You Guessed It! Go here first! Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
One of my many, many parenting mistakes is that I made a ritual out of bedtime. I mean, that’s what all the baby books said to do, so it’s not completely my fault. But if I had to do it over again, I’d go back and simplify. I’d read him one story, kiss him on the cheek, say goodnight and close the door. But Jonah wasn’t a great sleeper, and he loved being read to, and it just took him forever to slow down from the day, to unwind, and to settle himself down to sleep. So, somehow, through the process of time and trial and error, we ended up with a complicated series of distinctly contrived and coordinated choreographies that we would perform in order to get the child to finally nod off, and go to sleep.
Almost eleven years later, we’re still dancing at bedtime. They need water. With ice cubes. They need their personal comfort objects. They need to be told, every. single. night. To brush their teeth and go to the bathroom. They need snuggles. They need me to tuck them in, turn out their light, and say, “Goodnight. I love you. Have a good sleep.” In that order. Jonah, if I’m lucky, will grunt back, and then I’ll know it’s ok to close his door. Levi will respond, “Good night, mama, I love you too, have a good sleep,” and then I know that the day is done, the work is over, time for a beer and my favorite Netflix sitcom.
But most of all, they need their stories. We started off with a reasonable three. A “Goodnight Moon,” a “Where the Wild Things Are,” a “Corderoy,” or “The Snowy Day” and we were good to go. But then they got longer. Three Berenstain Bears. Then four. Then chapter books: Charlotte’s Web and Winnie the Pooh and Harry Potter. Now we’re on page 247 of the Lord of The Rings Trilogy. Try to put them to bed before the story, even after a full day of stories, of Minecraft and National Geographic Specials and Lego battles and Star Wars and How to Train Your Dragon, they still need one more, just one more story, before they can settle in, close their eyes, and enter their own dream worlds of story and image, of symbol and process, connection and disconnection.
The other night, I was lamenting to Dan about the tediousness that bedtime can be. It’s the same story - the same ritual - every night, the same repeated requests, the same instructions, the same reminders and the same battles. Even after eleven years of the same process, night after night, the story stays the same. The ritual repeats itself. I asked Dan when this process would finally be over. When will these kids finally be able to put themselves to sleep. When will we be able to simply let them decide when it’s time for bed, let them be responsible for their own dental health, when will they be able to read stories on their own, settle down, settle in, and nod off to sleep?
Dan simply responded, “Well, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.” Which is so very true. And Levi, our master snuggler, overhearing our conversation, came in to the room and said, “Never. You’ll be reading me stories until I’m seventeen.”
And so goes the story of our lives. Lots of tedium. Lots of repetition. Lots of trying again and “I’m sorries” and stories within the stories. Stories of lost Lego guys and found favorite stuffies. Stories that start out with giggles and harmless wrestling and end up with tears and bruises and broken picture frames. Stories of a little boy’s first cucumber, grown in the back yard, eaten whole, straight off the vine. Stories of boredom and grocery shopping and cleaning and re-cleaning the bathrooms.
Lots of parables told with forgotten storylines only to be picked up again in a new train of thought. Lots of worry. Lots of concern. Lots of comparing others’ stories to my own. Lots of stories with unknown endings, stories we’re still living out, fretting about, writing and rewriting, stories erased and tried again. Stories of endings. Stories of new beginnings.
There was a time when I thought my stories weren’t good enough. They weren’t dramatic enough. They didn’t have enough action and suspense, they were tedious and repetitive, mundane and boring. My stories contained within them a couple of minor regrets, so I thought they were all wrong. So I left. I left my stories and pursued new ones. Well, that made a mess.
That caused some heartbreak. And now I have to live with all that mess and all that heartbreak being a part of my story as well.
But why all this talk about “story?” Why am I rambling on and on about the stories we live and read and tell and write?
Our book group this week read a wonderful and enlightening chapter from Rachel Held Evans’ book, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again. In this particular chapter, she asks, “Why Christian?” Why are we still…Christian? After a violent history, after painful interpretations and deep canyons drawn in the sand, after divisions and misrepresentations and disagreements and schisms, why are we still Christians?
It’s a good question. It’s a question we should all ask from time to time. Why are we still here? Why are we doing what we’re doing, proclaiming what we’re proclaiming? It’s a question we need to ask during this transition that our church is experiencing right now. Why Christian?
Evans says, that for her, it’s because of the stories. She says, “The gospel means that every small story is part of a sweeping story, every ordinary life part of an extraordinary movement… the church is a group of people caught up in the same story, with Jesus at the center.”
She says, “When God was wrapped in flesh and walking among us, the single most occupying activity of the Creator of the universe, the Ultimate Reality, the Alpha and Omega and the great I AM of ages past and ages to come, was to tell stories.” Jesus walked the earth, telling stories, and then became The Story.
Because that’s what stories do. They connect us to the unknown. They are the bridge between the things that we know, deep in our heart’s core, things like seeds and water and weeds and bedtimes and quilts, and those things that we don’t know, those things we can’t fathom, things we don’t understand — the Other, the Kingdom, God, redemption and forgiveness. Love. Sacrifice.
If you want to understand thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, calculus, mystical experiences, the miracle of birth and death, if you want to really understand it, listen to the stories. If you want to better understand racism, and classism and prejudice, listen to the stories of those who have suffered it. If you want to better understand who you are, listen to your own stories. If we want to know what life should look like, what life will look like, what life does look like when God’s realm is made known, look at Jesus. Look at the story of his life. Study the stories he tells. Let those stories mold your own. Live out your own story. Then tell about it.
