I Love to Tell the Story

Dr. Lawrence Hull Stookey’s book Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church was required reading for my class on Worship and Sacraments in seminary. I will confess that I wasn’t excited about paying $18 for a book on the history of paraments and their colors. Imagine my surprise, and relief, when I found that the colors of paraments were handled in an appendix. From the first sentence of the book, Dr. Stookey opened my thoughts about the rhythm of the church year and the importance in our faith development of being people of the story.

In the passage from Joshua that Laurinda read this morning, the people of Israel had passed through the Jordan River when its banks were overflowing, on dry ground. So, Joshua calls the leader of each of the 12 tribes of Israel and has them pass in front of the ark of God and pick up 12 stones and laid them down where they lodged as a sign, a reminder. A way to cause them to recall and pass down the story. When your children ask in days to come, “What do these stones mean?” You will tell them the story, “Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we passed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty.”

There is a Hebrew adage, “Shiv’im panim la Torah” –“There are seventy faces to the Torah.” Judaism teaches that every time you look at the stories of Scripture you discover something new. Just as a well-cut diamond has many facets and sparkles as the light is reflected by it.

Dr. Stookey writes, “To be deeply Christian is to know and to live out the conviction that the whole human family dwells continuously at the intersection of time and eternity.” Time is a continuum, and we live at the cutting edge between the past and the future.

We tell the story of that continuum every Sunday in our Affirmation of Faith, on Communion Sundays in the Great Thanksgiving, and even each year as we follow the Christian calendar through the seasons of the church year.

Have you noticed that our affirmations of faith and Great Thanksgiving prayers follow the same pattern? When we affirm our faith we say, “I believe,” and we reach back and remember God’s story; we remember who God is and what God has done. Then, we declare what we know the Holy Spirit is doing now that gives us hope as we reach into the future. We take up our cross, we claim our place as the cutting edge between what God has done and what God has promised.

When we come to Communion, we come to remember. We remember the story. Just as the Israelites told the story of crossing the Jordan on dry land, we tell the story of God’s faithfulness to all generations. Then we remember that God sent his son Jesus. We remember that he ate with his disciples on the night he was betrayed and told them to remember him as they broke bread and drank wine together. The Lord’s Supper is more than a recollection of Jesus, though, as we share in communion we reaffirm the new covenant and are united with all who gather at the Lord’s Table in covenant relationship. The third and final section of Great Thanksgivings is the invocation of the Holy Spirit. We pray for the Holy Spirit to sustain us as Christ’s body in the world and to empower us to do Christ’s work in the world. When we remember Jesus at this table, we are part of all that God’s coming in Christ means now. The power and presence of Christ is a reality in the gathering at his table. Here, we see what ought to be, the world as God wills it. Here, we celebrate and look forward to the reign of God.

When we affirm our faith in worship and when we receive the bread and cup of communion, we declare our place at the cutting edge between history and hope. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”