Sermon for Sunday, April 14, 2024 || Easter 3B || Acts 3:12-19; Luke 24:36b-48

As I prepare to head off on sabbatical tomorrow, I’d like to use our sermon time today to talk about what I’m going to be doing and why. Ever since joining with a group of other local clergy two years ago to learn about faith-based community organizing, I have grown increasingly fascinated with storytelling. This may sound strange because I’ve been writing novels for a dozen years. But for some reason I’ve never linked being a writer with being a storyteller. I think this is because writing novels is a solitary experience, while storytelling happens in community. Faith-based community organizing coalesces around the stories people tell about themselves and their communities, their struggles and successes, their hopes and dreams and nightmares. These stories become the building blocks for specific justice-oriented actions that seek to improve the lives of everyone in the community.

Recently, I have begun engaging the vestry in one-on-one meetings to share the stories of our lives with one another. These deep conversations are illuminating and life-giving, as we recognize how infrequently we intentionally share our stories and listen to others share theirs. While I am on sabbatical, the vestry will continue sharing their stories with one another. And when I return, we will invite the whole parish to begin such mutual story-sharing. During my three months away, I am planning to dig more deeply into the grace-filled effects of storytelling.

Storytelling is so important because it is the primary way humans make meaning. In his recent book How to Know a Person, David Brooks writes, “There are two layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful.” In other words, we filter what happens to us through certain lenses, and our memories of objective events are actually the subjective stories we tell about those events.

These subjective stories can change over time depending on how we frame them. If we see ourselves as victims of certain events, we will tell one story. If we reframe the story, recasting ourselves as ones who have overcome adversity, we will tell a very different story. 

In two of our lessons today, we see the power of framing stories. In the Gospel reading, the Risen Christ opens the minds of his disciples so they understand how their scriptures speak of the Messiah. Jesus reinterprets a story they all knew so that they now saw him as the central character. In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter has just miraculously healed a man, allowing him to walk. Peter’s intention seems to be avoiding taking credit for the healing and giving glory to God instead. But the story he tells frames his fellow Israelites as the bad guys who “killed the Author of Life.” Peter could never have known that the effects of this framing would reach down through history in the appalling treatment of Jews by Christians.

The way we tell our stories matters, not just for our own well-being, but for the equitable, just, and peaceful flourishing of society. In our world today, false narratives thrive in a fragmented media landscape. Propaganda from bad foreign actors poisons the well of truth. And few people take the time to listen to each other’s stories, to seek common ground, and to join together across difference. This is why we should take storytelling seriously – to dismantle societal falsehood with personal witness and to combat isolation with community. 

Jesus changed the world by telling stories. People asked him narrow questions, and he told expansive parables to wedge open that narrowness. A lawyer once asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. Jesus responded with the great commandments: “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” “Ah,” said the lawyer, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus could have said, “Everyone! Everyone is your neighbor.” But instead, Jesus reframes the question and tells the story of the Good Samaritan, a tale about what Martin Luther King Jr. called “dangerous unselfishness.” A priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan each walk down the road, but only the Samaritan stops to help the injured man. At the end of the story, Jesus asks the lawyer which of the three was acting like a neighbor. “The one who showed mercy,” the lawyer replies. Instead of answering the lawyer’s original, and rather anemic, question about who constitutes a neighbor, Jesus tells a richer story about how to be a neighbor. Luke recorded the story in the Gospel, and people have shared the story so often throughout history that now we use the phrase “Good Samaritan” to describe helping strangers in need. That’s the power of storytelling.

We recently put a new poster on our bulletin board at home. The poster teaches about how to cultivate a “growth mindset.” On one side of the poster, there are seven statements like “I can’t do this” and “This is too hard.” On the other side are the “growth mindset” way of saying these same statements: “I am still learning. I will keep trying.” And “With more practice, it will get easier.” By reframing our experience when things are challenging, we can stick with them as we learn and grow. The “growth mindset” chart helps my family tell different stories about how we are experiencing the world.

Again, David Brooks says, “The greatest thing a person does is to take the lessons of life, the hard knocks of life, the surprises of life, and the mundane realities of life and refine their own consciousness so that they can gradually come to see the world with more understanding, more wisdom, more humanity, and more grace.”

As you do this lifelong work, I encourage you to reflect on the kinds of stories you tell yourself about yourself. How is God present in the midst of those stories? And how are you present to God in your memories of what has happened in your life? What role does love play? Or pain or grief or power or joy? How do the stories you tell affect the way you relate to yourself, to God, to other people, and to the world?

Over the next three months, I will be reflecting on these questions in my own life and in the narratives I will be writing. I invite you to do the same. You might not be a performer or novelist, but I assure you that every one of us is a storyteller. The accumulation of our shared stories tells the wider story of our community. And so it is imperative, with God’s help, to tell our stories through the frames of justice and peace and love.

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Photo by Kevin Erdvig on Unsplash.