There's a lesson that preachers learn very early on – for all your hours of preparation all people will remember are the childrens’ address and the stories you use to illustrate the sermon.
Something in us responds to stories and nothing holds our attention quite like a story. We have an insatiable appetite for them.
Some of us devour them in print, others prefer the silver screen; some have a taste for the epic, while others gravitate towards the more everyday storylines of the soaps. Some get their fix when they wander down to the shops or visit the mart and have a news with whoever they happen to meet. But we all love a story.
It starts in childhood and stays with us all our lives.
I remember going through a phase when Ross was about 3 when we couldn’t keep him in books, so I had to make up stories for him every night. And after three months of that your story reservoir’s pretty dry. So we ended up with this wee system where he’d choose three words for me and I’d have to weave some kind of a story around them. And that kept us going for another three months. Insatiable.
We love stories. And we hold our storytellers dear.
But why? Why are stories so important to us?
Well there are a host of reasons, I guess.
They stir the imagination, they open up new vistas to us, they inform, they puzzle, they entertain.
Storytelling’s a corporate act. Someone speaks, someone listens. And even if we’re reading by ourselves, as we enter the world of the novel we forge a connection with the writer that spans both space and time.
Eugene Peterson tells of a time early in his ministry when he was close to burnout and for six months he set aside two hours, twice a week, to read the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. There was something about his writing, and the stories he wove, that fed Peterson’s soul in a time when little else did, and he’d diary those hours in. He’d write ‘Appointment – FD’ in his filofax, and keep that appointment come hell or high water.
Stories draw us in – they draw the village round the campfire; they draw the child into her mother’s arms; they draw the masses to the multiplex.
But the best stories do more than that. The best stories also draw us out. In our response to them, they disclose something of who we really are.
Today’s reading from Second Samuel is a classic example of that.
King David’s achieved just about everything he wanted to achieve in life, and as we all know that’s when boredom sets in and eyes begin to roam.
One night as he hangs about listlessly on the roof of his palace he catches a glimpse of naked flesh on another rooftop and lets his gaze linger on the forbidden form of another man’s wife. The man is Uriah, one of his soldiers, and the woman is Bathsheba.
David has her brought to him, she falls pregnant, and then to hide his sin he arranges for Uriah to be sent into the fiercest part of the battle and then abandoned, leaving him to certain death.
He thinks he’s got away with it. But then Nathan comes with this story about the rich man who took away the poor man’s lamb to feed his guests, and David rushes to judgment., not realising he’s judging himself. “I swear by the living Lord that the man who did this ought to die”.
“You are that man” says Nathan. The story has drawn David in, but it’s also drawn him out. The truth about David has come to light.
And that’s exactly why Jesus’ teaching is marked not by doctrinal exposition but storytelling. He didn’t give us elaborate formulations about the nature of the Trinity. He told stories about merchants and farmers, fathers and sons. He told parables that were obscure or even deliberately provocative to challenge the preconceptions of his hearers.
“What - do you mean the Samaritan’s the good guy?”
“Are you telling me the father took that boy back into the house after all he did to him?”.
“Are you telling me the folk who worked in the fields for one hour got paid the same as the folk who worked all day?”
Jesus’ parables drew people in, but they also drew them out. Their responses to those stories revealed who they really were.
Now all of this is a long prelude to what we’re going to be doing over the next few weeks in these summer services, because we’re going to be looking at one of the most well know and popular stories in the Bible – the story of Jonah.
But before we begin to look at it, I felt it was important to have this conversation about the purpose of story.
You see the scholars can’t agree about Jonah. Is it fact, or is it fiction?
On the side of fact, Jonah’s name is found elsewhere in the Bible. He’s mentioned briefly in the book of 2nd Kings and there he’s described as a prophet. And in the New Testament, Jesus speaks of Jonah as a real person and of these events as factual.
On the side of fiction, some see this more as a parable, which helps us digest the more irrational parts of the story, like a man surviving three days in a whale’s belly, or the plant that mysteriously springs up overnight to give Jonah shelter.
They also point to the fact that there’s no historical anchor to the story to tell us where it fits in – and that gives it an air of ‘once upon a time’.
We could easily kick around those arguments all summer. But instead, let’s agree that whether it’s fact, or fiction, it’s in the Bible because it’s a story that can draw us in and also draw us out. And Godwilling, it will do so in the weeks ahead.
But let me round things off this morning by leaving you with a question, and it’s one to which I’m not sure I have the answer.
What does it say about God that his chosen medium of communication is the story? Or to put it another way, why is the Bible full of stories, and not full of nice, neat, systematic, precise doctrine?
Maybe it’s because only stories can do the sheer wonder of God and human beings justice.
Any one of us could rhyme off bare bulletpoints that describe us:
Male, Caucasian, 5’8”, British, son, husband, father, minister.
None of that’s incorrect. But if you really want to know me, you need to get beyond that. You need to hear some stories. You need to speak to my parents, my wife and kids, my friends. Then, maybe, you’ll have a better idea of who I really am.
I’m more than any formula you might derive to try and describe me. And so are you. And so is God.
Life in all its glory resists over-simplification. You need a sonnet to extol your lovers’ eyes, not an algorithm. You need a story to feed your faith, not a formula. Some things just won’t be simplified and we do them damage if we try.
The author Donald Miller tells about his first forays into writing, and the day he attended a seminar on writing for the Christian market. The woman who was leading the seminar had a clear formula for success – you must paint a picture of great personal misery; you must talk about where you are now, having gained control over the situation that was making your miserable, and you must give the reader a three or four point plan for getting from the misery and lack of control to the joy and control you currently have. It had worked for her, and it could work for them, she argued.
Donald, in his own inimitable way, was graciously sceptical about whether this was either Biblical or helpful. So he went back to the Bible and found no three step plans. Just a bunch of messy stories about messy people. People with rough edges and dubious methods who nonetheless encountered God in real ways.
“It got me thinking that perhaps formula-type books, books that take you through a series of steps, may not be all that compatible with the Bible. I looked at all the self-help books I happened to own, the ones about losing weight, the ones about making girls like you, the ones about getting rich, the ones about starting your own pirate radio station and I realised that none of them actually helped me that much. All the promises of fulfilment really didn’t work. My life was fairly normal before I read them, meaning I had good days and bad days, and then my life was fairly normal after I read them too, meaning I still had good days and bad days. It made me wonder, honestly, if such a complex existence as the one you and I are living can really be broken down into a few steps. It seems if there were a formula to fix life, Jesus would have told us what it was.
I bring this up only because life is complex and the idea that you can break it down or fix it in a few steps is rather silly. The truth is there are a million steps and we don’t even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and me and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we find this truth beautiful, the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us not to rely on easy answers, bullet points, magic mantras or genies in lamps, but rather in His guidance, His existence, His mercy and His love”.
For me, that sums it all up. Faith isn’t a three step programme. It’s a living relationship with the God who’s great overarching story of creation, fall, redemption and reconciliation is being played out across time and space. And what God wants more than anything, is that you and I gather round the campfire, open our ears and our minds, and get drawn into the tale for ourselves. Because we, just like Jonah, have our part to play in this great unfolding story.
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