Telling the Story
Mark 4:30-34
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 19th August 2007

We have been exploring the theme of sharing the faith!  Over four weeks we explored the ‘Content’ of faith. We’re now considering how we share, communicate, transmit, or evoke faith!
We are looking to the communication strategy of Jesus. Last week we reflected on the place of questioning and listening, rather than preaching, proclaiming, getting doctrines across.  Yet we have to say something. Always be ready to make a defense  to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in; yet do it with gentleness and reverence (1 Peter 3.15).
But what does this mean? It used to mean memorizing strings of Bible texts you could trot out, or mastering particular doctrines of which you could convince somebody. Yes, Jesus did preach and teach, did have pithy sayings. He was involved in controversies and arguments. But above all he told stories. Mark goes so far as to say he did not speak to them except in parables (Mk 5.34).
People told stories about him at the time, and ever since they have been telling stories: stories about Jesus and stories that reflect Jesus and his message.
Now stories are difficult to control. In the film The Life of Brian there is a wonderful scene where the people on the fringe of the crowd are listening to Jesus who is speaking way off in the distance. They are conversing with one another and trying to listen. Somebody in front turns around with a puzzled look and asks: “Blessed are the cheesemakers?”  Whether through mischief or mischance many strange stories about Jesus circulated, so much so that the church eventually had to sort out what collection of stories accurately reflected the story of the Lord they knew and worshipped.
But the stories kept coming. We have the stories of the early church, and the stories of the saints and the Desert Fathers – those strange and holy men and women who confronted their world with a devotion alien to the opulence and cleverness of their age.  In the Middle Ages there were the morality plays and the Passion plays. The stories were painted into the great works of western art. In literature and poetry the stories were told:
John Milton in Paradise Lost told the story…
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe

This was not just poetry for poetry’s sake. It was not just an artful story. He entreated the aid of God:

Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

For those whose tastes did not run to epic poetry of Milton the story was soon expressed in more accessible prose narrative by John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress.  This story is told those evocative places that mark the journey of faith: the Slough of Despond, the House Beautiful, the Valley of Humiliation, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle and so on to the Celestial City.
In more modern days the story is told in novel form by George MacDonald – the novelist who stories inspired CS Lewis – and then in turn by Lewis himself in the Chronicles of Narnia. The story comes again in the Earthsea trilogy of Ursula Le Guin –and in a thousand other creative telling.

The story lives on in our own telling. There are the great conversion stories of the faith - St Augustine’s Confessions, CS Lewis’ Surprised by Joy - and, miraculously, this includes our own unfolding of experience and conviction which can be the catalyst for the transformation of someone else’s life. Many years ago I had the privilege of supporting a lady on the long journey of her dying. She told the story of a man in the church who had given her a hymn-book when she arrived one morning at church 12 years before and said something to her that meant so much to her. She never told me what had been said, but to the day of her death it was a treasured memory of one of life’s best moments. The things we do, the stories we tell, the comments we make, can be so special for others.

All of which brings us to one my favourite versions of a Biblical story – as eloquent as Milton, more accessible than Bunyan, a tale of passion and pathos and betrayal and redemption.  I speak of course of that modern classic King George and the Ducky, my favourite Veggie Tale.

For those who are not aware of this contemporary form of high art, Veggie Tales are video cartoons of Bible stories presented by animated vegetables for young children. King George and the Ducky presents the story of David and Bathsheba, a tale of seduction, adultery, manipulation and murder narrated for those under six years of age. This sounds unlikely but involves a transposition of the key dramatic action from the bedroom to the bathroom: where King David had a passion for Bathsheba, King George (an animated cucumber) was passionately connected to his collection of rubber duckies for the royal bathtub. His seizing the rubber ducky of a poor neighbor precipitates the plot. At one point in this story, the Prophet Nathan appears as an animated egg-plant and uses a flannel graph to tell the parable of the rich man who stole the sheep of his poor neighbour. For those who prefer to read the book you can find it in 2 Sam 12. When first watching this cartoon I suddenly said to myself: I am watching a video of a vocalizing aubergine using a flannel graph to explain to an cartoon cucumber a written account of a prophetic speech which included a parable addressed to a murderous misuse of royal power nearly 3,000 years ago, which itself has been re-conceptualised as  a theft of a rubber ducky!  This is the amazing power of story - the evolving, unfolding, multi-layered power of story to carry a message into the heart of a listener, and into the heart of a culture.

But how do we control that power of the story to replicate itself and morph into new forms and be re-expressed for new audiences in new contexts? Well, we are people of the book: the Bible becomes our touch stone. We go back to the old story for the measure of our narratives.

There are some of course who will only have the original story. For them all the creative dynamic of a story that longs to be contemporary must be banished. There is a hymn, Tell me the old, old story, which I think is a coded expression of this worldview. It’s the re-doubled use of ‘old’ that gives the game away. This thinking is deeply skeptical of anything that is new and wants the story locked forever in antiquity.

