Daniel 6:6-23; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 24:1-12<\/p>\n
Today, I want to talk briefly about stories.\u00a0 Michael Malone is a great local novelist who has written some of my favorite books, and I had occasion a few years ago to hear him speak about his writing.\u00a0 I should also mention that he\u2019s married to a Duke English professor, so I imagine the part of his presentation I\u2019m about to quote has been the topic of a few discussions at his home.<\/p>\n
Malone said novelists know there are two great story plots in the world, one of which you find at the heart of any great story: 1) SOMEONE LEAVES HOME, or 2) SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN.\u00a0 These seem pretty simple, trajectories of departure and arrival, in fact not very significant in themselves, they\u2019re so simple, but if you think about it, each provides such a basic and profound plot direction that \u2013 if what he said is true \u2013 it might say something significant about our human nature.\u00a0 Now, I should say that as soon as someone makes a generalizing statement like this, and we\u2019ve thought about the stories of which it\u2019s true, we also start thinking about stories of which it seems not to be true, to which Malone probably would say, even the stories that don\u2019t conform to these patterns are deliberately not conforming in reaction to those plots, and so are still determined and shaped by them in a negative way.\u00a0 I also should say that I\u2019m no expert on world literature, and I don\u2019t know if his statement would be true about stories from south Asia or Japan or central Africa, but I have read a good bit of European and American stories, and it at least seems to be generally true of many of the stories I know.\u00a0 Moby Dick pushes the boundaries of how far one can go from home.\u00a0 \u201cSounder\u201d combines both plot lines.\u00a0 The Prodigal Son story we read a couple of weeks ago is first \u201csomeone leaves home\u201d and THEN \u201csomeone (the same son) comes to town.\u201d In Pinocchio, the Blue Fairy comes to town, but the real plot is Pinocchio leaving home to become real.<\/p>\n
If Malone is right, at least about stories in Western culture, I think it may be in part due to the Christian story of human life.\u00a0 The drama of redemption begins when someone leaves home \u2013 Adam and Eve reject the divine home, the life of gift and self-forgetting, and leave Eden.\u00a0 Then Abraham leaves home to follow God.\u00a0 Moses comes to town to set his people free.\u00a0 The people of Israel come to town in Canaan to settle down.\u00a0 They leave home then in the exile.\u00a0 And then Jesus comes to town to gather all God\u2019s people out of their exile, even people who didn\u2019t know they belonged to God.\u00a0 BUT, what makes the story of Jesus great and profound, is that he wasn\u2019t just another someone (even a great someone like Moses) coming to town.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 \u201ccoming to town\u201d, arriving on the scene, was AT THE SAME TIME, God \u201cleaving home\u201d in order to come to us and save us from our exile, to bring us back to our divine home.\u00a0 And, where we are in our story now, we await Jesus again to come to town to complete our redemption.<\/p>\n
Setting aside Michael Malone\u2019s description of stories, consider a different one, the classic division of stories into comedy and tragedy.\u00a0 The plot, the basic direction of drama has been defined as either comic or tragic.\u00a0 Comedy, as a kind of story, is not about the jokes that make us laugh in TV comedy shows, but is defined by the more basic element of a happy ending.\u00a0 So Dante\u2019s \u201cDivine Comedy\u201d is not a comedy because it has jokes, but because \u2013 although it begins in hell with \u201cThe Inferno\u201d \u2013 it has a happy ending in heaven with \u201cParadiso\u201d.\u00a0 Tragedy has a sad ending.\u00a0 In comedy, conflict is resolved by relationships being restored to harmony; in tragedy, conflict is resolved by the death of the main character.\u00a0 In comedy, the main character becomes reconnected into community; in tragedy, the hero becomes more and more isolated, into the final and ultimate isolation of death.\u00a0 Comedy is about the continuation of life, which is why classical comedies like Shakespeare\u2019s so often end in with a betrothal party or a wedding.\u00a0 Tragedy is about the inevitability of death, which is why so often before the main character dies he finds that his efforts to resolve the conflict he\u2019s in have only contributed to his doom.\u00a0 \u201cComedies end when someone gets hitched, tragedies, when someone dies.\u201d (Professor Hilbert, \u201cStranger Than Fiction\u201d)<\/p>\n
