Nightmare Before Christmas.  This claymation masterpiece from Tim Burton holds a dear place in my heart.  As an artist I was drawn to the macabre beauty of Nightmare from an early age and it still holds me captive frame by frame, but it wasn’t until I took a class in Biblical Theology in college that Nightmare became as significant to me as it is today.

Our professor, fond of using pop-culture to flesh out theology (Lion King, Field of Dreams, etc.) dropped The Nightmare Before Christmas on us to help us understand the important connection between narratives and the communities that inhabit the narratives.  Stories and communities go together.  Take a story out of one community and drop it into another and the community changes the story to fit into the community.  We see this when Jack Skellington discovers Christmas-town and tries to bring it back to his native Halloween-town.  What follows is not the conversion of Halloween-town into a North-Pole-esqe town of holiday cheer.  Instead the inhabitants of Halloween-town turn the Christmasy items Jack brought back into tools of fright and terror.

In much the same way, God’s story and the community of people living that story go together.  When we take God’s story away from the community that lives it (the church) and drop it into other communities, the story becomes twisted.  I would argue that this happened when Rome adopted Christianity as the “official religion of the Roman empire.”  In doing so the Emperor of Rome ripped God’s story out of the church and dropped it into a world-dominating empire.  One natural consequence of this was that the story had to change to accommodate world-dominating kinds of actions like war.

But for communities that are willing to live by God’s story alone, and to live out this story of redemption for their neighbors to see, there is hope.  Hope that we can be animated by the Holy Spirit to live in step with God’s rhythms.  Hope that we might be but a faithful chapter in the giant book God is writing.