Telling Stories

We all have stories--the story of our family, the stories of our loves and losses, the story of our children, the story of our work, and all the other stories that comprise the narrative of our lives. We also have the story of our faith. Each of us has a unique story of God with us, God in us, and how that presence shapes all else within us. What follows is an exploration of how the story of faith intersects with all of our other stories. As we explore that connection, we discover some vital insights into how we are to be a people of faith in a changing environment and context. 

Deuteronomy 26:1-10

When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, 2 you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. 3 You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, “Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.” 4 When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, 5 you shall make this response before the Lord your God: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, 7 we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8 The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10 So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.” You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. 11 Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.

Everyone has a story. It is the narrative of our lives. For some of us, that story has grown quite long, including many footnotes, addenda, revisions, a few blank spaces, and enough anecdotes to keep us occupied for a weekend. Others’ stories are still quite short. Life is new. The experience is limited. Like a comedian once quipped, When I was five, my life flashed before my eyes. It was so short, I had to ask for a rerun. 

No matter where we are in the composition of our story, there is meaning to it. Our lives matter. What wisdom we have is there within the story. All the joys, sorrows, hopes, dreams, failures, wounds, doldrums, pinnacles, and all else is there, forming us, shaping us, and making us who we are. 

Knowing that, Moses lays down an interesting piece of liturgy for the Israelites as they prepare to enter the Promised Land—their worship will include their story. 

Why? 

Because in that story resides the presence of God. They have a story because God led them into it. Moreover, as they tell their story and finding God with them, they will realize that their story is not just their story. It is a story that ties them into their ancestors’ stories. It is a story their own descendants will repeat, weaving themselves into the narrative of God and God’s people. 

Knowing that will make all the difference, for the story is about a promise—a promise made by God for all who will be God’s people. The story is a promise kept. A promise kept gives them faith to face the future. That same promise will lead them into whatever comes. That same promise keeps them secure where they are. God was with their parents; God is with them now; and God will be with their children for all generations to come.

That knowledge becomes a great source of hope.

But it does more than that—it also ties them together. Yes, each individual will come forward, making their offering and intoning the words—they are each a child of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They are each a child of the promise. But so, too, is every person who comes to the altar. The story is no one’s exclusive claim, but rather is a narrative shared by all. They will all tell the same story, even as it is their own personal tale. Their history binds them together. They are family  through the presence of God.

We sometimes forget that. In our contemporary faith practice, we tend to make the story about each person’s encounter with God. We offer an invitation to individuals to find themselves within the promise of God. We offer them individual hope to find their place in the kingdom of God. 

Yet, that is so contrary to the work and will of God. God created human beings for community. We will examine that in a bit as we look at the story of creation, but for now, we simply need to know that every creative act of God is an act of love. Love is communal. Love is relational. Love is never individualistic. So, any story we tell of our experience of God is by definition a communal story. We are finding ourselves with ancient Israelites, with all of our immediate forebears, and with everyone near at hand. We are woven into the story of promise, not for our individual sakes, but for the sake of the whole creation.

One of the most striking verses of scripture I know is the last verse of Mark’s gospel—

And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”

The gospel is for all creation—my story is your story, and our story is that of all the cosmos.

Genesis 1:1

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, ²the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 

So, turning to creation’s own story, we find that everything began in motion—churning waters, the Spirit hovering. To be alive is to be in motion. In fact, to be created is to be in motion. Everything we see is moving. Right now, as we breathe, our chests rise and fall. If we look outside, we see the wind moving the trees. The sun arcs across the sky. The earth itself hurtles around the sun, spinning at 1000 mph on its axis! The solar system flies through the galaxy at 515000 mph! With everything in motion and in high speed, we need to expect change to come, and for those changes to be rapid-fire.  

Why bring this point up?

Because if we exist within a cosmos constantly in motion, we can expect chaos. Constant speed brings constant flux. Constant flux can be off-putting. We will need anchors. We will need something—and more importantly—someone—on whom to rely. This is our hope in a seemingly out of control cosmos.

But God planned for that.

