We Are the Stories We Tell
August 26, 2007
Ed Powers

My grandfather was a homeless teenager and survived as a street kid in London in the 19th century. He became a ship's deck hand, was shipwrecked off the coast of South Africa, and eventually landed in Philadelphia. He became a farm hand, married the farmer's daughter, and then for 50 years was a postal carrier known for his story. As he made his rounds, he would announce to all: "It's a great day for the race!" In answer to the inevitable question - "What race?" - his eyes would twinkle as he proclaimed, "The human race!"

We are the stories we tell.

Jesus got that. There are many things that make Jesus special. One certainly is the power and enchantment of his storytelling. His stories are called parables - a different kind of story. Somebody, in what was claimed to be a serious moment, called them "earthly stories with a heavenly meaning." Jesus doesn't use them primarily to tell his story - but through them we do get the point of his passion and teaching; thus, in the final analysis, they do become his story.

One day - as our ancient testimony notes - his puzzled disciples asked him: "Why do you speak to them in parables?"

Jesus' crisp answer: because "seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand."

The other ancient testimony gave us an example of Jesus' storytelling. A lawyer who wanted to justify himself asked him: "Who is my neighbor?"

"A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers…" I've traveled that road and with its forlornness even today one easily imagines the scene. Yet, each of us in our own imagination travels that road. "Who is my neighbor?" We know the answer and it matters that he was a Samaritan. The answer is transparent, compelling. We get it!

In fact, Jesus gives us precise clues about the stories we imagine or tell or hear. This process - this narrative creation as it is sometimes called - is about seeing… perceiving… hearing… listening... understanding. Great criteria.

We often talk about the Christian story - those events and actions which capture the dimensions of that faith and history. The elements of the Christian year - Advent, Christmas, Easter, and the like - represent dimensions of the story. We get it because of the story of the announcement to Mary or a scene of temptation or the tragedy of betrayal. Each story embodies some form of the word made flesh, the divine made present, or the human enlightened. The Christian faith is ultimately a collection of stories - known, understood, appropriated.

I've heard Union Theological Seminary's imaginative theologian Daniel Day Williams claim that "Saying who Jesus is, is the never-ending business of the Christian community." The parables are certainly a clue.

Bruce Lescher writes:

Encouraging people to tell their stories is one way to overcome fragmentation. Story has a way of drawing people's lives into focus and providing narrative coherence.

Stories have a beginning, middle and (eventually!) an end. They encourage people to reflect on their roots, explore their past, situate their present, and at least implicitly project a future. Often in the very act of telling one's story one comes to new insights and understandings about one's experience.

There's a Judson mantra often expressed around here: we say, "We love the question." We do, and that tells us a lot about us.

But, there is an interesting variation of that theme which occurs on the third Friday of September each year. On that night, as the Judson community has gathered at a retreat center in Connecticut, the first and only scheduled item for the evening is The Question. Only one person knows in advance what The Question is - and she won't tell.

As we sit in a circle, The Question is revealed and each is asked to respond in turn. By definition, this is the occasion for Storytelling - Who are you? How does The Question impact you? What of you do you want to share? How do you want to enter into this community?

Watch the body language - not everybody loves The Question moment, not everybody loves The Question: "Don't start with me;" fight or flight; be clever or be succinct; let it all hang out or don't tell them anything. What shall I say? You can pass, of course.

But it is reflective of our theme, We Are the Stories We Tell, for often in those moments when our story is called for, we do not rise to the occasion; often we miss the moment. The New Testimony talked of the importance of each person's narrative and the ways in which the narrative we put forth is not only a connector with others but a definer for ourselves.

We may be unaware or regretful of the stories we do tell. Sometimes we exaggerate; often we understate the reality. Ours are stories in search of authenticity, power, and connectivity. Sometimes they fail Jesus' parable test - inadequate seeing, perceiving, hearing, listening, understanding.

Here's a personal example driven by my work on this sermon. The sermon title came from an ACLU article and the phrase captured my imagination, perhaps from my unconscious depths somewhere.