Peter Pan is a marvelous story for several reasons, and one is its rebellion against these conventions.\u00a0 The story most of you are familiar with, I hope, is that of a boy in magical NeverNeverland, who never grows up, in combat with the pirate Captain Hook over the fate of his companions that he\u2019s brought from our world to visit.\u00a0 For all of it\u2019s insight into the relationship between child and parent, and its sensitivity to the glittering borderlands between childhood and adulthood (like friendship and risk and romance), finally it\u2019s about an option to avoid death AND life-in-relationship.\u00a0 Captain Hook is the embodiment of adulthood, with mortality, death, hunting for him in the form of the crocodile that swallowed a clock, ticking down his life every time he approaches Hook.\u00a0 Peter combats this mortality with a child\u2019s bravado, crowing in response to Hook\u2019s threats as they duel that \u201cTo die would be a grand adventure.\u201d\u00a0 But after defeating Hook, he also refuses to return home with Wendy and grow up with her.\u00a0 He represents the very human fantasy of eternal freedom on our own terms, free from death and free from the entangling commitments in which humans build life.\u00a0 It exemplifies what perhaps should be distinguished from tragedy and comedy \u2013 fantasy.<\/p>\n
In a recent movie called \u201cStranger Than Fiction,\u201d an IRS agent named Harold Crick, who is living an isolated, dull, monotonous life one day begins to hear a woman\u2019s voice narrating his life as he brushes his teeth.\u00a0 He hears her describing is boring and compulsive activities in detail as he does them.\u00a0 She comments on the life he has regulated down to the minute by his wristwatch, catching the bus every morning at the exact same time just after it arrives at the stop, taking pre-determined lunch breaks that last exactly 47.5 minutes, and otherwise living his life by a suffocating, precisely timed routine that leaves no room for spontaneity or intimacy.\u00a0 He begins to worry about himself (and why no one else hears the voice) as he hears it.\u00a0 He tries ignoring the voice, but a few days after this begins, he hears the voice say while he\u2019s standing at a bus stop going home from work, \u201cLittle did he know that this simple seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.\u201d\u00a0 Harold responds by shouting out to the voice in frustration, \u201cWhat? What? Hey! HELLOOO! What? Why? Why MY death? HELLO? Excuse me? WHEN?\u201d<\/p>\n
Now Harold is seriously worried.\u00a0 He consults a psychologist, but rejects her diagnosis and advice, and then decides that since his life is being narrated, he should consult a literature professor to find out what is happening and how to take control of his life.\u00a0 The Professor Hilbert that he consults gradually accepts that Crick\u2019s life is in fact being narrated and helpfully suggests that Crick needs to determine whether Crick is living inside a comedy or a tragedy.\u00a0 He asks Harold questions to begin to discover this, \u201cHave you met anyone who simply might loathe the very core of you?\u201d Harold tells him, \u201cI\u2019m an IRS agent.\u00a0 Everyone hates me.\u201d\u00a0 Hilbert replies, \u201cThat sounds like a comedy to me!\u201d\u00a0 But there\u2019s no denying that the ominous death warning points toward tragedy.\u00a0 Harold begins to fall in love with a counter-cultural, anti-war bakery owner whom he\u2019s auditing, and tries to build a relationship with her to move toward comedy and a happy ending in which he \u201cgets hitched\u201d and lives.\u00a0 He takes other measures with varying success to turn his life away from a mysterious and tragic end, to embrace joy and creativity, but still hears the voice.\u00a0 The voice says that the watch by which he measures his life activities will cause his death.<\/p>\n
Then he discovers that the voice he\u2019s been hearing is that of a famous novelist named Karen Eiffel, whom Professor Hilbert describes as famous for killing off her main characters at the end of her books.\u00a0 It turns out that Eiffel has been having writer\u2019s block, unable to come up with a satisfying way to end his life, which she has tapped into and taken over as the central character of her new book.\u00a0 Harold succeeds in tracking down Karen Eiffel and explaining his problem, and pleads with her not to end his life.\u00a0 Distraught that her fictional character has a real, independent life and personality, Eiffel says that she\u2019s already written out a draft of it in hand, but hasn\u2019t typed it into her manuscript.\u00a0 She won\u2019t agree to change the ending, but does let him borrow the draft while she thinks about it.\u00a0 Harold can\u2019t bring himself to read it,\u00a0 but takes it to Professor Hilbert, who reads it and tells him, \u201cYou have to die, Harold.\u00a0 This is her best book ever, and if you don\u2019t die, it won\u2019t be the same.\u201d\u00a0 Harold says, \u201cYou don\u2019t understand that this isn\u2019t a story to me, it\u2019s my life! I want to live!\u201d\u00a0 Professor Hilbert says, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Harold,\u201d and tells him to read the story, which he does and takes back to her, without further plea or protest.<\/p>\n
