Text: Luke 24:36-49
Speaker: Joel Miller
When this congregation formed in the early 60s they wanted to have a common statement they could all affirm. It was a way of committing, and re-committing each year to their faith and one another. The words have changed, but the practice remains. As Jacqui mentioned, we’ll be lingering with these words throughout the next month.
This first Sunday of that series happens to be the last time I’ll be preaching before a Sabbatical. I’ll be here through next Sunday, worship leading as new members join. But then I’m off to a cabin in a favorite spot in southern Ohio, the Arc of Appalachia, for a three day retreat to start the Sabbatical.
This morning I want to talk about story. Story is one of the framing ideas in the Commitment Statement. We have story around the practice of Sabbatical. One of my favorite thinkers makes a distinction between what he calls right story and wrong story. Our scriptures come to us primarily as story.
This will be a bit longer than the average 16 ½ minute sermon, and then you won’t have to hear from me again until August.
Aside from a few verses about Jesus’ ascension into the heavens, today’s reading is the end of Luke’s gospel. It’s a continuation of last week’s Emmaus Road story. Those two travelers have hurried the seven miles back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples about encountering the risen Jesus. And now Jesus, pierced hands and all, appears to all of them, with the words we still pass to each other each week, “Peace be with you.”
And like the Emmaus story, Luke tells us Jesus went through the whole arc of the scriptures with them, from Moses through the prophets. We don’t get many details of how Jesus interprets this sacred story of his people, except that it points toward a Messiah who would suffer, and rise again.
Not only is Luke telling us a story, but the story he tells emphasizes a larger story. One that’s been with the disciples all along. The crucified and risen Christ is both a continuation of the ancient story of Israel – Moses and the prophets, and a startling revelation. Jesus illuminates an old new story, and the disciples are drawn into this ancient-present pattern of death and resurrection. The church becomes the people who die to sinful patterns that harm one another and rise to life within what the apostle Paul calls the new creation. This is the shape of the big story of the Jesus-way.
Our Commitment Statement has three different stanzas that begin with “Ours is a story…” They go like this:
Ours is a story
of those who journeyed by faith,
whose questions opened fresh possibilities.
Ours is a story
grounded in scripture, centered on Jesus,
re-envisioned by Anabaptists, ever-expanding in our time.
Ours is a story
of death and resurrection and all things made new.
Each of these is a sermon unto itself, but for today I’m especially interested in how we live within story. Not just a story to learn, or believe, but a story to live.
Narrative therapy recognizes the power stories have in our lives. We’re constantly telling ourselves stories about who we are, and who we aren’t. Understanding how this works can help us create more life-giving stories. These improved personal stories can, for example, help reduce anxiety and feelings of meaninglessness.
The catch is that having a story that is merely personal to you is itself a cause of anxiety and meaninglessness. Welcome to life in the modern world, where we liberate ourselves from old and heavy oppressive stories, only to be oppressed by our lack of collective story connecting us to each other and the greater-than-human world.
Without this kind of story we’ve got no way of knowing where we are and who we’re in relationship with and how to be within those relationships. If you don’t know what larger story you’re in, you’re lost. But don’t worry, you won’t be lost for long. Because story will always find you. You can’t live without story, and story can’t live without you. It will find you.
Turn on the television, or watch a YouTube clip, and there’s not just the story you chose to watch, there’s these little stories spliced in there. We call them commercials, but they’re just little stories trying to find you. A basketball player keeps shooting hoops after everyone else has left the gym. Effort, sweat, determination. Swish, Spin, Dunk. The image fades, then a Nike Swoosh, or Adidas, or Under Armour, or whatever it might be. You didn’t even know you wanted to be part of that story until you saw it. Now all you have to do is buy the shoes, wear the logo. Now you’re a little less lost, a little more determined, because you’re part of a story. Thank you little story.
Story keeps the world going round. Story keeps the economy humming. If you don’t know your story, don’t worry. Story will find you. Story needs you.
One of the books I’ll be living with this Sabbatical is called Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell. It’s by Tyson Yunkaporta who is a member of the Aboriginal Apalech Clan in north Queensland, Australia.
Tyson takes for granted that all culture is composed of story, but differentiates between right story and wrong story. Wrong story, he says, is “made by individuals or corrupt groups separated from land and spirit.” (p. 21) Wrong story creates the perverse incentive systems currently mining the world for profit and creating a big mess. Right story, he says, “never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land.” (p. 21) Right story comes out of intergenerational relationships, is place-based, and contains protocols for a relational economy.
One of the many stories Tyson tells is about Tiddalik the frog. “Tiddalik was a giant frog entity that drank all the water in the land and just sat there with it in his enormous belly.” The land withered. In order to release the water, “every animal used their unique skills, eventually making Tiddalik laugh so hard he spewed all the water back into the landscape” (p. 115). Tyson wonders whether “you don’t change a destructive system by attacking those who have too much ego, power and greed, but by bringing people together and having a good laugh.” But this right story can easily become wrong story. It comes from a specific place and people, but we can’t just adapt stories without considering our own land and people. Maybe the rich are already amused enough. Maybe we need to combine our energies to teach them to cry rather than laugh out the water. Or maybe the frog is a more predatory animal that calls for other wisdom sources for our survival. Or maybe we are Tiddalik.
