A folk tale for Good Friday and Better Days

In one of the famous sayings from the cross, Jesus turned to the thief crucified with him and declared, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43).

The other day, I read a folk tale about paradise in Best-Loved Stories Told at the National Storytelling Festival.  Steve Sanfield's story is entitled "Could This Be Paradise?".  The basic story is that a man set out from home in search of paradise.  He got rather far from home and settled down to sleep for the night, but before doing so, he pointed his shoes in the direction that we was heading.  During the night, someone or something full of mischief, turned those shoes in the opposite direction.  The man walked all the next day and arrived at a place that seemed so familiar right down to a vary familiar looking house and the family who dwelt there.  He spent the rest of his days wondering if he truly had found paradise.

Here is a link to the tale, but you might also find it in your local library or book store:

"Could This Be Paradise?"

Of course, I can't just give you the tale and that be it.  A little commentary and preaching must accompany it.  Is anything really free?

As a minister, I have encountered a number of people who have definite opinions about heaven.  They are so definite that it would offend them to hear that I've used the word "opinion" regarding what they hold dearly as absolute truth.  Among this group are those who are biding their time just waiting to go to heaven.  They occupy a pew on Sunday morning, but do little else.  Some of their colleagues are a little more dangerous.  They seem to me to be folks who will be rather disappointed with heaven if some people don't go to hell.

Now don't get me wrong.  I'm not here to tell you there isn't a heaven, though it might be easy to imagine.  No, I believe what the old creed says, "I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting."  I don't think I would even venture to tell you there is no hell, but I know a good joke about it that was told to me by a 90 year old Gideon, so it's been blessed for your hearing.

The pastor of a Unitarian Universalist congregation was studying away one morning when he became convinced that hell did not exist.  He beat a hasty path to the sign in front of his church and changed the message to read, "THERE AIN'T NO HELL".  Well, the pastor of the Baptist church down the street happened to be driving by while the sign was being changed.  He hurried to his church and changed his sign to say, "THE HELL THERE AIN'T!"

We are in a season at the movie theaters where some of the conversation is about God, Jesus and even Heaven.  For some the movies might even prove decent ammunition to win some argument about the existence of God.  Let me, however, leap quickly to a point: offering a convincing apologetic, winning an argument, about the reality of heaven is a pointless victory if you fail to do anything about the hell your neighbors experience on earth.

Jesus didn't talk a lot about heaven, but he did teach about the kingdom.  In one of his lessons he said, 

"The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, 'Look, here it is!' or 'there it is!' For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you" (Luke 17:20-21).

Which brings me back to our folk tale.  Before we set off in pursuit of heaven, we have to seek the kingdom.  We have to see the tremendous potential of paradise in the here and now even if that means being crucified with Christ for the sake of others.

Sharing our stories

A couple of my Facebook friends shared the following video on their pages.  Please give it a look.

lifeasweknow.it

"Life As We Know It" (no, not the Katherine Heigl movie) looks like a it could be a very useful resource. I can already imagine a number of possibilities for it.  Chiefly, I would like to see how this would work in parts of congregational life.

Churches have several small groups, whether they're Sunday School classes, Bible study groups, prayer gatherings, choirs, committees, etc.  I bet each of these groups could benefit from sharing their stories with each other.  Just because some folks have sat in the same room with each other every Sunday since the flood doesn't necessarily mean they know a whole lot about each other.

There have been many a Sunday morning where I have seen the same people show up, sit in the same place and leave through the same door they entered.  Sometimes I wondered if they would change.  Other times I wondered if they would ever make the effort to get to know someone who sits across the sanctuary from them.  Wouldn't that be great?

I might try putting together several story sharing groups.  I think I'd hold something of an NFL draft to put specific people in their places (no pun intended--I think).  I wonder what stories and what relationships might come from getting people together whose only common ground might be that they could pick each other out of a lineup of possible members of the same congregation.

