Gospeling Our Life ~ Beyond a Few Neat and Tidy Verses

 

Author Margaret Atwood writes, “When you are in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, and wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or a boat crushed by icebergs or swept away by rapids.  All on board are powerless to steer or stop the boat.  Only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.  When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

 

Too often we compartmentalize Scripture.  (Like the rock split above) We read a few verses on Sunday, watch as the preacher dissects and inspects the words and phrases.  Too often, as you listen, the pastor hands the words back to us wrapped with a neat and tidy bow we can put in our pocket as we head off for coffee and cookies and the rest of our week.

 

But the Gospels are stories.  Most of us would not open to page 65 of your favorite fiction author, read a paragraph, then proceed to make meaning of that.  Okay, you may be the kind of person who reads the last chapter first, but we read a book from beginning to end.  That is what I am proposing to do with the Gospels.  Each is a testimony, a witness, a way a community of faith made sense of Jesus birth, life, death, and resurrection.  We are a storytelling, meaning making people.  Chances are your conversations with your friends are not just facts about your life.  I don’t sit down with my friends and recount only details about what I ate or what I did.  Rather, we swap stories with each other, where one story feeds off another.

 

That is what happens in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  Where each story begins matters.  What parts of Jesus’ life are told matters.  What is repeated in each and what is unique to each matter.  There is a world we are entering in each Gospel.  This reminds me of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate factory, where the kids go in and discover a world at work in turning out delicious chocolate.  Where each child finds him or herself in new ways, where each child’s shadow side is explored.  The same can be true in the gospels.  This is a holy journey that can shape our life, each time we open the book.  And, as Atwood says, it is only after going through the wilderness of words and worlds created by each Gospel verse by verse that by the end, we might see the whole journey/pathway/twists and turns with new appreciation.  This is both the promise and possibility of what you might find in each Gospel.  I pray after the last few weeks you are more than ready to being.  With anticipation and God’s love to you this day.  Amen.