Our Stories and The Story
From The Forum Magazine, Winter 2011 - view the full issue here
Some years ago in the New York Times Book Review, an author penned an essay that discussed— or, better said, that lamented— the recent glut of memoirs. If you go to a website like Amazon.com and type in the subject of “Memoir,” you will discover upwards of 150,000 titles currently in print that fit the bill. As the Times essayist noted, it only stands to reason that people like Winston Churchill or Eleanor Roosevelt would have memoirs worth writing because they have stories worth telling. But Paris Hilton? Ivana Trump? Puh-leeze! In the course of this essay the writer also referenced—with obvious disgust and barely concealed contempt—a recent poll that asked people, “Do you think your life story is worth telling in a memoir?” Somewhere in the neighborhood of 78 percent answered “Yes.” The essayist was at best incredulous (and at worst scandalized) by this.
Three weeks later, however, an exceptionally smart “Letter to the Editor” appeared in which someone wrote, “The recent article on memoir indicates that 78 percent of people think they have a story worth telling. But that means that 22 percent of people think they have no story to tell at all. How tragic.”
The letter-writer turned the essay on its head, and in a most wonderful way at that! Even if we are prone to do some eye-rolling over the specter of a Paris Hilton memoir, as Christians we should surely agree with the sentiment that if anyone was convinced that he or she had led a life of such unimportance and low account as to be not worth talking about, that would be tragic indeed. The truth is that lots of ordinary people have stories to tell that are finally more interesting—and quite probably more redemptive—than many of the celebrity memoirs that get published these days.
Yet it may be precisely in Christian circles that we will encounter the most hesitancy when it comes to telling our stories. Pride may or may not be the original besetting sin of the human race, but we all know it has long been listed among the “deadly sins” for good reason. The witness of Scripture makes it clear that God has little room in his kingdom for the haughty, the self-absorbed. As Mary sang in her “Magnificat,” God intends to scatter the proud and exalt the humble. And as Mary’s Son went on to say, in God’s kingdom it’s the poor, the meek, and the lowly who get exalted. “The first shall be last,” and all that.
Few things strike us as more prone to pride than talking about ourselves. As a teacher of preaching, I repeatedly tell my students that when it comes to injecting themselves and their own stories into sermons, less is definitely more. As Tom Long has said to preachers, stories in sermons about your children, your spouse, your favorite hobby, or your college years are like oregano: it’s a strong spice, a little goes a long way, and not every dish needs it. Nobody likes a self-absorbed preacher who seems to find his or her own life to be so endlessly fascinating and instructive as to season every single sermon with at least a dash or two of his or her story.
True enough. But even outside sermons, many in the church have a certain shyness about speaking of themselves too much. In the Reformed tradition—and especially in various streams of the Dutch tradition within that larger Reformed ethos—there has long been a tendency to downgrade ourselves as a way to make room for glorifying God alone.
Yet here we have an issue of the CTS Forum that is filled with personal stories. In recent years—perhaps as a part of the larger trend in memoir publishing already noted—there has also been in Christian publishing a resurgence of spiritual autobiographies and articles in which often ordinary Christians talk at some length about their individual spiritual journeys. Is this a good thing, or just another example of the church’s being co-opted by a narcissistic culture of celebrity-driven media hype?
For the most part it’s a good thing, provided we keep such personal storytelling nestled securely in the Big Story of God’s great drama of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. To again invoke Tom Long, in the Bible, narrative is not a device; it is a reflection of the fundamental nature of reality. The Bible is not a book of doctrines that now and then uses stories by way of illustration. No, the Bible is one big Story that comprises lots of individual stories because that is how God views the universe: it is all a grand Story filled with little stories. We learn about God best not by memorizing lists of doctrines—rather, the doctrines emerge from the stories and from the Story.
When Christians tell their stories—and Christians have been doing so in one form or another since at least the time of Augustine’s now-famous Confessions—the purpose is never self-aggrandizement but rather testimony. We bear witness to what God has done in our lives—and what God has taught us along the way—so that this story can become the lens through which others can then look at their own stories.
I testify to what God has done in my life because God’s Holy Spirit has a tendency to work in similar ways in all of our lives. If I can name instances of grace I have witnessed, you are then enabled to tell your story in ways that will possibly help you spy grace in places you had not seen it before.
Each individual story counts and is worth telling because, by grace, we all are caught up in the Big Story of God’s redemption. Each of our stories is alive to God every moment. This came home to me recently when writing a sermon starter article for the Center for Excellence in Preaching website. The Lectionary passage was from Luke 20 where the Sadducees are questioning Jesus about the resurrection. At one point Jesus says something utterly surprising—in fact, if it were not Jesus who said this, you’d wonder if this could count as a legitimate way to interpret the passage he mentions. He says that when God said to Moses from the burning bush in Exodus 3 that he was “the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” what God meant was that each of those persons was still alive in God’s sight. They were not dead but living in God’s presence.
Our stories matter and are worth telling and re-telling because each of us is always alive before the presence of God. Individuals matter. God does not save anonymous chunks of humanity, he saves Abraham and he saves Moses and he saves Theresa and he saves George and he saves Larry and he saves Mildred. God, in short, pays attention to people.
Christians tell their stories not out of pride but out of humility. Humility is that Christian virtue which reminds us that no one is more important than anyone else and that we all exist on a level playing field in God’s sight. This is why the insights we gain from one another’s stories add to the richness of all our stories and also enhance our mutual appreciation for and celebration of God’s providential grace.
