Telling the Story

I love to tell the story. ‘Twill be my theme in glory.

To tell the old, old story… of Jesus and His love.

[Chorus from I Love to Tell the Story by Katherine Hankey]

Dear Friends,

When Laura and I started dating, she introduced me to a really new concept: watching movies over and over! My whole life prior to that, I don’t think I had ever read a book that I’d read before or watched a movie or play that I had seen before. In my mind, since I knew how the story turned out, there was no need to watch it again.

Laura and her family had a whole library of VHS tapes (remember those?) of their favorite movies. When they gathered together, they’d pull out one of their favorites like My Cousin Vinnie or The Hole in the Wall Gang. Gradually, I became a convert. I was amazed that even as I watched a movie that I had seen before, I still went on the emotional journey that the movie took me on and I re-experienced the emotions.

On Sunday, I told the Passion Story from Matthew, chapters 26-27. I’ve probably told this story in worship at least 20 times! Sometimes, I wonder why I/we keep telling it… We all know how it ends. The story doesn’t stop with Jesus’ death on Good Friday but continues on to Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. On one hand, we retell the story so that we can once again “go on the journey” with Jesus. It is a powerful, hard, and engaging story. But it’s more than that…

I think I’ve written before about the trap I’ve sometimes fallen into as I prepare a sermon on a Scripture text I know well. The trap is, I know this text. I know what it means and what it is about. This is a trap because it gets in the way of the Living Word speaking to me anew. We believe that the Bible contains the Word of God. The Word of God is not static. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, this Living Word can speak to us when we read the Scriptures and are open to the new thing that God wants to say to us here and now in this place and in these circumstances. I suspect many of you have experienced this. You’ve read a well-known passage and, yet, you notice something new or it speaks to you in a different way. This is what it means to be open to the Living Word.

The Passion Story is perhaps the most important story in the Bible. It is a story of obedience, suffering, rejection, fear, judgement, death… AND hope, forgiveness, faithfulness, life, resurrection and especially love. Yes, when we hear it, we go on the journey again but even more importantly, we become present again to the new reality that Jesus’ resurrection creates! During our day-to-day lives, we are bombarded by sooo many stories. When our head gets filled with all these stories, it can drown out the primary story about God’s love and our opportunity to live lives in response to it.

So, we keep coming back Sunday after Sunday… We take on daily devotional or Bible readings… We take time out of this Holy Week to gather around tables and experience the story of Jesus’ Last Supper and ponder his suffering and death on Good Friday… We do this so that Jesus’ story lives within us…

And we gather once again this Sunday to rejoice in the new life that Jesus’ resurrection reveals!

Peace,

Pastor Phil