Here's my story: a day after I chose my sermon title I ran into a faculty colleague in the elevator. John is a colleague whom I greatly admire and enjoy. I hadn't seen him for a month. He said, "Hi, how are you?"

I made a quick reply - "I'm doing fine; I'm busy but ok." In effect, I told him little. Unwittingly I brushed off his question, which I believe was sincere. Afterward, I kicked myself and asked myself why I had done that. After all, "I was the story which I told," but I didn't like the story.

At that moment I had failed to tell the story that I really had to tell. It was a terrible reminder of how often I - and perhaps we - brush off the moment, when the story we have to tell gets blunted or dismissed.

Our identity and our well-being are wrapped up in the stories we tell.

Often our lack of authenticity, like mine with John, is our fault - for whatever set of reasons we hold ourselves back, we fail to capture the story in our heart and we diminish the ways in which we can increase self-understanding and build relationships.

Many years ago I learned to use the Behavioral Event Interview process. This approach is widely used in recruiting, selection of personnel, and in performance evaluation. My use of it has been in competency development and assessment as part of executive and organizational development work. Roots of the Behavioral Event Interview are deep in the life work of David McClelland, the eminent social psychologist at Harvard.

The gist of the approach is to get someone to identify situations/events in which, in their judgment, they were characteristically effective or ineffective. Over the years I've probably done a thousand of these interviews. They focus, of course, on the past and seek to capture the cognitive and action behavior of the person. When the onion gets peeled away with a little help from the interviewer, there emerges a remarkably authentic story.

It represents, after all, "one's own story" - "I was effective in this event" or "I disappointed myself in how I handled this." This is the core person conveying now how they have made sense of things and what they have done. Who I am is conveyed in what I have been thinking and what I have done, as our New Testimony suggests. Competence, after all, is the capacity to act, and a clue to what the future might be is captured by the recalled and embraced story.

We are the stories we tell.

What is crucial for us in the search for authenticity is to get the story right - Who am I? What makes me tick? What difference am I making in the world? Getting our story right means capturing "(i>the real," so essential for our self-esteem and empowerment. It is essential also for our connectivity with others.

In wanting to explore this theme I've also wanted to focus on the Judson story ? how will we get that right? In a time of growth and change at Judson we've been trying to capture what is the Judson story, both to sustain what is our core essence and to engage new colleagues in storytelling.

Though there may be as many stories as there are Judsonites, there are some we seem to hold in common; we love to tell about the fountain on the corner which in late 19th century was the source of the only potable water in Greenwich Village. True to our original vision, it was appropriate for poor Italian Catholic immigrant neighbors to come to a Baptist church and find living water.

Another Judson story concerns the renewal of these grand windows. One day long ago, our beloved Arlene Carmen completed a line in a pension form she signed at the ABC pension board, M & M. The beneficiary column needed to be completed. Arlene wrote one word on that line: Judson. After her untimely death, monies from that pension started the Arlene Carmen Fund, seeding the effort to renew the windows that she loved in order to prepare them for their second century. Sometimes we tell our story with a single action.

Or, here's another Judson story - check your bulletin covers: I've always been fascinated by the LaFarge windows, and as I've contemplated them I've wondered, "What were they thinking?" - Edward Judson, John LaFarge, and Stanford White.

To me, one of the most puzzling windows has been that of St. George of Cappadocia, the dragon slayer. The mystery was made more intriguing last May when Mary and I visited the "cave churches" in Cappadocia, Turkey. A half dozen of these churches were carved out of the volcanic rock in the 3rd and 4th centuries. They were places of worship and refuge before Christianity was accepted in the Roman Empire, and later as it was under attack from various antagonists.

In those cave churches which we saw, there are remarkable paintings from those earlier years. They have been preserved and are recognizable today. In several of these churches St. George and the dragon are dynamically portrayed.

St. George himself was a Roman soldier who converted to Christianity, confronted the emperor who asked his soldiers to kill Christians, and was, in fact, martyred just before Constantine changed the game's rules.

