Telling Stories

This week, I’ve been thinking about telling stories.

This morning I woke up to a piece on NPR about the movie director Dave McLaughlin talking about the power of stories. McLaughlin is the writer and director of the movie “On Broadway,” (small) parts of which were filmed here at Christ Church two years ago. He was talking specifically about stories and myth in his own Irish American culture. In the interview, he spoke about how he had wanted to convey some of the more positive stories of Irish culture than those that we see in violent movies like “The Departed” or other mobster films. If our stories tell us who we are, then his community, he felt, needed some more positive stories on the big screen. The plot of “On Broadway” goes something like this: the main character writes a play to remember his dead uncle, and in the process (as tends to happen on screen) surmounts remarkable obstacles and wins the acclaim of his family and friends. It opens around town tomorrow, and in wider release after that. I hope it’s a good movie—let me know if you see it!

Another place I’ve been thinking about stories has been with our Connect class. On Tuesday we talked about how our relationship with God is understood through story telling. There are, of course, Biblical stories that instruct us about our faith. The parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, teaches us how we are to be neighbors to each other. The story says, “be like this.” At Connect, we also talked about the whole of our salvation story: all the way back to our creation and the calling of the people of Israel and the ministry of Jesus, and his death and resurrection and coming again. It’s almost like a play in 5 acts. We are created good, but we sin. Jesus is crucified, but he is raised. And, act 5, Jesus will come again. At Connect, we were encouraged to ground ourselves in the original blessing of the story of creation, (God created, and it was good) rather than the sin that came after that: original blessing, not original sin. We talked about how that goodness runs through and under everything else that happens afterwards, even when we fail to live up to it.

Film maker McLaughlin was talking about the importance for a community to be able to identify with good stories (families reconciling), instead of not so good ones (mobsters blowing each other up). The place of narrative as he was talking about it is like a mirror: it reinforces what you see in yourself, and you can choose to reinforce the good, or the bad. But the “Big Story” of our faith as Christians can do even more than that, and we tell it every Sunday morning. The way we make communion—that bread and wine become body and blood—is by telling this story. But we don’t just tell the story in a commemorative sense, as if we were looking back on it and these things happened to different people at a different time. We tell the story because it’s ours, and in that telling around that altar, something extraordinary happens-we ARE the story. As we remember Jesus and his friends in that upper room, we go there ourselves. That story doesn’t say “be like this,” it says “you are this.” And as we become that, we are transformed even more fully into the goodness that we were created for.

Thanks be to God!