The next day, Karen Eiffel begins to type the ending she had composed, and Harold hears it narrating his morning as he goes to his bus stop, explaining that when his watch had malfunctioned and been reset a few days ago, he had reset it a couple of minutes earlier than it actually was, so that he arrived that morning at his bus stop early.\u00a0 When a boy riding his bike past the bus stop falls from his bike into the street right in front of Harold, Harold uses his extra moments to step down and pick him up, and then as the bus he was awaiting pressed down on him, he pushed the boy onto the sidewalk without a word and then Harold is struck head on by the bus as it stops.\u00a0 We see Eiffel\u2019s hands tremble at the typewriter, and then compose another ending in which Harold survives and is taken to the hospital.\u00a0 She types a narration by one of his doctors, that a shard of glass from his wristwatch pressed against an artery and kept Harold from dying by bleeding to death, as he otherwise would have, and so his watch saved his life.<\/p>\n
Karen Eiffel takes her finished typed manuscript to Professor Hilbert to read, and when he\u2019s done, he says, \u201cIt\u2019s good.\u00a0 It\u2019s not great, not a masterpiece, but it\u2019s good.\u201d\u00a0 Eiffel tells him that she couldn\u2019t bring herself to kill him at the end, and the professor asks her, \u201cBecause he\u2019s real?\u201d\u00a0 And the writer says to him, \u201cBecause it\u2019s a book about a man who doesn\u2019t know he\u2019s about to die. And then dies. But if a man does know he\u2019s about to die and dies anyway. Dies- dies willingly, knowing that he could stop it, then- I mean, isn\u2019t that the type of man who you want to keep alive?\u201d<\/p>\n
The writer Karen Eiffel, a great contemplator of death, does something she had not done before, just as the Author of the universe did something never done before in Jesus of Nazareth.\u00a0 God did what Karen Eiffel did in this movie, and though the movie is not one about Christian characters, it is a plot made possible because 2000 years ago, God wrote something in the life of Jesus of Nazareth more real than either comedy or tragedy.\u00a0 God wrote himself into our story as a man who knows he\u2019s going to die and dies anyway, not just to save one of us but to save us all, and to save us when we were trying to get him killed, like the counselors of Darius sought to kill Daniel.\u00a0 Jesus died willingly, knowing that he could stop it, that it was avoidable if he would let go of love.\u00a0 But he chose to die anyway.\u00a0 And that\u2019s the man that God wanted alive so much he wrote a new ending to the story of the universe.<\/p>\n
In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God wrote a story that was tragic, because Jesus looked death in the eye and accepted it as necessary, embracing it in its most extreme pain and loneliness.\u00a0 But it was more than tragedy.\u00a0 God wrote a story that was comic, because new life and new community came into the world on the first Easter.\u00a0 But it was more than comedy because death remains center-stage.\u00a0 It was something new, God\u2019s new story, GOSPEL: for precisely THROUGH the death of self-giving sacrifice, God stopped the mouth of the lion of death and robbed the grave of its power over all people, whether criminals or kings.\u00a0 Through the willing death of Christ, God gave birth to new life and a new people in the Spirit of Jesus, to live as his risen Body in the world, extending his table to the hungry and hurt\u2026 to live unafraid of death.\u00a0 In this new story, God\u2019s REAL story, our life and hope for a community of peace and plenty is not attained by AVOIDING death, but by accepting it in union with Jesus and his example.\u00a0 We read from the prophet Isaiah a couple of days ago words about God\u2019s suffering servant that the church owned as about Jesus: \u201cHe was pierced because of our transgressions, and crushed for our iniquities, and by his wounds we were healed\u2026.\u00a0 If you make the gift of his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and have long life\u2026.\u00a0 Out of his anguish he shall see light and be satisfied\u2026.\u00a0 My servant shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.\u201d\u00a0 Creation out of nothing, life out of a tomb full only of death, forgiveness out of pain.\u00a0 All this offered to us as gift.<\/p>\n
