"Telling Time"

Parochialism takes lots of expressions, but perhaps the least noticed is the way we tell time. Not everyone tells time the same way, you know. The Chinese tell time differently. Their New Year begins in the spring rather than on January 1. Jews tell time differently too. Their New Year, called Rosh Hashanah (literally “head of the year”), is in the fall. How you tell time can be a telling indicator of what you value, what you think important, how you order your life.

That’s why we Christians have developed through the centuries our own unique way of telling time. For Christians, time-telling is a function of faith. Through the way we order our days we give witness to our faith that history is finally His-Story, and that the story of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ is finally the only story worth telling.

Incidentally, it is both an annoyance and an embarrassment to me that we Christians permit just about anyone and everyone to tell us how to tell time – Hallmark (It’s Grandparents Day!), the ecclesiastical denomination (It’s Radio and Television Commission Sunday!). Anybody, it seems, with an agenda can co-opt the calendar for their purposes (It’s National Car Care Month!). How you tell time is telling, isn’t it!

For Christians, our year begins on the First Sunday of Advent with the birth of the Son of God and the beginning of the Salvation Story. It continues through Epiphany with the coming of the Magi (representing the larger, Gentile world) to worship before the Christ Child. Then in the spring for forty days called Lent through the long wilderness journey to the final week of His life we Christians join Jesus on the Way of the Cross. In early summer, on Pentecost, we celebrate the coming of the Spirit on the Church to empower us to be his witnesses “to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Then through the long hot summer months we trace our own journey with Jesus as his modern day disciples by remembering how our fathers and mothers of faith in the Early Church dealt with difficulty and persecution and even death in their determination to be God’s people. Finally, in late fall we culminate the journey on Christ the King Sunday when we remember that Caesars come and Caesars go and Jesus is still King of Kings and Lord of Lords Whose Kingdom and coming are sure and certain.

And so, for the four Sundays leading up to Christmas, Christians will “tell time” as Christians do by preparing all over again for the coming of the Christ into history - into our world, into our lives, into our hearts, into the Church, and into the new year. We will light candles for the Light of the World; we will sing songs for the One Who makes our hearts glad; we will give gifts to honor the Gift of God; and we will tell stories – no, we will tell The Story – of the Word made flesh. We call it Advent (Latin for “coming”). It is the Church’s “New Year” celebration and a reminder that no matter what the New Year brings, for the believer it will bring Christ, just in the “knick of time.”

Happy New Year!

Story of My Life

Do you remember E. M. Forster’s classic definition of a story? Story, he says, is the difference between these two sentences: “The king died and then the queen died;” “The king died and then the queen died of grief.” The first, he says, is merely a recounting of events without attendant significance; the second is a story. That is to say, storytelling is a creative act; it assigns meaning to the events that make up our lives.

In Jay McInerney's 1989 novel, Story of My Life, Allison is a young woman who lives a “grab all the gusto and never look back” kind of life in fast-paced New York. Her life is filled with events but devoid of meaning. She has spiritual and emotional Parkinson’s disease, lots of motion, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Numbed by it all, she shrugs off whatever life deals her with the quip “story of my life.” Her roommate steals her rent money and spends it on a present for a boyfriend: “story of my life.” She falls in love with a guy who dumps her for another woman: “story of my life.” No matter what happens, she shrugs it off: “story of my life.” The quip is an ironic commentary on Allison’s life – there is no “story of her life,” just an aggregation of disjointed events without meaning, without purpose, just one stupid thing after another.

That’s why Faith is such a good storyteller; it puts purpose and “plot” in our stories.

Stan Hauerwas of Duke has argued that the Christian story is most truthfully told when it is told as a “Thanksgiving Story.” It is, essentially, a story of what we’ve been given. “The self is a gift,” he writes, “and we need a story that helps us accept it as gift.” Hauerwas goes on to say that when we learn to tell our stories as the story of being given a great gift, we can then be truthful about ourselves. As long as we are trapped in telling stories about our power or our wisdom or our success, we’re dishonest with ourselves and with others, hiding our weaknesses and our impotency and our failures both from ourselves and from others. The truth is, our story is not about our power or our wisdom or our success; it’s about grace, and coming to terms with that is what sets us free to accept it all, the bad times as well as the good, as a gift from God, as our “story.”

There are, of course, lots of ways to tell the “story of your life”: “Of all the dumb luck!” “They’re just out to get me!” “Life is a box of chocolates….”

Long ago, our fathers and mothers of faith told ours as a Thanksgiving Story: “A wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, O LORD, have given me.” (Dt. 26:5-10)

Now that’s a story!