Sally McFague says that metaphors, which are simply the elements that make up our stories, are “the way human beings get from here to there, from … unbelief to believing. [It is] what theological reflection is about; it is not primarily about formulations and systems. Believing has a narrative quality, for it is a process, usually a slow process, which moves from the unsurprising to the surprising with the complexity and ambiguity, the stops and starts, the insights and setbacks of a story.” The stories are what get us from here to there, from mystery to understanding, from question to comprehension. The stories are the bridge.
The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. The Kingdom of God is like leaven. It’s like treasure hidden in a field. It’s a merchant, a net thrown into the sea. The Kingdom of God, this unknown, amorphous, mysterious, scary, hopeful thing, is just like the stuff we encounter every day. It’s just like groceries and cucumbers and cups of ice water and the ritual of putting your kids to bed every night. The Kingdom of God, Jesus says, can be found in our everyday lives, in our everyday stories. Talitha J. Arnold says, “…the stories of God’s kingdom and that of heaven are down to earth, literally. They are common stories about ordinary people —a tenant farmer, a housewife, a fisherman — doing everyday things. … In his parables, Jesus puts that incarnational focus not on himself but on the world around him.
“The kingdom of God is like” the most common things in human life. Like Jesus himself, this everyday world embodies the sacred meeting of divine and human, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. … For Jesus, God’s realm is not some esoteric kingdom in the sweet by and by, but as close as the next mustard bush or loaf of bread.”
And Sallie McFague says, “The kingdom is never defined; it is spoken of in metaphorical language. … A parable is an extended metaphor — the metaphor is not in discrete images which allow for a flash of insight … but it is a way of believing and living that initially seems ordinary, yet is so dislocated and rent from its usual context that, if the parable ‘works,’ the spectators become participants, not because they want to necessarily or simply have ‘gotten the point’ but because they have, for the moment, ‘lost control.’ …
The secure, familiar everydayness of the story of their own lives has been torn apart; they have seen another story — the story of a mundane life like their own moving by a different ‘logic,’ and they begin to understand (not just with their heads) that another way of believing and living — another context or frame for their lives — might be a possibility for them.”
These parables aren’t something we simply assent to. They aren’t meant to be fully logically comprehended. They aren’t simply illustrations of things that we already know. They aren’t simply teaching devices, allegories, or moral illustrations.
But through this connection between familiarity and strangeness, through this unity of the known with the unknown, through this bridging between the everyday and the mysterious, we are transformed. We are different. We do differently. Parables are the stories that recalibrate our entire lives. Parables find kingdoms in seeds and untamable weeds, in unclean leaven used to make enough bread for a wedding feast, in treasure in fields and pearls and nets full of fish.
And isn’t that what Jesus does for us? Jesus becomes the ultimate Parable, the one who bridges for us the known with the unknown, humanity and God, ourselves with the ultimate Other.
Again, Sallie McFague says, “Jesus, as the parable of God, did not tell people about the kingdom but he was the kingdom; and the way his whole life brought people to the kingdom was through a juxtaposition of the ordinary within a startling new context.”
Stories require our participation. They require that we step inside of them, enter in to them, we take their strangeness, their otherness, and apply it to our own everyday lives. Jesus, as the ultimate storyteller and the ultimate Story, invites us into the story of our own lives, invites us to see the Kingdom in the everyday things we hadn’t thought to look into before.
We receive the stories when we, as Sallie McFague says, “participate imaginatively,” when we “must so live in the story that insight into its strangeness and novelty come home to us. We are not told about the graciousness of God in a parable but are shown a situation of ordinary life which has been revolutionized by grace.”
So yes. Obviously and mysteriously and evidently and strangely, the kingdom is in a mustard seed. It’s in yeast and in nets and in fields and in merchants. It’s in our daily bedtime rituals. It’s in the mundane stuff we think we’re too good for. It’s in the dishes and the dust bunnies in the corners. It’s in the oil changes and the Facebook statuses and the late July heat. It’s in the stories we share and in the stories that our lives become.
Maybe it wasn’t such a big mistake to surround my kids with stories, even if it is way past their bedtime.
The truth of a story, the heart of a metaphor, cannot be found by analyzation, through logical study or scrutinizing or examining or parsing or dissecting. It can only be lived. It can only be participated in. Read and then read again. And if you still don’t “get” it, read it again. And if you still don’t get it, well, then maybe you’ll discover that there’s nothing to “get.” It’s only to be experienced. The metaphors sewn together with our own lives, our ordinary, mundane, everyday lives, in order to bind the unknown to the known, that is incarnation. That is the story of God.
There’s nothing to “get.” There’s only the doing. The being. The presence.
Jesus is that Parable. Jesus is the one who bridges the unknown to the known. Jesus reveals to us a life revolutionized by grace. Jesus is the ultimate Storyteller who invites us, who shows us, to see the Kingdom of God in our own lives, in homegrown cucumbers and laundry and junk mail, and cans of cat food, and little boys resisting bedtime. Stories draw us in to an entirely different logic, a new way of seeing and understanding and participating in the world. So participate in the stories. Do the stories. Enter in. See anew. Be transformed.
Jesus walked this earth telling stories. Jesus is the Story.
Thanks be to God.
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