It sounds so simple to go back and tell the old story, check our stories against it, but this is not so. A close reading of Mark chapter 4 will confirm this. It’s a collection of parables, Jesus at his most simple and clear (we might think). And yet, vss 10-12 contain a strange warning by Jesus that he chooses to give his message in parables so that the meaning might be hidden and people left in ignorance and the disciples given the secret in private session. In the brief lesson this is echoed, but softened to extent that the parables carry as much meaning as people can hear, but there is still the private instruction given to the disciples. This is quite confusing. What is going on?

When Jesus originally told the parables he told them to make a point. They were clear and immediately understood by his listeners. Given the power of stories to morph and get a life of their own scholars suspect that the early church developed an ideology that the stories cannot be left free: only the church had the right to interpret them. They are a form locked in mystery until the church provides the interpretive key. There are some churches and congregations that still believe this.

Mark develops a different view. He presents the disciples as also in the dark, needing illumination and instruction. The meaning of the story, Mark says, rests only with Jesus, the risen Lord himself.  As Eduard Schweizer expresses it the text is saying: “understanding is possible only in association with Jesus; but certainly not with the Jesus who might be reconstructed with the aid of historical research …. This association must be with the living Jesus who speaks to the church today, and who alone can “explain everything” (Eduard Schweizer, Mark p.107). The meaning is slippery, so slippery that no interpreter can control it. It is the living Jesus who ultimately explains the meaning of the story.

And this dynamism of the story, this slipperiness of meaning, is present even in the Biblical story itself.  Look at the short parable of the mustard seed.

In the form that Jesus probably told it, the scholars tell us, it would probably have been a parable of the amazing growth of the Kingdom of God, the smallest of seeds (Jesus’ preaching and actions) growing into the largest of bushes. That’s pretty straightforward, plain, easy to get hold of. It conforms to what we expect of a parable.

But somewhere along the track it has put forth large branches so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. It has morphed from shrub into tree, and suddenly all sorts of other meanings, as well as birds are starting to take nest. Ched Myers in his political reading of Mark’s gospel calls this whole chapter ‘the First Sermon on Revolutionary Patience”. He points out that all the parables of this chapter are about seeding and growing. He also points out that in late biblical literature the sheltering branch was a common metaphor for political hegemony. This story now echoes the stories of Ezekiel Chapter 17 in which the tree sheltering the birds of the air is a metaphor for the mighty kingdoms of the earth. The earlier saying about the parables being there to obscure and confuse, quotes Isaiah and connects this chapter with Isaiah’s story of the tree that shoots from a blackened stump. And there is an association with Ezekiel 31, where the tree parable announces doom on Assyria, and Daniel 4 in which Daniel explains King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream about a tree and all the birds of the air nesting in it. This simple story is already alive with associations and other meanings before it has even been written down! It’s about the growth of the kingdom, yes, but it’s also about the fate of earthly kingdoms, and the community which carries this story carries also the memories of the prophets who interacted with kings and announced the downfall of empires.

So the stories cannot really be controlled, and maybe this is just as well, because it leaves room for the mysterious work of the living Christ through the Spirit to bring the meaning to our minds and hearts.
The preacher and novelist Frederick Buechner tells the story of his conversion in his autobiography The Sacred Journey.
“… on the same block where I Iived there happened to be a church with a preacher I had heard of, and I had nothing all that much better to do with my lonely Sundays. The preacher was a man named George Buttrick, and Sunday after Sunday I went, and sermon after sermon I heard. It was not just his eloquence that kept me coming back, though he was wonderfully eloquent, literate, imaginative, never letting you guess what he was going to come out with next but twitching with surprises up there in the pulpit, his spectacles all a glitter in the lecturn light. What drew me more was whatever it was that his sermons came from and whatever it was in me that they touched so deeply. And then there came one particular sermon with one particular phrase in it that does not even appear in the transcript of his words that somebody sent me more than 25 years later, so I can only assume that he dreamed it up at the last minute and ad-libbed it – and on such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the  destinies of us all. Jesus Christ refused the Crown that Satan offered him in the wilderness Buttrick said, but he is king nonetheless because again and again he is crowned in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place, Buttrick said, “among confession, and tears, and great laughter.”
It was the phrase great laughter that did it, did whatever it was that that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then.” (Buechner: The Sacred Journey, 108-9)
I can only assume that he dreamed it up at the last minute and ad-libbed it – and on such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that I suppose hang the destinies of us all.

We’re all vegetables really – fumbling with our flannel graphs, stumbling through our stories, mumbling our confusing parables in public – astonished and amazed that the spirit of Christ in the privacy of human hearts explains and convinces and touches the depths, until we come into that place of faith and hope and clarity where all becomes plain and we see what has been hiddenly in the doing, all the years of our listening, and our telling, of that story.