The deeper truth—God created the cosmos to be interactive. But it was more than that. As we read the story of creation, we discover that this interaction was meant to be purposeful. There is intent behind creation. It is this intent that brings order to our disorderly context. What our Gospel tells us is that this intent is love.

John the Evangelist makes this truth the most evident. Think of John 3:16—God loved the world, and so God redeemed the world. So profound was that action that John makes this statement—God is love. Many theologians then argue that John uses that truth to define creation itself in the prologue to the gospel—everything happens and comes into being through the Word, and the Word is a verb—to love. 

In a sense, then, the whole of scripture is a love story. From Genesis to Revelation, we see God’s love for creation unfold, and we see how we responded—for good or ill—to that love. What we find most strongly revealed is that it is through other people that we discovered God’s love, were able to realize its promises, and then touch the kingdom within us. 

Therefore, as we begin to consider our stories, we need to constantly keep before us that some how and in some way, God’s love is the source of everything we experience, and that all the human beings we meet along the way are to be met in love. In this way, we become the implements of God’s ordering process. 

Luke 1:1-4

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

The Gospel is first and foremost a story—the Bible is not a systematic theology, but instead a story of God’s interaction with humanity. Therefore, God’s redemption of humanity from sin and death is not related in a theological discourse, but in a narrative. The story of Jesus is the story of saving grace. 

Jesus was a human being. As such, he lived a narrative as we all do. His life becomes the revelation of God’s salvation. So, the gospel writers tell the story of Jesus, leaving great room for us to come to our own conclusions about what is important, what is being said, and why it is being said. 

That is true for all of our lives. Many things happen to us. We do many things. We interact with many people. We fall in love. We raise a family. We argue with others. We may well battle others! We collect friends and enemies. We form tribes and nations. We choose a line of work. We begin to determine values and mores based on what our stories teach us. Experience leads to wisdom; wisdom leads to a mindset; and a mindset grows into faith and a faith practice.

Very few of us would write down a systematic philosophy revealing what we believe that leads to what we do. Instead, we simply reflect on the narrative of our lives—

What worked?

What didn’t?

What left us happy?

What left us sad?

What helped us grow?

What held us back?

How we answer those questions becomes the core of what we pass on to the next generation as wisdom. It begins to form a sense of who we are, what we do, and what we value.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that scriptures of our faith are a narrative. Read and hear—all will become clear and plain. It began as bare bones—just collections of quips and aphorisms. But then folks began to realize they needed context. Why Jesus said something depended on where he was, what he was doing, and with whom he was. That gives us, far removed from the event of Jesus himself, something to hold onto. We see the “why’s” behind the great statements. 

Too often we rely solely on the great statements to explain things—i.e., a creed is supposed to explain what we believe and why we believe it; but the truth is a story will better communicate the tenets of a creed. Think about how Jesus communicated truths—usually in parables—those stories would tell people the foundational truths of God’s expectations of us. Even a massive collection of dictums like Leviticus or Deuteronomy needs a narrative backdrop in order for the laws contained there to make sense. Otherwise, we see where Pharisaism came from—rules without context. Jesus re-establishes the context, not by reiterating a collection of laws, but by living them, revealing their power as he interacted—remember the Sermon on the Mount comes at the start of Jesus’ ministry—it will be the ministry itself that will reveal the full power of those laws.

So, as we gather as a fellowship of Jesus, we need to capture the power of story. Our narratives explain why what we believe is important and reveal how what we believe shapes who and what we are.

And that is the path to realizing the order God intends for creation.

Genesis 12:1-3

Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

Now, the great irony of our communal story within the story of creation itself is that God moves us, and as God moves us, there will come moments of loss. We will move from home to marriage. We will move from being a couple into being a family. Children will grow up and leave home. Some relationships will last a lifetime, but the vast majority will come and go. If God is love, and God made us in love for love, then do our loves seem so fragile? Shouldn’t love—all love—be as eternal as the God who is love?

This is indeed a great conundrum. Yet, there is always grace, even in the most abysmal moments. There is something to cling to that reveals that God’s love is still present, active, and leading us into the next order of who we are to become. 

