Iwant to tell you a story about a story. This is a bit complicated, so try to stay with me.
I was thirteen years old. It was a hot midsummer evening in San Antonio. I was the starting pitcher in the all-star baseball game. Let me set the stage. My team had won first place in the league. We here hosting a game against the all-stars of the other teams. There was a big crowd at our home park.
This was my moment to shine. I especially wanted to impress a bunch of 13 year old girls that had come to the game. Now, I did not have what baseball players call a great arm. I had a good arm and, as they say, pretty good “stuff.” But I didn’t have a great live arm with overpowering velocity. What I did have was control. So many kids with great arms can’t throw strikes. I could throw strikes. I was able to keep us in games because I rarely walked anybody.
As we took the field I was pumped. I struck out the first hitter. I struck out the second hitter. I was feeling great and hitting my spots. Next up were the third and fourth place hitters, the best hitters in the league. I got ahead in the count to the third hitter and threw him an offspeed breaking pitch low and outside. It threw off his timing and he hit a pitiful ground ball to the third baseman. Our third baseman picked up the grounder and threw to first. His throw was low and bounced to the first baseman, who could not catch it. The runner was safe. No big deal.
The next hitter, the cleanup hitter, hit a routine ground ball to Bill, our sure handed shortstop. Bill misplayed the ball and bobbled it for an error. Now there were men on first and second.
“Geez,” I thought. I should have been out of the inning twice already. “What do I have to do, strike out every hitter?”
My sure handed second baseman made an error on the next hitter. Then my memory starts to get fuzzy. Suddenly my glory had turned into a crisis. I, the guy with good control, walked the next hitter. The next guy got a base hit.
Then I lost it. I was shaken. I got to thinking about how these guys had let me down. Suddenly I lost my control. I walked one hitter, then another, then another.
I wanted the ground to open and swallow me up. I was humiliated. I wanted to be taken out of the game. I began fantasizing about my father getting a job in a far away city and beginning a new life in a place where no one knew about this total humiliation. Surely the shame of this inning would follow ruin the rest of my life in San Antonio.
Finally, the manager came out of the dugout and walked to the mound. “Good,” I thought. “He is finally going to take me out of the game.” I desperately wanted to get off that pitcher’s mound. Our manager was a great guy, the kind of guy you want coaching your kids. He was always supportive, always positive.
He was a head taller than me. He stood right in front of me and bent over to look me in the eye. His eyes were blazing. His face was less than a foot from mine. He spoke very slowly and very quietly, but with anger in his tone.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, and throw strikes,” he said. Later in life I came to call his words “the sermon on the mound.” Then he turned and walked back to the dugout. He left me out there. I was hurt. And furious. What about all the jerks behind me who suddenly couldn’t field a simple ground ball? Feeling sorry for myself! How dare he!
Of course, part of me realized he was right. “I’ll show him,” I thought, still furious. I struck out the next batter on three pitches. They were probably the three best fastballs I ever threw.
We lost the game. We settled down and made a comeback, but I had dug us too big a hole.
But I promised to tell you a story about a story. I was using the story about my 13-year-old meltdown during a baseball game as an illustration of an abstract moral lesson. My sermon, at least in my mind, was about how in a real community where people know one another and have learned to trust one another, they hold one another to account.
What I found, of course, was that no one could recall my profound moral lesson. And everybody remembered the story. It drove me crazy! I remember months later a couple of people mentioning “that sermon about baseball.” “It wasn’t about baseball,” I would respond.
I came to notice the same pattern over my years of preaching. People would often comment on the story I used as an introduction or illustration. The stories touched people in a special way.
It turns out that scientists from different disciplines are convinced that our brains are somehow wired to follow stories and to tell them. This morning’s reading is taken from a book, Story Proof: the Science Behind the Startling Power of Story. The entire book is devoted to research on the importance of stories.
This stuff about story goes to the very core of our being. This is how we understand our world, how we understand ourselves, how we pass on our culture and our values.
It turns out that evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists believe that stories play an important role in our learning to be social creatures, in helping us understand and develop relationships. This is another way of saying that stories are essential to our being human.
How do stories do this? One way stories are critical is that they help us develop empathy. In stories we learn to put ourselves in the position of another person, to experience vicariously what another person experiences and to see the world from the point of view of another.
Just look at the way children respond to stories. Children don’t ask for a bedtime news summary or moral lesson or scientific explanation. But they never tire of hearing and rehearing stories.
In groups we tell stories about one another to keep tabs on how other are feeling and how they are doing. Gossip gets a lot of criticism, but it is malicious gossip that is the problem. Gossip also includes telling about how John or Sally was upset about something or how we heard that Bob or Jane was going into the hospital. We use stories to convey lots of news and to weave community.
And, of course, in social groups common stories are used to create and pass on a group identity.
Let’s look at some of the powerful ways stories shape our lives.
Now that we are entering the holiday season, let’s begin with familiar Christmas stories. [Though after the chalice lighting I do so with a little trepidation!] The song Quadratic Equation sang just a moment ago is a good example. It retells and embellishes the story of shepherds finding the newborn Jesus in a stable. Think of the hundreds of stories about the birth of Jesus. Millions of children are going to reenact parts of the story in Christmas pageants — little shepherds, angels and wise men with fake beards are rehearsing all over the world.
The story that is retold and reenacted is not really the biblical story. In the scriptures the wise men never come to the stable. There is no mention of camels. As stories get retold, they get changed.
