Our Holy Story: Facts Kill, Stories Resurrect

I used a spreadsheet to estimate - I have listened to over 2,500 sermon from more than 500 different preachers.  That may make me many things - numb, excited, connected, humored - but it does make me a Jesus follower, or a Christian or even a believer.

Stories are what form me, they are the soil I grow in, they are the compost that feeds me.  On my email signature (the bumper sticker of our time), I use this quote:

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. - Muriel Rukeyser

I really believe that - that the ocean we live in is filled with stories, not facts or atoms.

A hero of mine - Ira Glass of This American Life-  talks about it in this interview (below). He says that to succeed as a storyteller, or in any creative endeavor, you’ve got to enjoy killing (the part about killing starts around 1:30 in).  You've got to tell those stories of death, of transformation - rather than domesticated facts, agreed upon doctrines.

Chris Jones comments on this, in the context of software development - I think it has huge implications for folks of faith:

This idea that entropy is the enemy when you’re building something really makes sense: The universe is fighting against you. It’s trying to make whatever you’re creating chaotic and disordered. Everything will decline and degenerate unless you stop it from happening.

Jones is so spot on here - and I have watched so many battles fought in faith communities that try to hide the entropy, try to deny the chaotic, try to re-organize the disordered.

The irony here is that the story we follow is that death is not a defeat, but a triumph.  The Jesus story that I live in is that the Liberating King was killed by a competing empire, executed in a way to communicate humiliation and subjugation.  Death is not an end state, it is an avenue of hope.  Decay is not something to cover up with make-up, it is a mark of wisdom &  experience that defines our creation in the image of God.

I'll probably hear a sermon this week..and the next ...and the next.  It is just part of churchianity.  We give people - usually guys in America - big talking sticks, then we get disappointed when we find they are humans with doubts, decays & foibles just like us.  I'll take the sermons - it's just part of the game, the price of admission, even occasionally the game itself - but I'll swim with stories.

Muriel Rukeyser is right - The universe is made of stories, not atoms.   We people in faith communities seem to not like that, we seem to water to turn wine into water, stories into atoms.  That's shame - the water will flow, the stories will come.

And they will set us free.  The tomb is empty, the pulpit abandoned - stories resurrect, facts kill.

Comments

[Melinda]

Loved the Ira clip; the others in that series are great, too. Thanks, Bob...

M