We are constantly tempted to turn the gospel story into something different.\u00a0 Popular culture reduces it to comedy of one sort or another, a happy ending we can attain by saying magic words to avoid the death that the Jesus of the gospel in fact invites us to.\u00a0 Secularism reduces it to tragedy, mouthing platitudes about Easter representing the spirit of spring\u2019s renewal of life.\u00a0 The women at the tomb did not experience the terror of blinding light and vertigo because green grass and daffodil blossoms were sprouting; what they encountered was un-natural.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 grave was just like the rest of ours since then \u2013 it was no tunnel with a rear exit, but a final, ultimate, dead-end with no destination past it.\u00a0 Jesus Christ arisen from death is risen to freedom from all corruption and death.\u00a0 In the words of Paul (Rom. 6:9), \u201cChrist being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the beginning, many have written off the resurrection story as a wish-fulfilling fantasy of the disciples, like Peter Pan, wanting freedom from death and pain so much they convince themselves this story is true.\u00a0 In Acts 10, Peter addresses the question of why Jesus didn\u2019t just go show himself to Pilate and Herod Antipas and the temple crowds with the statement, \u201cGod raised him on the third day and made him manifest; not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.\u201d\u2019\u00a0 God in Jesus wanted to spread a story that moved by faith and love, not one that could be used to slap people over the head with affidavits.\u00a0 And it\u2019s always been harder for some to believe that, than to believe that the apostles created a fictional resurrection to process their grief about Jesus\u2019 death and then died themselves for the sake of that fiction.<\/p>\n
But in the New Testament, as terrifying and puzzling as the risen Jesus is, the disciples recognize and name something that is different from a dream or a ghost, something NOT that, but instead an embodied presence conveying God\u2019s reality in Jesus to them.\u00a0 And rather than evade suffering and death through a delusion, they accept persecutions and martyr deaths that could easily be avoided by admitting they made a mistake and let their imaginations run away with them.\u00a0 But it was no fantasy, no wish-fulfillment encountered that Easter.\u00a0 It was something more real even than the grave.<\/p>\n
In the words of Rowan Williams, \u201cDeath and the hells of dereliction and abandonment eat people up, exhaust them, scrape them out, and bring them to nothing.\u00a0 Jesus is already empty, already poor, already nothing, for God is everything in him; and so the inexhaustible life of God meets death and eats it up and exhausts it.\u00a0 The resurrection is not a resuscitation; it is the gift of a new KIND of like, the life that exists on the far side of death and hell, of destruction and disintegration. [Jesus] will die no more\u2026.\u00a0 He is no longer the prisoner of the past, not an historical memory, whose life is neatly tied up and put away.\u00a0 No, from now on he belongs to all people and all times, he is available to all.\u00a0 He is free.\u201d\u00a0 Free to write our stories into stories of freedom, gospel stories, REAL stories beyond facile comedy or tragic doom.\u00a0 \u201cBy death, the death of obedience, of self-emptying, of gift and grace and mercy, Jesus has trampled death underfoot and shown us the way to life by union with the pattern of his death \u2013 his mercy, his self-emptying, his self\u2013offering.\u00a0 By this we can, with him, pass from death to life and die for the life of all the world.\u00a0 We may stand with Jesus, life the life of God, share his freedom through service and giving of our whole being to God and God\u2019s suffering world.\u201d\u00a0 (Williams).\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that the kind of story God wants to keep alive?\u00a0 That gospel story of divine life, life not past the grave but through the grave \u2014 SHATTERING, emptying the grave, is the greatest adventure.\u00a0 Christ is arisen.\u00a0 He is arisen indeed.\u00a0 Alleluia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Daniel 6:6-23; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 24:1-12 Today, I want to talk briefly about stories.\u00a0 Michael Malone is a great local novelist who has written some of my favorite books, and I had occasion a few years ago to hear him speak about his writing.\u00a0 I should also mention that he\u2019s married to a Duke […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"yoast_head":"\n