"Y3W"

Just about the time you’re convinced that television is completely without redeeming qualities, it shows you how powerful well-chosen sounds and images can be. ABC’s Good Morning America does a weekend piece called “Y3W” for “Your Week in 3 Words.” Ordinary people use video cameras to capture their week in images and then choose three words (or groups of three words) to express it all. Behind the images play the haunting sounds of The Weepies’ “World Spins Madly On.” And it’s powerful and moving: a soldier in Iraq standing by a wall with a sign: “Happy B’Day Morgan;” a baby stumbling across a floor to waiting hands with the words “Her First Steps;” a hand with the words “Lost My Job” written on it, and when the hand is removed a “For Sale” sign in front of a house. Powerful.

It’s powerful because of the God-given capacity we humans have not merely to respond to life, but to reflect on it. Someone has called this “the flying fish perspective.” Like flying fish, we humans can leap out of our environment momentarily and gain some perspective, some sense of the whole, before we plunge back into the murky madness where everything looks and feels the same. Like flying fish we can’t do it very long, there’s swimming and eating and predator-avoiding that takes priority over perspective. But we can do it, and when we do, it’s powerful and provocative.

It’s the difference between viewing the events of our lives as a random collection of “little stories” that don’t go anywhere or mean anything (like the stories on the nightly news), and seeing them as “scenes” in a single story that has point and purpose and plot. As Christians, we refine this metaphor further by seeing our lives not just as scenes in a story, but as scenes in The Story, God’s story in which we are characters and our lives are scenes. History is His-Story. German theologians of another day had a big word for this: Heilsgeschichte, “salvation history.” But what they really meant is “The Story” God has been writing from the moment He called creation out of chaos and you and me from our mothers’ wombs.

It makes a difference how you see your life, whether or not you see the daily and weekly and yearly events of your life as mindless and pointless, or whether you see your life as having point and purpose and plot. It can get you through a tough week.

Take last week, for example. I buried a twenty-six year old mother of two who was killed in a head-on by a drunk driver. All week I kept saying to myself: “It makes no sense. What’s the point?” And then I remembered the flying fish and realized that I can draw no conclusions about the plot of The Story until God is finished with it. He’s an amazing “Author” Who gives His characters terrible freedom to do both awesome and awful things, like drive drunk and take lives, and yet is so creative that even this awful “plot twist” He can incorporate into the plot of The Story. He’s had experience, you know, at a place called Golgotha.

Oh yes. My Y3W? “Life is hard…God is good.”

"End of Construction: Thank You for Your Patience"

Though I’ve not seen it myself, I’m told that on the tombstone marking the modest memorial to a remarkable woman who was, given the public prominence of her preacher husband, inevitably known simply as “Billy Graham’s wife,” read the words: “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” Ruth Bell Graham chose them herself years before her death. They come from a road construction sign she once saw greeting travelers with the good news that the long wait and faithful patience was now being rewarded. She reputedly commented: “What a marvelous image for the Christian life – a work under construction until we go to be with God. That’s what I want as my epitaph.” And so it is.

What strikes me about that epitaph is not just the modest, self-effacing candor that was so typical of Ruth Graham’s life, but its appropriateness as a metaphor for the Christian life – a work under construction. Nowhere, in my experience, is there more dissonance between “Baptist” and “biblical” than here. There is a popular Baptist soteriology (doctrine of salvation) that sees salvation as purely event without any sense of a process, journey, “work under construction” at all. Our language betrays it: “So-and-so got saved last night.” Finished, complete, end of story. And sadly, for many it is! The day they give their “hearts” to Jesus is about as “Christian” as they’ll ever be. Armed with the knowledge that they’re now “saved,” their “ticket is punched,” they return to life and to “business as usual.” No Christian growth, no discipleship, no “work under construction.” And then we wonder why there are so many “undiscipled disciples” (as Jess Moody called them) in the Church!

To be sure, salvation begins with an event, a decision, a moment, but it does not end there, not if it’s really “salvation.” To save us, God must change us, and that takes a lifetime, as Ruth Graham knew. It is transformation, enculturation, formation, and it is both event and journey.

C.S. Lewis once wrote: “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.” What he meant was that God loves us just as we are, but because He loves us, He cannot leave us as we are; He must form us in the image of His Son Who is both our Source and our Destiny. That is why He is so infinitely patient with us; He has a lifetime (ours) to finish the construction.

And note: Construction zones are not smooth highways and easy rides. Lots of bumps and “lane shifts” and starts and stops can be expected. Anybody who tells you otherwise has never been “in the zone.” Think about it! Patience and persistence are required.

One thing more. In this “construction zone,” we don’t just work on Sundays.