The God of Stories

Propers: The Third Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The mind of God is infinite and inscrutable, boundless, depthless, limitless, beyond all of our wildest imaginings, beyond every category of human thought or classification. Even to speak of God’s “mind” is inadequate, for He is not a mind such as you or I have—limited and fickle, changeable and frail—but we speak of God as infinite mind because it’s about as close as we can get, using an analogy we can grasp to get at the reality we cannot.

Thus the truth of God can never be fully encapsulated in any one tradition or doctrine or philosophy. He will always be more, always be truer, always be simpler, than we can possibly comprehend. As we cannot fit the ocean in a thimble, so we cannot fit the whole of God in our heads.

Yet we do believe that we can know Him, because we believe in revelation; which is to say that we believe that God knows us, sees us, hears us, loves us, and responds—for indeed, if He didn’t respond, what would be the use of all that seeing and hearing and knowing? No parent ignores the child he loves. We can know God in part through reason, through beauty, through poetry and art and science and song. But the primary way that we know Him—the revelation that makes Him for us the most real—is through story.

If you want our religion in a nutshell, it’s the conviction that we can best know God through the stories that He tells. That’s why Jesus is the Word of God.

Human beings are storytellers born. Stories are how we make sense of our life, make sense of our world. We have this universal conviction that meaning and purpose and value are real, that goodness and beauty and truth are real, and so it all must mean something, it all must make sense. Be we scientific, superstitious, or somewhere in between, we build our world on stories. Stories tell us who we are, how we got here, and what we ought to do. Everything is a story, working towards a goal, overcoming obstacles, making sense of life.

And it is the conviction of Christianity that this is not simply some accident, but the very thing that makes us human, that connects us to God. As God is the great Storyteller, bringing to life not simply the characters and settings but the meaning and the joy, so we most closely reflect the image of God within us when we tell our own stories as part of the greater narrative, part of the greater whole. That’s why Christians and Jews are so big on the Bible.

The Bible is not a dictionary. It’s not a sourcebook for dogmas and doctrines. The Bible is a collection of history and myth, poetry and song, philosophy, prophecy, law codes and laments. It is not one book but an entire library of stories. Every sort of story that you can imagine. And it is through these stories that our faith reveals to us our God.

See, Christians don’t believe in fate. We don’t believe that we’re all just puppets acting out some great script written before the dawn of time, as though we were billiard balls bouncing about a predetermined geometry. But we don’t believe in chaos either. As I said, the world has meaning, the world has purpose. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, let alone split the atom. Rather, we believe in providence, which is the action of God in our lives.

Providence is a uniquely biblical concept, and uniquely beautiful. The mind of God, recall, is inscrutable, and so His purposes are largely beyond our understanding. But He does reveal Himself to us, respond to us, by intervening in history. And this doesn’t mean that God makes bad things happen, as though the Holocaust were fated or the Fall of Man were part of His plan.

We cannot believe that God wills evil, as not only would this be philosophically contradictory—an evil God by definition could not be God—but also because it’s morally abhorrent. A wicked God is infinitely more terrifying than any devil. Yet we must believe that God can extract good results even and especially from horrible happenings, and thus redeem the story of our world.

We can know God through the stories of His people: His infinite generosity, His unceasing forgiveness, His mournful chastisement, His ultimate will for the salvation and glorification of everything and everyone whom He has made. We cannot know God by abstract definition, but we can know Him through the stories that He tells. And those stories are written upon the history of His people.

The other thing about divine providence, besides its inscrutability, is that it’s initiatory; which is to say, you have to live it. We come to know God through our story, the story we each tell ourselves to make sense of our own lives. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end; there are complications and plot twists and unexpected shocks; but it’s all working towards something, it all means something. And again, we cannot believe that God causes the horrors in our lives, but we must believe that He can bring good out of them.

The end of the story is the most important part. It’s the bit that brings meaning and worth and sense to the whole. And God, by His grace, does not tell tragedies.

Our religion, our faith, is the conviction that the best way to know God, the deepest mystical union we can achieve, is through knowing and living and entering into the stories that He tells, the stories of God’s people. That’s why we read the Scriptures every single day. That’s why we act them out in the liturgy, in our Sunday worship, which is nothing other than the Bible made tangible, the Bible made real.

And that is why the Good News of Jesus Christ is the Greatest Story Ever Told: because in Christ the Author Himself, God Almighty, enters into His own story as the main character, the literal incarnation of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty; the Word of God who makes sense of it all, gives life to it all, and imbues every single character in this Epic of Creation with purpose and meaning and value and hope.

He comes to us in Word and water; comes to us in bread and wine; comes to us in the Scriptures we read, the sermons we preach, and the stories that here we all share. And it doesn’t matter if they happened a thousand years ago, two thousand, four thousand years back. They are our story, the story of our people, the story of our God, and they are real here and now today in us.

That is why Jesus can pull out the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, written more than 500 years before He was born, and say to His people gathered for worship, “This Scripture today is fulfilled in your hearing. It is for you. It is about you. And it is real right here, right now, in you.” We are all part of this story, from Adam and Abraham to Donald and Barak. We are all part of this book. And it is in the telling of the Story—that deepest and most primordial of all human actions and drives—that we come to know the Living God who gives meaning and life to the world.

Someday the end will come at last: the end to each of our stories, and to the greater story as a whole. The world as we know it will end, not in the annihilation of all that’s gone before, but in the culmination, the revelation, of what it has all meant. And on that day, every tear shall be dried, and every wound shall be healed, and every mother’s child shall be raised up from out our many graves. And the Hero will hand over the Kingdom to His Father, and God at last will be all in all.

It shall be the greatest of all possible endings, with every promise fulfilled, every tragedy made right, and every hope brought to its fullest fruition. Our Story ends in boundless joy. And then, well—who can say what new stories we shall tell?

Hear the story. Live the story. Tell it in your life. For this is the Word that redeems all the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.