As I said, I’ll be living with this book throughout the Sabbatical, and I’m intrigued with how right story, wrong story impacts the practice of Sabbatical itself. Maybe I’m going down to that cabin in the Arc of Appalachia for some personal development. I’ll read some books that make me smarter, fodder for that August sermon already on the horizon. Maybe I can extract some spiritual insights from the forest, package it up before returning to the comfort of home. Wrong story.
Maybe I need to remember my very first Sabbatical, back in the Cincinnati days, when a friend told me about this place called the Arc of Appalachia. I signed up for a tree identification course with a wise teacher, Nancy, who still runs the whole organization. It was the first time I realized that trees themselves have stories. Nancy says the maple waits patiently in the shade until a larger tree falls, then shoots up toward the sun. Nancy says the locust lives at the edges where the soil is disturbed, replenishing it with nitrogen. The pawpaw, Nancy says, is a migrant from the southern rain forest. The ginkgo is old, and all of its close relatives died off long ago. Maybe I’m not going down to that cabin to be alone, but to rekindle relationship with old friends I can’t live without. Thank you Tyson and thank you Nancy.
There’s a way to tell the story about the updated language of our membership commitment statement in which a handful of people form a committee and create this new document for the congregation. That’s true, but it’s the wrong story version. It becomes too much about organizational efficiency and outsourcing collective discernment to a small band of experts. A right story version would mention how long-time members and new members alike sensed it was time for some fresh language, raising good questions. These feedback loops prompted staff and lay leadership to ask a small group of folks to help re-imagine the whole framework. The group listened to congregational culture, past and present, and included place and story-based practices like “everyone is welcome” and “honor all seasons of life” and “sanctuary.” Ours is a story of those whose questions opened fresh possibilities.
There’s good story behind each of those. Another congregation could lift this statement and use it as their own, or maybe ChatGPT could make an even better one. Either way it wouldn’t have the lived stories behind the words.
It’s a little unnerving how easily right story can turn into wrong story.
Even scripture, or maybe especially scripture, can get caught up in wrong story. Luke doesn’t really tell us how the risen Jesus interprets all those Old Testament passages from Moses through the prophets. We’ve been filling in the blanks ever since. Maybe humanity is inherently flawed and God, in God’s perfect righteousness, can’t be in the presence of sin. Sin needs punishment, and rather than unleash wrath on all of humanity, God, in God’s grace, sends his perfect son to earth and directs all of the divine wrath against him, taking our place on the cross. Every person who believes this is saved and assured eternal life in heaven far away from this earthly veil of tears.
This story of individual salvation disconnected from any kind of right relationship with the web of life has eerie similarities to today’s billionaires trying to colonize Mars because we’ve nearly exhausted the life support systems that make this planet habitable. Plus it’s kind of weird to cling to a story in which Jesus essentially saves us from God, who can’t help himself in unleashing violence.
Christianity has it’s fair share of wrong story floating around, and it’s done a lot of damage. But you already know this. You’ve already wondered whether Christianity even has capacity for right story. We need a faith lineage which, when it talks about the new creation, actually means creation in its visible and spiritual dimensions. A Jesus who, like Moses and the prophets sets the oppressed free. Jesus who calls together friends and enemies around a meal to have some hard conversations and a few laughs. A church that resists the violence of empire and practices an economy of mutual aid even if we do buy the occasional Nike Tshirt to wear at the gym.
We’re getting close to end. It’s time for a commercial break before wrapping this thing up. Here’s the scene:
You see a middle aged man relaxing in a cabin in the woods. He’s lounging while reading a book by a cool indigenous author. He looks pleased, relaxed, like he got a full night’s sleep. Now he’s out on the trail talking to a tree. Is the tree talking back? We don’t know, but he’s writing something in his journal, so it must be working. This is a Sabbatical, and you didn’t even know you needed one until this little story. But how do you get one? Where do they sell them and how much does it cost?
What this little story doesn’t show is that a Sabbatical is not an individual project. It’s an agreement, a commitment, within a community, and it takes the whole community to make it happen. While this guy is thinking deep thoughts in the deep woods his partner is back home driving the kids around and washing the dishes. She’ll need her own mini-Sabbatical soon enough. While he’s away from his professional duties, and let’s just switch this out of the third person and make it real, while I have a break from pastoral duties, Mark is here fulfilling his, and Robin Walton and Bethany Davey are filling in with pastoral care and worship coordination. The whole congregation decided last fall to add some money to the budget to pay for that extra personnel, and that money comes from the jobs you all do out in the community. Everyone does something to enrich the life of the church, even if it is just showing up or tuning in from wherever you need to be. Mark will have a Sabbatical next year and we’ll plan ahead for that too.
Sabbaticals are an act of community. When done well, the whole community is renewed over time.
I wish everyone could have a regular Sabbatical. Maybe in some future expression of the new creation we can. Sabbaticals, I think, are a practice of right story. But our economic and cultural lives aren’t organized this way. Maybe we need a Sabbatical-centered economy rather than a consumer or production based economy. We’d have to prioritize it.
Businesses would have to hire 13 people for every 12 jobs, so one person could always be rotating into a one month paid Sabbatical, or something like that. It would be less profitable. Maybe it wouldn’t be profitable at all. Maybe we could tax the things that harm the earth and turn that into a Sabbatical subsidy fund. It would make toxic waste unprofitable and start to shift the whole incentive structure. That way the land gets renewed too.
Maybe we’ll stumble into a bigger right story some day. I do enjoy being part of a little community like this one that tries, and has some good language and practices for living out our commitments.
You’ve been very kind in listening this morning. And kind in releasing me to a Sabbatical. Peace be with us all.
