Once upon a
time there was a story. The story
was connected with God, the story was God and God was the story. Everything happened through the story. When the time was right, the story took
shape and lived among us, the characters emerged, the plot unfolded.
The story
took a few different forms. In
one, the young woman, unmarried and unsullied, is impregnated by God,. Her bewildered man enters the story by
doing nothing, contributing nothing to the pregnancy. It’s not his child. For the rest of the story he stands
outside the plot, helpless, hapless.
A bit part. He follows the
government’s directives, returns to his hometown for the census, but , in a
typically male way, he forgets to make arrangements. When her water broke, they had no where to stay, the inn filled with the wealthy and well organized. And so this Divine-human baby was born in a barn. There, amid the dung and
vermin and straw, the story became human.
The woman could nurse the infant story, breastfeed the infant God. All the
man could do was wrap the child in rags, lay him in a feeding trough. Ironies abound. The holy in dung. Peasant child gives birth to God. Man
relegated to bystander status. The story is not his to control.
In another
form most of the same characters appear. The young woman is the same. Unmarried
and expectant. This time though
the man is old and not merely bewildered, he is ashamed.
Again they return to his hometown.
But his mind is not on her.
His perseverates on what to tell the censusman, how to explain this, er, delicate situation. This time when her water breaks, he can only find a
cave for shelter. Utterly embarrassed he leaves her, wanders into town,
knocking on doors, looking for a midwife, and misses the Entire Event.
Different forms. Same story.
It is, by
all accounts, an astonishing tale. A story of how God’s own story broke into
our own cycles of myths, contained and predictable. Bewildered, no longer in control of the plot, we find we are
but characters in God’s narrative. Entrances and exits we have but not
editorial control. Yet we are also
the woman, surprised and naïve, somehow giving birth to the Holiest of
Holies. The recipients of wonder.
The plot has many unexpected turns. The
narrator becomes a character in the play.
The author comes to his own characters, but they don’t recognize him.
Worse, they reject him. The narrator seems to have lost control
of the plot at this point, he tries and tries to explain the plot to the
characters, explains it to them in simple parables and folk tales, but they’ll
have none of it. They know two things:
One is that they are independent thinkers, not two-bit characters in a dimestore novel. And two, if
they somehow are characters, well that Character is certainly not the Narrator. The Narrator would have a much deeper
voice, and probably a pen in his hand at all times. He wouldn’t hang around with sleazebags and such. He’d do book tours, and give
important lectures to intelligent people.
He’d know far better than to put his trust in a ragtag band of losers ….
So his own characters plot together and put the Narrator to death. They kill the Author. Surely that proves their independence,
once and for all. They are free Characters.
All the
markings of a tragedy. But the
story still has twists and turns,
and, without giving the whole plot away, the Narrator returns to life. It is his story, after all, and in his story
such things are quite possible. And the Narrator begins to unfold his tale once again.
We
enter the story, find ourselves in this confusing landscape of competing
narratives. Some choose to follow
the bewildering tales of the Narrator, far-fetched though they seem. Others say there is no narrator, and if
there ever was, he is dead now. No, those were simply the old tales.
We write our own stories now. . .
And that is
why we celebrate Narrative Worship at Knox.
Confused?
Come and
find out more. Second Sunday of every month.
This Sunday we're looking at the stories of Elijah.
