Telling Stories

Once upon a time there were no stories. Nearly 14 billion years worth of tales untold until suddenly, Man, sitting around a fire telling stories. Some were true, some were lies, and some were fictional but somehow still true. But what is a story? When someone asks for “your story”, when my mom used to make sure she was home at noon every day to watch her “stories”, or when a reporter “smells a story”, is the same word being used for the same thing or is there a core thing we call a story? How can a painting tell a story, or a piece of music? How can a shoe on the side of the road have a story behind it?

Yet this thing that seems so intimately tied to us as humans, to tell and to be told stories, seems to disappear when you go looking for it. Search for story and you’ll find no end of discussions of narrative, plot, and dramatic structure, but what story itself is seems to shatter into bits and pieces scattered throughout each. This is not only a problem for the study and understanding of narrative in the abstract but for the understanding of any individual narrative, wherever they are encountered. Whether its in biblical studies, climate science, or the understanding of the self and one’s relationship with world and others in it, understanding story and narrative is essential.

In everyday discourse, story and narrative are often used interchangeably. Most narratologists would distinguish story as an abstraction, a summation of the narrative.

Obviously, story can be abstracted from the narrative that tells it, Cliff’s Notes, Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, book proposals, script treatments, or discussions about the work wouldn’t be possible. In fact, one could talk accurately and intelligently about the story without ever having read or seen the narrative, whereas an attempt to discuss the narrative without the experience would be an artifice. But in this view the story always remains an abstraction, a paraphrase.

But story is not born from the narrative, the story exists independently of the narrative. In fact, stories exist in the real world, whether they are told or not.

For example, suppose you were asked to describe the United States involvement in World War Two. You start by noting the attack on Pearl Harbor, the subsequent declaration of war, perhaps to save time you skip the European Theater and move to Midway, Guadalcanal, etc., and end with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending with the unconditional surrender.

         Those are the mere events. To connect them is to create a narrative. This happened, therefore this happened which caused this new thing to happen.  These ‘therefores’ we call narrative, the linking of the events.

We are surrounded by narratives--the chain of cause and effect that are linked to convey a story. But, if the Bible is true then it means that reality is indeed a narrative, as is every life. For

this commitment to a particular book as the Word of God, is presented in the form of a narrative. A book which purports to not only narrate a story about God but claims that this is the story of reality itself. Its claim is that there is a story, as told in these Scriptures, of everything that ever was, is, or will be. The question then arises, why a story? Why do we have to live the story? Why can’t we get the gist from Wikipedia and skip to the end? And why does God, who is eternal, unchanging, and outside of space and time, talk to us through story, something which has a beginning, middle, and end, and is all about change? And therein lies the key; Change. Events happen, things change, and it is either significant or insignificant but whatever the case, it means something. Meaning can only reveal itself within a story.

What does it mean to love one’s neighbor as thyself? Jesus could have explained who qualified as a neighbor and given a list of how to treat them, but instead he told the parable of the Good Samaritan. God chose to interact with us narratively because narrative is just what we call a connected series of events unified into a story. The narrative of Scripture recounts to us a story of humanity’s engagement with God. It is the story that recounts the creation of Reality itself in the beginning, all the way to its end and remaking in the New Creation. That means that each life has a part in that narrative, while at the same time every life can go from background character to protagonist in the same redemptive arc. is a narrative of our journey with God, from the Fall, through His covenant with Abraham, the Exodus, the Temple, captivity in Babylon, the return,

and the coming of the Messiah are all events in a great narrative that culminates into the Son entering foursquare into the narrative as its Hero. A story which grants to every life a unity and wholeness, a story which finds its completion through Jesus Christ.

The Bible is not a How-To manual, it’s not a Self-Help Book, It contains Liturgy but it is not a liturgical instruction booklet. It contains history but it is not a history textbook. It is the story of humanity’s relationship with its Creator and an account of how God the Father rescued us by sending His only begotten Son to enter into our stories.

Jesus is the lens through which we must read Scriptures and only through our relationship with Him can the fullness of Scripture be revealed to us.

Because He is the Word made flesh.

When God spoke the universe into creation, He did so with the Word, His Son. When he breathed life into His creation He did so with the Holy Spirit. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Ghost are well and truly present not only in the New Testament but the Old as well. What the theologian Hans Boersma has called ‘The Real Presence of Christ in the Scriptures’ is the first truth that must guide us in our engagement with the Bible. The Bible tells the whole story of existence from its creation to its end. That means that every one of us, everyone, find their story in His story.

         But that requires understanding one’s own story, or at least entering into understanding of one’s self as being part of an unfolding narrative. The events of our lives, connected by a narrative throughline, of the things we go through and how we overcome our setbacks or brought low and broken by the events of our lives, all make us who we are now but in continuity who we were from the beginning. The events that mold and shape us must not reside unconnected, but integrated within ourselves just as Jesus integrates us into Himself and He is integrated into ourselves.

And now consider this night. You are participating in an event, an event. If it sits unconnected to the rest of your life, it will fade from your memory and won’t become a part of your story, but if you make that narrative connection, if this night takes on meaning it could become a part of your story. And then look around you, there are others here, participating in the same event. They can become a part of your story and you a part of theirs. That is the true joy of story, to share not only in the telling of them but of the making. Making and sharing stories, together, is how disparate individuals become united together as a community. A community is only as strong as the bond they share and that shared bond is just another name for the story they tell together.