Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

I wonder how many of us still get this request from children in an age of games and TV-on-demand and virtual reality. Yet telling stories is an essential part of human culture and the foundation of our faith, in the form of Scripture, testimony and teaching.

Even tech-saturated youth long to tell their stories—the everyday and the “epic”—if not to their parents and caregivers at the end of the school day, then to their friends via text messages or to their mentors over coffee.

October is storytelling month, according to my 2013 wall calendar, and I’m pondering how to celebrate. I’m not very good at making up stories, so retelling Bible stories may be a fine place to begin the celebration.

We’ve got two creation stories, the great flood, Hagar’s tribulations, the angels’ visit to Abraham and Sarah, the adventures and misadventures of David, Samuel’s nighttime calling, and I haven’t even gotten halfway through the Hebrew Bible, let alone to the New Testament stories.

Sacred and complex stories from Scripture aren’t the only way to celebrate. Aesop’s fables and family memories and, “You won’t believe what happened to me today”stories count, too.

“Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth,” writes Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. L’Engle was one of my favorite authors as a child, so I take her views on storytelling seriously now as an adult. “It’s no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day” she writes.

Jesus mostly made up stories to help people understand his teachings: He told the story of the sower to illustrate how God’s word is spread and (sometimes) bears fruit. He told the story of the Good Samaritan when a lawyer asked, “And who is my neighbor?” He told stories about seeds and trees and yeast to describe the kingdom of God. He told the story of the wicked tenants to point out the treachery of the religious leaders of his day.

Jesus told stories, and he also was the story. The Gospel of John begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” From this passage in John, I imagine the Spirit of God in Genesis longing to tell a story through words that created all: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

L’Engle writes: “Stories are able to help us become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.”

Exactly. In Genesis 1, God names the cosmos into being out of the chaos. And in Genesis 2, the earthling is privileged to name “every animal of the field and every bird of the air” as God creates them. From the beginning, God and humankind spoke to create meaning.

We need to tell stories, our own as well as those that help us make sense of the world around us. Book clubs, Bible study groups and open mic nights help us “become Named” and “make some small sense of the confusions and complications of life,” as L’Engle wrote back in 1972.

L’Engle couldn’t have predicted the proliferation of memoirs we have today, but she understood that good stories are essential—and by good here I mean true and deep and beautiful. We need to tell and hear good stories in order to become as fully human as Jesus was.

But what happens when a story is stuck within or censored from without?

“There is no agony like having an untold story inside you.” This quote attributed to African-American author Zora Neale Hurston tops each page of the Web site ourstoriesuntold.com, a site that addresses sexual violence in the Mennonite church.

The Divine’s desire for incarnation is also the artist’s desire for expression and the abuse survivors’ desire for sharing stories of violation and healing.

Mary Pellauer says in God’s Fierce Whimsy, “If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories—listening to them and honoring and cherishing them, and asking them to become even more brightly beautiful than they already are.”

So tell me a story, and I’ll tell you one, too. Tell me your life story, the joyful parts and the sorrowful parts, and we’ll honor and cherish them together.

This is a story full of love,
a song to set us free,
of God, the Wisdom and the Word,
the Keystone and the Key.
(Hymnal: A Worship Book, #315)

Sara Dick is associate pastor at Shalom Mennonite Church, Newton, Kan.