Telling Stories

II Corinthians 6:1-13, Mark 4:35-41

June 21, 2009

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

We are about to go on a vacation this week which will include visits to both Gavin’s and my extended families. Our visit to his family in Michigan, especially, will be kind of a family reunion, the first time we’ve all been together since his brother’s funeral 18 months ago. I don’t know about your families, but what happens with most families when they get together like this is that sooner or later we tell stories. Maybe you will experience this during the summer in visits or today as you celebrate Father’s Day. Parents and siblings bring out stories from childhood which are funny or poignant, and a curious thing happens. People remember things differently! Often the person telling the story tells it in such a way that they are put in a positive light. Or sometimes stories are edited so that children in attendance don’t hear difficult truths. I was an adult before I heard the full story of how my grandmother’s childhood on an Ohio farm, which had always been painted in a rosy light as sort of Little House of the Prairie East, was actually something much darker and more painful. Nostalgia has the effect of clouding truth. You Harry Potter fans eagerly awaiting the release of movie 6 in July might re-read book 6 and remember how Professor Horace Slughorn magically altered his own memory of an important event to put him in a better light and erase the pain of a tragic mistake. Telling true stories is much harder than “Disney-fying” them.

Imagine if you had been one of the disciples who had been in that boat in our gospel story today. Would you have wanted to be remembered as a fisherman who cowered in fear before a storm with Jesus right in the boat with you? I surely would have wanted at least the dialogue here edited so that I didn’t shout at the sleeping Jesus, “Don’t you care that we’re dying here?!” but rather, heroically, stood at the mast saying, “Fear not, my friends, for Jesus is in the boat with us and I am sure when he wakes up we will be saved!”

One of the gifts of the Bible to me has always been that the stories in it and the characters in those stories have been fully fleshed out. And I mean flesh, with all our human beauty and imperfections. One of my frustrations in reading history books in high school and college was that I could tell there were lots of things left out of the stories, lots of events and characters that were never told or only partly exposed. There is deep truth in the aphorism that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and our country and many others and our families have fallen prey to that reality often. I fully believe that if our leaders do not come to a deeper understanding of the fullness of the history of Europe and later America in the Middle East, we are doomed to failure in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine. We have to tell the stories of the past, in the first place, and we have to tell the true and full story, warts and all. In the end it is as Jesus said, the truth will set us free, and others as well.

One of the reasons that history, telling true stories, is so important is that we are truly known through our stories. To fully know another human being does not have to do with recognizing their face or physical attributes; it happens when we know their stories, their deepest stories, their most joyous stories and their most difficult. We know those disciples because we hear their fear, their doubt, their confusion about who Jesus was. We don’t know them as comic book heroes, but as people a lot like us, and we draw strength and encouragement by learning how they navigated the waters of faith and doubt, of fear and faithful service.

Storytelling has always been important in the church. At its best, the church has been a place where people have been courageous enough to tell the truth and to stand with one another as that truth is told, to give encouragement to one another through difficult and painful stories, to bring forgiveness and hope. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth that he had been pouring his heart out to them, telling them stories of how his faith had gotten him through an incredible litany of struggles: imprisonment, riots, grueling travel, shipwreck, beatings, slander, death threats, etc. He’d told them honestly of his own struggles with faith, of his past as a persecutor of Christians. He’d laid his life before them in an effort to connect with them and to help them find ways to connect with God and each other. He’d tried to engage them in telling their own stories, in searching their own hearts for their struggles and wondering how God might have been at work in their lives incognito. “Our heart is wide open to you,” Paul said, “open wide your hearts also.” He yearns for them to trust him and each other with the deepest truths of their lives, to tell their stories and listen to his and to each other’s. We know from other parts of Paul’s two letters to this church that many folk in the Corinthian congregation did a lot of posturing and status protecting, relating to one another on a surface level, stereotyping each other and so being divided from one another and afraid to really engage one another and so build strong relationships of mutual love and support. He longed to have them dive more deeply into relationships with each other and God.

That has been my longing also in every church I have ever served. Sometimes churches excel at clouded stories of the past, often forgetting or distorting stories from the history of the congregation itself, or simply assuming everyone knows stories that newcomers could not possibly understand. That sort of institutional practice discourages individuals from being honest and trusting in telling their own stories, whether of joy or pain. Redeemer has worked hard over the years to overcome this tendency of congregational life, and there are those who can tell the story of how Redeemer literally was saved by the congregation opening up to each other to tell each other stories and discover new truths in those stories in such a way that a fading congregation found new vitality. This is a story that we need to tell anew to those who were not around here in those days, and we need to hear their stories as well.

Storytelling is still important to us at Redeemer; several times throughout the year people will share testimonies in worship, telling stories of how God has worked in their lives. We begin committee meetings by asking people to share stories that are “Good” or “New,” or stories about how they have experienced the Holy Spirit acting in their life and work. Not all of these stories are happy; not all of them put the storyteller in a holy or heroic light. We tell the stories because by doing so we build connections with one another, connections that are deeper than the “hi, how are you?” conversations at the door, deeper than a 140 character Twitter exchange or a short Facebook status update. I think that the blogging phenomenon is so interesting because so many blogs are people telling stories about themselves or other people in words and pictures. A blog for many, or a Facebook page for that matter, has become just a new way of sharing the stories about ourselves and our world that connect us to one another.

Through the work of the Connecticut Sponsoring Committee and members here who have been trained as leaders, we are beginning a new emphasis on telling stories to each other. Groups begin meeting today to find ways to share our stories together. I am eager to find ways to meet with more of you to connect through our stories, so that we become even stronger as the kind of congregation Paul imagined, a place where we hold each other gently, carefully, compassionately and full of trust because we know each other through our stories. So that we become even stronger as a place where painful stories, stories of failure or struggle, true stories of faith and doubt can continue to be told and burdens and pretence dropped.

More than ever we need to do this here so that we can take that same kind of honesty and depth out into a world where so little truth is told, where so few are interested in truly knowing and understanding one another and where there is so much mistrust, so much stereotyping of anyone who might be considered “other.” Do any of you read the little surveys in the New Haven Register every day? I often ignore them, but happened to look at it on Thursday. The question posed was “Is a ‘wave of hate’ sweeping the nation?” Here are some of the answers. “Yes, try being a white male walking into a predominantly African-American store and see how you are treated.” “Yes, and it is due to our anti-Jewish, pro-Muslim administration.” “A lot of hate is stemming from the NAACP. All they do is stir the pot.” We see and do not see; we hear and do not hear; we do not know each other’s stories.

Amos Wilder once wrote: “There is no world until we have named and languaged and storied it.” Let us create a world here that is based in knowing one another truly, deeply, with compassion and love through our stories. Then let’s work with God to imagine and embody that world outside our doors. Amen.