You need to know, I tell a lot of stories in my preaching.
Mostly they are stories from my life or the church’s life. The stories that you
find when you Google or, God forbid, from sermon anecdote books, make my flesh
crawl. My actual life is way more interesting than those stale Saltines. Stories have always been important to me.
They are the way I learned lessons, from the time I was a wee tyke. Family stories, mostly, that all start with
“The Time…” like The Time Mama Rowe
Wanted to Learn to Drive, The Time Uncle Roscoe Shot the Rope, and The Time
Daddy Left Me in the Tree. Stories, to
be good ones, had to have recognizable, fallible, flawed, hopeful, characters,
somehow kin to me, and moments of great conflict , and satisfying resolutions.
From those stories, I learned who I was, where I came from, and what was
important in life.
So much of the gospel is told in story form. Scripture is, at base, a story of God and
people, a story of covenant and consummation and the life and work of Jesus
Christ. In that larger story, we see ourselves, and when preaching works, we
come to see that the story of faith is our story. We see ourselves in
Israelites and Egyptians, in Peter the
Doubter and Peter the Rock. The best
part of the preaching moment is when we come to see how the Jesus we hear about
in Scripture is the Jesus who woos us and works in and on us today. It’s a
wide-eyed recognition that, in the blink
of an eye, we are the women, running from the tomb, running from the sanctuary,
saying “He’s not here. He has risen.”
In every church, we must tell the story of the gospel and we
must tell how the gospel is being lived out in our midst. What are some of your
church’s stories of God at work? The
Time Our Church Fed our Neighbors in the Park, The Time John Went into Rehab
and We Prayed for Him, The Time We Marched for Justice? The Time the Power Went
Out and We Worshipped Anyway? I promise, you have a story to tell, about God’s
love and mercy, about faults and failures and God’s redemption. You have a story because God had a story
first…that “old, old story of Jesus and
his love.”
