Kevin Murray, director of youth ministry
One of my favorite things to do in Youth Ministry is write curriculum. It gives me a chance to get my brain working and forces me to re-read chunks of the Bible (a spiritually healthy thing to do, I hear). And for this curriculum I read the Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew is brilliantly set up, retelling the story of faith of the Hebrew people by telling the story of Jesus; and communicate who Jesus is by defining our own actions. The Gospels in general can get tiring to the weathered or well-seasoned preacher, as hitting the lectionary texts year-after-year can make the Epistles more enticing; but I am not there yet and believe Matthew has all of life’s answers.
The most recent curriculum dealt with ‘Getting out of the box’ – loosely referring to getting out of one’s comfort zone in their faith, but more in line with feeling like we have all been in a box metaphorically in our culture (and maybe even feeling it literally in the pandemic). The core concept comes from moving out of the boxes in our lives (our square houses, our square phones, our grid-like roads and neighborhoods) in which we put ourselves and return to a more circular world – the human body, nature, naturally bodies like the earth/moon/sun. That idea, Western culture putting us in literal squares inside of a round-like universe, comes from a Lakota Sioux medicine man named Lame Deer. His writing is fantastic, and his words resonated with me while reading Matthew.
Matthew 18:15-20 ends with Jesus saying – “Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”
The issue of Western culture putting us into progressively smaller squares is eventually it will leave us utterly alone in a box, a cell without windows, where we cannot even see an alternative for our lives outside of it.
Jesus in Matthew tells us something profound, by our very nature, by Christ’s very nature we are meant to be together – our symbol of existence and strength is the circle. We find ourselves in community and that is where Christ is. We circle up together in agreement and our Father in heaven will make it be done for us. In early Christianity, one of the popular symbols of the Christian was the ICHTHUS symbol – popularized in the 70/80s with the fish symbol. While it is debated how widespread the fish was, there was another way of symbolizing our togetherness in professing Jesus Christ is the Son of God, Savior. It was with a circle, each letter in Greek was overlaid on top of one another so that professing ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior’ would create a wheel – showing how Christ completes us and we are made together complete in Christ.
Our challenge today is creating the circle for one another, throughout a pandemic, and in a society that is pushing towards individualism and more isolated, square screens. How do we break out and see another way to live our lives? Jesus gives us the answer in Matthew – I think we should start with the Beatitudes.