For that matter, the Christmas stories told in the scriptures are almost certainly not historical. The first gospel written, The Gospel According to Mark, has no birth story at all. It begins with Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist. Bethlehem is never mentioned. Jesus is said to come from Nazareth. The stories in Matthew and Luke are very different.
My purpose here is not to debunk the birth stories. My point is that they are stories. It isn’t as though we have an accurate historical account in the Bible that we moderns have embellished. It all started as a story. The whole idea of history as a more or less objective and factual relating of events is modern. It would have made no sense to biblical writers.
The same is true of all the major religious stories. The Exodus: scholars can find no evidence that it actually happened. The creation story in Genesis: clearly a myth. The stories of Krishna and Buddha and Mohammed are all legends. They are like the stories of Jupiter and Mercury and the rest of the gang on Mt. Olympus.
Ah, but for you and me to reject these stories because they are not factual is just as misguided as it is for a fundamentalist to insist that every word is factually true. Whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem in a stable or at home in Nazareth is not terribly important.
The stories are not true. The truth is in the stories.
Let’s look at the Christmas story. What an amazing story! What a revolutionary story! It is a story about salvation coming in the form of a baby from a poor family! It is the story of a savior and prophet that comes from the working class and from a nowhere town. It is about shepherds, of all people, getting news of a historic birth. It is the story of Mary, a young woman caught up in events she does not comprehend.
Look at the human longing. Look at the tenderness, the vulnerability! And in the story we are witnessing a theological revolution. What happened to the warlike God that went around smiting thousands of enemies? What happened to the God that had lists of rules and was very picky about the sabbath and how animals were sacrificed? That God is gone now. Now God reaches out in love to humanity, seeking reconciliation. The story conveys a theological revolution and does it far more powerfully than a multi-volume set of systematic theology.
We are seeing humanity learning to see itself in a new way. And the truth is in the story.
We should never get caught up in arguing about whether the stories are true. We especially should not get trapped into rejecting religious stories because they are not factual. That would be as silly as rejecting Shakespeare’s accounts of Richard III or Hamlet because they are not historically accurate.
Our attitude toward religious stories is only the beginning. Stories powerfully shape our lives in all kinds of ways. And it isn’t all benign. Stories can and do create terrible harm.
One of the ways groups of people learn to hate and kill one another is through the stories they tell.
The stories European Christians told about the Jews being responsible for killing Jesus was a powerful way of perpetuating anti-semitism. These stories helped set the stage for the stories the Nazis invented about the Jews being responsible for the ills suffered by the master race. In a very real way, the Holocaust was made possible by the stories people had been told.
In our own time we have seen how paranoid stories about the “gay agenda” has frightened people into homophobia. These stories are the products of fear and reinforce fear. The result has been violence and attempts to limit the rights of gay and lesbians.
I think back to the stories I heard about black people as a child. And, of course, the scripture story of Abraham sending away Hagar and Ishmael was used for centuries to justify slavery. Stories have power for good and for ill.
And perhaps the most important stories any of us tell are the stories we tell about ourselves.
Let me share an extreme example. Lillian Rubin, a therapist, became fascinated by how some people manage to overcome terrible trauma and abuse, while other people get seem to get stuck in their suffering and pain.
One of the things she found is that the people who managed to transcend their trauma told very different stories about themselves. These people had experienced terrible things. However, when they told their stories they did not see themselves as victims. Rubin found that the survivors were not in denial. They would talk about what had happened. However, they framed the narrative in a way that they never portrayed themselves as completely helpless. They never lost a sense of themselves as being able to act. In time they acted to get away from the terrible situation and create a different life. In a very real way the stories they told about their experience opened new possibilities.
Now, I want to be careful here. Trauma and abuse are real and their effects on people can be devastating. I do not want to suggest, nor did Rubin, that we can just make up a happy story and fix everything.
What is important here—truly vitally important for each and every one of us—is that there are any number of “true” stories we can tell about the same facts.
Let’s take my little “sermon on the mound” story. We lost the game. I walked a bunch of guys. I was the losing pitcher. If I had not walked them we probably would have won. I could tell that story as one more example of what a loser I am, of how this was one more instance of blowing my big chances. Or I could tell the story I told—essentially a humorous story of a self conscious adolescent who lets self pity get in his way but then, with the help of someone who confronts him with the painful truth, learns an important lesson.
Listen, I have enough athletic screw ups to weave a convincing story of a loser who falls short in key moments. Which story I tell myself can change my life. If I see myself as a loser, I will avoid new challenges. I will expect failure and thereby make failure more likely. The story I tell myself shapes my relationships with others.
What story do you tell about yourself? It makes all the difference. As we look back on the last year of our lives, how shall we frame our narrative? The reason this is so vitally important is that the last chapter in our lives foreshadows the next chapter.
For you and I are not only shaped by stories, we shape them. We are going to write the next chapter. And we are free to write the next chapter. Ultimately, it isn’t about the story we tell, it is about the story we live.
Yes, we are shaped by stories. We are shaped by stories we were told—religious stories, stories of heroes and heroines, family stories.
And we are all story tellers. What is the next chapter of my story going to look like? What story are you going to write? Will it be a love story? I hope so. Will it be an adventure story? Will it be a story of making the kind of difference in the world we want to make? Will it be a story of making it through challenging times by paying attention to what matters most in life? Will it be a story of deeper awareness? We get to write the story.
This is a season for hearing and telling stories. Tell an inspirational story. Live an inspirational story.
The truth about you, the truth about me, is in our story.
Amen.