Loss is actual a sign of growth and development. We move from innocence to experience, not because we are cursed by God, but because it is through loss that become deeper, stronger, and more compassionate. Walter Brueggemann, the great OT scholar, now retired from Columbia Seminary, rewrote the interpretation of the greatest failure story in the Bible—the failure of Adam and Eve. Dr. Brueggemann argued effectively that had Adam and Eve remained in the Garden, they never would have grown up. They would never have been able to handle life as it is. They never would have found the full presence of God. 

Much as we rail against it, we know this to be true. We literally carry the story of our experience in our scars. Those scars reveal our education. Some come from glorious moments of achievement, ironically; while others are from moments of inglorious failure. Some are visible; while others, thankfully, are invisible. It is those scars that give us the ability to relate to one another mercifully. 

Therefore, we find in the promise made to Abraham a great blessing, but one that will take the experience of loss to realize. If Abraham is able to keep the faith, he will make it through to the experience of the fullness of God’s grace for him and for all his children right down to us. Now a quick word about keeping the faith—it really means nothing more than simply keeping God ever before us. It is not a call to superhuman action. It is a call to clinging to God from whom all blessings flow. 

As we consider our own scars, note how many of them came through experiences that revealed our basic dependence on someone else if we were to get beyond the hurt. The consider how many of those saints who walked with us were really no less than God walking with us. That is the power of love—we become God with others.

Acts 8:26-40

Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over to this chariot and join it.’ So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this:

‘Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,

   and like a lamb silent before its shearer,

     so he does not open his mouth. 

In his humiliation justice was denied him.

   Who can describe his generation?

     For his life is taken away from the earth.’ 

The eunuch asked Philip, ‘About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’ Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?’ He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. 

There are three basic lessons for the church in this story—

To follow Jesus means you will be moved—God will send you where God wills

Every human being is a beloved child of God—a unique act of God’s creative will

Therefore, the church’s response to any person is radical welcome

During the last century, the church adopted a strategy of “build it and they will come.” As suburbia became a reality, mainline denominations would plant a church in the middle of a new subdivision and then wait for the new neighbors to find it, establishing new congregations. This model, though, is not what the gospels reveal about how Jesus engages the world. Instead, what Jesus does is call people into action. “Follow me” and “Go” are his two most frequent commands to anyone who decides to join his fellowship. Jesus rarely stayed in a synagogue or the Temple. Rather, he was outside in the streets, byways, and countryside where the people were. Therefore, we, as followers of Jesus, should expect to move. We should expect to enter the world, not wait for the world to find us. We should be released from our facilities. We should be mobile. 

Also during the last century, particularly as it drew to a close, American faith practice came to be defined by moralism. Codes were enforced. Lines were drawn within the human community. Black/white definitions of good/bad and right/wrong became simplistic structures for church membership and evangelism. The Ethiopian was a victim of such strictures. As an Ethiopian, Israeli Jews would have defined him as an “alien,” allowing him to literally only enter so far into the Temple. As a eunuch, Levitical Jews would have labelled him less than a man, pushing him further outside the worshipping community. Yet he still believed. Remarkably, he was able to love God despite the rejection from God’s community. The modern equivalent is the response religious researchers are finding among the Nones—they love and admire Jesus by a vast majority; but reject the church by almost the direct inverse of their admiration for Christ. Human beings have heard the good news that they are beloved by God, but have no patience for a religion that counters that knowledge. 

So, if we are to reconnect to the growing sweep of human beings who want nothing to do with organized religion, we are going to have to reacquaint ourselves with the way of Jesus. Jesus practiced radical welcome. He met and spoke with anyone willing to talk. He embraced them as a child of God, even touching untouchable lepers, eating with sinners, and sharing space with Samaritans—all people the church of his time rejected. We need to make love our aim. We need to see the child of God before us in every human face. We need to respond accordingly. We need to meet people where they are, as they are, and for what they are without judgment. God will deal with all of us as God needs to—that is not our responsibility. Our responsibility is to love others as God loves us. 

Learning these three lessons is our hope. It is our path into the future as a relevant piece of the cultural landscape. It is also a way to embody our faith.