Loading...What is the best story your parents ever told you? Maybe it was your mom telling the story of your birth? Or your father telling how he wooed your mother? Or maybe your favorite story is your own, about how you played the best practical joke ever on your best friend?
I remember the Christmas I bought my then sixteen-year-old son an electric razor. It’s a grooming tool for the new beard he was growing for the first time. When he opened it I had a flood of memories of funny haircut stories.
When my baby brother was Aidan’s age he asked me to cut his hair. Which I did, in the hallway, over the carpet. Not only did the haircut turn out disastrously, my parents grounded him for getting hair everywhere! I laugh just thinking about it. Then there was the time I tried to economize by giving my two young sons’ haircut in the backyard. When five-year-old Aidan grabbed the scissors I was distracted from two-year-old Joseph who took the clippers straight across the side of his head. That was the last of that budget saving effort.
There are some stories that provoke the feelings we felt at the time of the original event. I can’t prove to you what happened in that hallway covered in hair 35 years ago. But I also can’t suppress the smile when I tell it. Joseph doesn’t remember shaving the side of his head, but Aidan can’t suppress a smile when he remembers taking the scissors to his own hair.
When I tell you that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation I have no way of proving anything of the sort, except maybe the fact that Luke is a brilliant storyteller. When you hear this passage about the angel Gabriel and the announcement, and Mary’s question, can you suppress a feeling of …. I don’t know what... except wonder.
I have read Luke’s story countless times — more times than I have told my children about the day they were born, or the day they cut their own hair, or the day they decided they would call their uncle and ask him his opinion over mine. I even made a scrapbook of Christmas cards to chronicle the many depictions of Mary, Elizabeth and Gabriel.
If you showed up here this morning you can say it’s because of your schedule or because it’s your family tradition, or whatever reason sounds reasonable. But your secret is safe with me, none of us would be sitting here if the story had not got its hands on us.
Maybe there’s a story you’re holding and you want to put it into God’s hands. Maybe you can’t suppress that desire to be part of a story bigger than ourselves, bigger than illness and death and racial strife but including all of that in it.
If you are over thirteen-years-old you are now responsible for helping pass along the stories of St James and Holy Scripture to others. We might look like respectable pious people fulfilling religious responsibilities and worshipping and all that good stuff. We are, at the heart of us, storytellers who have got ourselves tangled up in the most mysterious, possibly the messiest, arguably the best story ever.
Here’s my admonition to you: tell your story. When you are lonely. When you are happy. When you are trying to find meaning. When you are up to your eyeballs in meaning. Tell the stories your parents taught you. The stories your Sunday School teachers taught you. Even tell the stories your funny uncle told you, whether they are true or not. It is the telling that binds us one to another: parents to children, angels to mortals, heaven to earth, the living to the dead, and our frail humanity to the resurrection of God’s only Son.
The poet and agnostic Stephen Dunn begrudgingly allows his little girl to go with friends to the local Methodist Church. He tries to justify letting her continue.
She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren't
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?
Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.
OK, we said, One week. But when she came home
singing 'Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so,' it was time to talk.
Could we say
Jesus doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.
It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead,
that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief
to a child,
only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story
nearly as good.
Our story is wonderful. Let it take hold of you and trust in its telling. Amen.