Did the 19th century Judson trio who designed the windows know about this heritage? We don't know, but we can imagine that in that period in the early life of the Christian church in Asia Minor the notion of dragons representing the threats of evil, epidemic, torture, and death were very real.

Why not, then, tell the story of the dragon slayer? Why, indeed, not now? There are always dragons and we have to choose which ones to fight! Beyond these walls, remember, there be dragons and we can name many of them!

Or, to a personal storytelling moment, here are two of mine:

The setting of the first is Bob Moss's office on a lovely September afternoon in 1975. Moss, an accomplished New Testament scholar, was President of the United Church of Christ.

In the summer just past, the UCC general synod had met and chosen ten priorities (never mind the fact that choosing ten does not really do much for setting priorities). What the synod had failed to do, however, was to act on a proposal for a study to define UCC policy on sexuality issues.

Bob had asked me to stop by to share a concern. He said three things:

1). "People are hurting. There is a need. We must offer guidance and direction about sexuality. We must do that study. I want it to happen." His pastoral heart said, "Whatever the legislative priorities are, we must find the way to address that need."

2). "I want the study to be to be educationally vigorous and strongly rooted in the biblical and theological tradition. We want people to be able to handle these issues."

3). "I want you to direct the policy study."

That study, acted upon by a general synod 30 years ago this summer, led to the UCC's basic core stand in areas of human sexuality. What makes the UCC tick? There's a need. We must pay attention. We see the results day by day - even now, even here!

My second story is set at the foot of Mt. Kenya, in the country of Kenya, in the summer of 1967. As all of us have been recently reminded in the press, that was the summer of the Newark riots, fires, and urban distress which erupted into devastating confrontations. The Six Day War had just ended and colonial shackles around the world were being challenged.

Several of us who headed education programs for their U.S. denominations were in Nairobi, Kenya, for a global conference on education. We had a weekend off and trekked to a small hotel at the foot of Mt. Kenya, the mountain which nurtured Jomo Kenyatta's vision of a Kenya free of colonialism.

As the group of us talked long into the night we were aware of the visions of freedom in Africa and the fires burning at home. That led us to gain a new awareness of how provincial we may have been. We each had shepherded strong educational programs for our own denominations, yet, somehow, that didn't seem adequate.

Our eyes were drawn to Mt. Kenya and Kenyatta's vision. We had a remarkable sense of an emergent and needy global village. We bled over Newark as we had bled over Watts and shared in the civil rights struggle.

So, we said, it cannot be business a usual. We need to pool our resources and help our churches shape education that can address the world that is emerging. (It was the Sixties, after all). Let's do our church education together and pool our resources in the name of the future.

Three of us committed our respective denominations to create a new organization: Joint Educational Development. It became the instrument through which to embody our vision. The organization survived that weekend by 30 years, becoming an instrument that would eventually involve a dozen denominations working collaboratively, not competitively.

There is a key point here - my final one - the link between oral tales and actions taken. Our story at its most real works because beyond the narrative is the reality of intent and action.

The Question is posed and storytelling is honored.

People could get clear water at the Judson fountain.

The windows could be restored because of Arlene's gift.

The United Church of Christ is open and affirming because its President heard a cry for help.

Denominations reached beyond themselves to meet each other in the public square and in the heart of the search for meaning through instruments like Joint Educational Development.

But the heart of the story/parable/narrative matter was captured for me earlier this summer in interviews with Princes William and Harry. They were getting ready to celebrate Princess Diana's birthday with a concert they were hosting in London. Matt Lauer of the Today show asked them about their mother: "Did she talk a lot about the causes she believed in, her activities to help others?"

"No," they said, " she didn't talk about it. It was obvious. We knew what she was doing. This was who she was, what she did, what she cared about."

The princes got it right - it is obvious. In the final analysis, the stories we tell are not the yarns we spin but what keeps us awake at night, the actions we take, the causes we support, the things we are passionate about.

We are the stories we tell!

What's your story?

· Ancient Testimony: Matthew 13: 10-17; Luke 10: 23-37