For the truth will set you free...

When I was in high school, National Geographic released a documentary on the Gospel of Judas, and the staff of Bon Air UMC, being curious, had a bit of a party.  Staff members and family (meaning spouses and... me) gathered at the house of the only people who had the right TV channel to listen and see how this new information might affect our lives and faith.  Rhonda VanDyke Colby baked a "Judas Iscarrot Cake" for the occasion, complete with thirty silver candies surrounding the bottom of the cake and a tree with a noose hanging off of it as a decoration.  (Never ever say we religious folk cannot laugh at ourselves.)

At a pause in the film, I remember Rhonda asking me, "If they found the bones of Jesus, how would that affect your faith?"  I was confused by the question, because honestly, it made no difference to me.  I mean, sure, there are some tricky logistical things with the Ascension if we found the bones of Jesus, but ultimately, my faith is not about bones.

For the past few months I've had a lot of people ask me questions about the "reality" of what I believe.  Do I believe that a virgin birth really happened?  That Jesus really died and was resurrected three days later and then ascended into heaven?  That Abraham and Sarah had a baby when she was ridiculously old?  I have a hard time answering this question because people want a "yes", "no", even a "maybe" or an "I don't know".  But my answer is, "That's not the point," which is akin to Dumbledore's response to Harry in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; "Of course it's happening in your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it's not real?" (Which is possibly my favorite line in that entire series, and in my opinion, the most biblical.)

I believe strongly in the power of story.  I work in theater and we in theater deal in stories.  There are many people in theater who still identify themselves as storytellers.  But nowadays "story" is often dismissed as "mere fiction" which, while entertaining and maybe sometimes eye-opening, is almost always second to "fact", which rules with an iron fist over our empirical society.  If you prefer "fiction" to "fact" you are delusional or at the very least, unwilling to accept the world you live in.  Maybe my analysis of the status of story in our society today is a bit harsh, but I ask; how many people will truly admit to having their lives changed by a story?  We will fully admit to having our lives changed by experiences, even by facts, but stories?  Life-changing?

And yet, stories are the backbone of our existence.  I don't know why but for some reason we tend to organize our lives in stories.  We give ourselves narrative structure, we describe our days as such, we tell stories at the dinner table.  We connect things together.  And more than our lives... if you give us really any kind of input, we will make stories about it.  I have done a lot of experimental theater, I have seen and done a lot of pieces that seem to have no story.  One of the shows I directed, Tongues, had NO story, it was a collage of voices and sound, and while I crafted an emotional journey, story was NOT my interest.  And yet, when I talked to audience members about the show (some theater people, some not), they had all made up stories about what had happened.  They made a narrative based on a girl sitting in a chair talking about being hungry and a boy dropping marbles into a bowl.  I have seen people make up stories from seeing a binder and a waterbottle arranged in various tableaus on a table.  (And if you doubt me on this, the next time we are together I will prove it to you.)  We connect things that may have never been connected before.  We create story, naturally.

And throughout all of human history, stories have been vital.  Stories are how we learn.  The fables you heard growing up taught you how to live in relationship with others.  Especially when we are young, stories are vital in our development.  As we grow up, stories are how we understand each other.  It is through the stories of people unlike us that we can begin to see things from their points of view.

Perhaps most importantly for us now, stories are how we move forward.  Stories are how we paint pictures of what the world, what our lives, could be.  Stories give us hope.  Stories give us vision.

This has come up so much in the religious part of my life for a while now, starting with Brian McLaren at the Montreat College Conference in 2011, who claimed that the world was having such a hard time because religions were no longer truly providing alternative stories to things like consumerism and materialism (Jesus provided an alternative story: "give up all your possessions, do not store up treasures on Earth," etc, but often the churches do not truly reflect those stories).  I spoke briefly about story to some people in relationship to the Voice conference a couple weeks ago, where the question, "Can stories cause transformation?  How?" came up.  And John Bell, in one of his sermons for Youth this week, spoke directly about stories giving hope, about Martin Luther King Jr. telling a story of a new kind of world, about how the vision of a new heaven where God shall wipe away all tears described in Revelation is a story held onto by oppressed communities.

For me, I have acknowledged before that one of the reasons Christianity specifically appeals to me is because I need a resurrection story in my life.  That is what gets me through when I am stressed and haven't slept in far too long and don't have money for food.  That is what gets me through when I feel lost and don't know where I'm going with my life.  It is the story of death and resurrection.  It is the story of Job that keeps me steady when I have no idea why certain things are happening.  And, conversely, it is the story of the Song of Songs that helps me figure out what's going on when I come back to these mountains and swoon from the beauty.  We need these stories not only to help us get through our days, but to provoke change, to help us move forward.  No one can possibly deny the effects that the "I have a dream" speech had on the Civil Rights movement.  That story is coming true.

Religion has always dealt in story.  I almost wrote earlier that theater has two origin points--storytelling and religious ritual, but from what I know of the Greeks, those didn't used to be different.  They were one in the same.  Plays were offerings in the festival of Dionysus, saying to the god, "Here, take our stories."  We study mythology now, which is essentially "old religious stories we know aren't true but are awesome and a good look at the culture" (how "primative" you think mythology is generally depends on how much Joseph Campbell you've read).  JESUS even dealt with story.  His primary tool was story!  He taught through parable, because he knew that story is the way we can begin to understand.  And Jesus told the stories of hope, the stories of a brighter tomorrow.  What else were the Beatitudes?

Story is, in fact, what religion does best.  Facts are not.  Leave the facts to science--science does facts so well.  Facts are not the realm of religion.  My religion even SAYS that.  The traditional reading of the "doubting Thomas" scripture, where Thomas insists on seeing and touching Jesus' wounds before he would believe that Jesus had risen, is that you shouldn't have to have the evidence in front of you to know that it's fact, but I think it's more that Thomas missed the point of the story by trying to tie it down to fact.  Thomas was trying to make faith be about bones.

There are many many reasons that you cannot take the Bible literally.  It contradicts itself, many people take the Bible literally and out of context which can cause some major misreadings because of how definitions have changed over the thousands of years that this has been around.  (I'm not saying the Word of God isn't eternal, I'm saying that OUR words are not so if we are using our words and our definitions to look at this text of COURSE some things are going to get mixed up.)  There are many reasons it's difficult to look at the Bible as "fact".

But I think it's limiting the Bible's power to look at it as fact.  I think it's limiting the potential of that story to truly shape and guide our lives if we continue to squabble over facts and bones when they are not the point.  The point is that there is truth to a story, and that truth--life conquering death--has the power to transform us if we can allow that story in.  And if we continue to spread and believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ--which is a story of a community of love and grace, of openness and inclusiveness, of all people caring for each other--that story can be closer to becoming reality.