The Power of Story
Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)
Sometimes I write a sermon that I think is theologically clever. I am pleased with myself that I am able to use sophisticated theological terms. I talk of things that I learned in college and in the many courses that I have taken over the years. I think to myself that this is what people really want to know. In fact, this is what people really need to know if the Christian faith is to mean anything to them. When I come to preach this kind of sermon, there is kind of a blank look on the faces of the people in the congregation. They almost seem to be disinterested. Then I tell a story and I find that the people lean forward to listen. There is a silence as the people seem to want to hear every word. They don’t want to miss any detail.
Why is it that a story captivates people? For several years on Christmas Eve I have taken the role of one of the characters in the Christmas story and presented the story in a dramatic monologue. One year I might take the place of one of the shepherds visiting the stable at the birth, or another year it would be one of the wise men, and then again the innkeeper. Also in passion week I have taken the place of the Centurion who was in charge of the crucifixion of Jesus and presented the story from his perspective being converted in the end by the seven words uttered by Jesus on the cross. People in the congregation have told me that these stories have affected their lives significantly and that the events have become real to them. I have found that telling the stories have had an enormous influence on my faith.
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Why do these stories have such amazing power on us?
I believe that any good story is one that makes us want to know what is coming next. There are some novels that I sit down to read and I can hardly put the book down because I want to know what’s coming and how everything is going to turn out in the end. The story has captured my attention in such a way that I have almost become a part of it.
That brings me to another reason that stories are powerful. They speak to us at a very deep level of the psyche. We find ourselves in them. Good stories are about us just as much as they are about the characters that they portray. We find that in hearing the story of others we are inside dealing with the hopes, dreams and conflicts in our own lives.
I used to lead relational bible study groups at one time. I would often ask people in the group to choose a character in the biblical story that we were studying at the time. The whole group would then be asked to act out the story in a short skit. I remember one woman taking the role of one of the Pharisees in a confrontation with Jesus. After the skit she said, “Until I got into that role I didn’t realize how much a Pharisee I really was. I was really struggling with myself because in a lot of ways I have the same attitudes as the Pharisee in the story. It just never hit home before” .
The most astonishing thing about biblical stories is that we hear them over and over again and we know what’s coming next and we know how they are going to turn out in the end. However we still love to hear them and present them in various ways as if for the first time because we don’t know how they are going to “hit us” . We don’t know exactly how our lives will be affected by them. We don’t know what’s going to happen next in our lives because of them.
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That brings me to the story that we have in the Gospel this morning when Mary visits Elizabeth. The baby Elizabeth that is carrying leaps in her womb and Elizabeth is overcome by the spirit and shouts for joy that God is about to do a great thing in Mary’s life. Then Mary breaks into a song that we have come to know as the Magnificat, “My Soul magnifies the Lord and the Spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.”
In the story of Mary meeting Elizabeth you realize that through their lives that the people of their time would know that God was in their midst. God is again doing a great thing in salvation history not just for Israel but for the whole world. Elizabeth’s felt the baby in her womb leap but she knew that the baby in Mary’s womb, the one to come later, was to do great things for human kind. It was through this one to be known as Jesus that the people of the world would know that God was in their midst.
The story speaks so powerfully to me because I know that just as Elizabeth and Mary knew that God was to be known in the world through the children in Elizabeth’s and in Mary’s womb. Elizabeth’s child was to become known as John the Baptist making the announcement that God was coming into their midst in a special way and of course Mary’s was Jesus who was the special way that God was in their midst – Emmanuel “God with us” .
God has become known to me through this same Jesus and God through the Spirit is in the midst of our lives at this present time. We don’t always recognize that God is among us but the Story heightens our awareness that because God was doing great things in the time of Elizabeth and Mary, God can do great things in our lives today.
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I have shared in my writings before of one example of the way that I have experienced God breaking into my life in the most ordinary event. There are many more examples of which I could speak but this is one:
It was about one Christmas that stands out for me in my memory. It was the first year that Paula and I were married ( 40 years ago) and we moved into a new parish in a small community of Killarney Manitoba on the 14th of December having left my position at the national office of our church in Toronto. We didn’t know whether our furniture would arrive before Christmas because snowstorms held up the moving van some place in Northern Ontario. We were invited to stay in the home of one of the parishioner for a few days. Through their great generosity they had invited us to stay with them until our furniture arrived but we were determined to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in our new home even if our house goods did not arrive in time. We put up a tree and decorated it with some Christmas lights and ornaments borrowed from our hosts. All that was in the house for awhile was this decorated Christmas tree in the corner of the living room. Our furniture did finally arrive on December 23rd but needless to say we were still surrounded by unpacked boxes on Christmas Day. We didn’t have time to shop in the weeks before Christmas so we spent two hours on the day before Christmas in the city of Brandon doing our Christmas shopping. We bought a few simple little things for each other.
The parish had been without a rector for several months so had just planned the simplest schedule — one service Christmas Eve. So Paula and I were alone for Christmas Day with no family or close friends around us. The people of the parish were kind and we were invited out for Christmas dinner but we chose to spent our first Christmas as a married couple together by ourselves. The people had brought over all kinds of home baking and preserves with the recipes attached to every item. They had everything in the box that we needed for a Christmas dinner. We opened our gifts from one another on Christmas morning and then spend some time quietly enjoying one another’s company. In the late morning we went for a walk in the fresh fallen snow and then we decided to visit the hospital. There weren’t very many people there but we did visit all of those who were there including two people from our parish with whom we celebrated communion. One person I was to visit frequently in the hospital and a nursing home for the next four years. We prepared and ate our Christmas dinner together and then went out to some parishioners for dessert.
I remember that day so vividly because I experienced God’s presence so significantly. Certainly God became real through the generosity of the people in that community but it was more than that. It was in the mere simplicity of that day that I experienced Christ so very close. A sense of peace enveloped us throughout the whole day, through the quiet time in the morning, the walk in the snow, the visit to the hospital, the quiet supper together, and the sharing of time with another family after supper. It was the peace of Christ that can only be described as “the peace that passes all understanding” . It was a peace that cannot be engineered. You can’t make it happen. No matter how hard you try through the multiplicity of things you do during the Christmas season you cannot capture it. It comes like Christ came into the world at his birth as a pure act of God’s Grace. That sense of peace that was given that day was to carry me through many days, weeks, and months to follow.
This experience can be considered ordinary…but for both of us it was deep experience of God breaking into our lives with presence and power.
God often is experienced in the “ordinary”. It could be the midst of worship, at the communion rail, in the singing of a certain hymn, or in listening to some music at home. It could be in our silence. It could be at the supper table. It could be in some common event that opens our hearts. It could be in sickness. I have known some people who after a heart attack or some other illness or a “near death experience” has a totally difference view of life. Sometimes it takes place in the midst of a conversation, watching TV or at the kitchen sink. We can know the presence of God through certain practices, like journaling, a quiet day or retreat. Sometimes we experience the coming of the God just in the way that other people touch our lives. It can be quite simple.
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We don’t always recognize God in our midst but God is always ready to be made known to us. God is always ready to seize us, impel us, embrace us, challenge us. We just have to be open to it. We have to have the open heart to receive God as an act of faith.
It is in the biblical story that God’s spirit interacting with our spirit often opens our hearts. We realize in listening to the story in the Gospel today that just as God came into the lives of Elizabeth and Mary through their expectancy of a birth of a tiny child, so God’s sweeping love can embrace us in the midst of our ordinary daily events.
We can have the same sense of expectancy that Elizabeth and Mary had – an expectancy that God will be revealed to us any moment now.
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