One message I am trying to push is the viability of the local story.  It is real.  It is significant, and it should not be dismissed as unimportant.  It must not be forgotten.  If we lose the story, we run the risk of ceasing to exist altogether.  Perhaps this curriculum (sorry, can't think of a better word) could be very helpful in collecting stories in a congregation.  It could spur further storytelling and story collecting, and before too long the oral history of a community is being shared, recorded and maybe even presented in celebration.

Here's one I'm definitely going to do one day.  I would love to lead intergenerational story sharing groups.  Sure, we disconnect across the aisles in church but even more so across the generations.  We can only blame ourselves.  We might have invented age segregation when we started sending everyone to their very own groups.  Granted, age-graded curriculum is a useful tool in faith development, but it cannot be the end-all/be-all of spiritual formation.  Let's add to it with conversation.  Get a teenager talking with a senior adult and a 30-something and see what shakes out.  I think it would contribute to better disciple making, helping establish bonds between believers which could bless them to share the story of faith because they will know how to share their story.

Of course, there are many ways "Life As We Know It" or something similar could prove useful.  What would you do to help people share their stories?  And hey, if you can add the Katherine Heigl movie to the discussion, you deserve extra points.

The 398.2 Feature for Preachers and Teachers

One of my goals in sharing this storytelling blog is to offer some help, insights, illustrations or other material for ministers to use in the upcoming week.  If you don't use the Revised Common Lectionary in your preaching, just file this away until you need it. 

What I hope to do in Feature 398.2 (the library call number for folklore) is find folk literature that connects to the lectionary texts.  So, here's an ofering for this coming Sunday, because to talk about this past Sunday wouldn't be so helpful.

Sunday, April 6, 5th Sunday in Lent

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Psalm 130 

Romans 8:6-11 

John 11:1-45

Of course, a hymn before the homily.

This weeks texts feature two great stories of folks being brought back to life. We can read about Ezekiel's experience in the "Valley of the Dry Bones" and we can join Mary and Martha's celebration as Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead.

Southern folklore offers a good many ghost stories and terrifying tales from which we could choose.  My favorite is "Dead Aaron."  You can read his tale in Raw Head, Bloddy Bones by Mary E. Lyons.

"Dead Aaron" is a Gullah folk tale from Charleston, SC.  The story is something of the opposite of what Ezekiel and John offer us.  I'll offer a summary here, but you need to read Lyons' account for the language to sink in (I'll probably work up my own telling of this one, soon enough).

Aaron died. That's why they call him "Dead Aaron".  Are you following now?

Aaron died.  They had his funeral and they burried him.  That very day, Aaron climbed out of the ground and walked back home--but he was still dead.  He returned home and notice that everyone was acting as if someone had died.  Guess what, Aaron?

Aaron sat around the fire at home determined that he wasn't going to leave.  His widow got rather put out with him because he was just sitting there.  I wonder if death was presenting a little too much of what she'd seen in life, but I digress.  Aaron sat around, and all he did was decompose.  It got on his widow's nerves.

One day a fiddler came to court Aaron's widow.  He couldn't really do that with Dead Aaron sitting there.  So they both just sat there, Aaron on one side of the fire, the fiddler on the other. 

Aaron noticed the fiddle and decided he wanted to dance.  He asked the fiddler to play, and so the visitor tuned up his fiddle and began to play and sing.  Dead Aaron got up and danced.  His bones creaked and cracked.  He got caught up in the music and danced so much that his bones began to fall off.

The widow noticed this and told the fiddler to play faster.  Well, the faster the fiddler played, the faster Aaron danced until he completely fell apart.  Well, almost.  Aaron's skull was still intact and hopped up and down asking for more.

The fiddler told the woman that he needed to go home to get more rosin, but he never came back.  He couldn't get over the sight of Aaron's dancing skull still calling out tunes.

They burried Aaron's bones, but they made sure to pile them up in a heap, out of place and out of order, becasue nobody wanted to deal with Dead Aaron if he ever pulled himself together again.


How many Sundays have preachers looked out on amassed congregations and heard God ask, "Son of man, can these bones live?"  And how many time have we sighed and offered a resigned reply, "Lord, only you know how to answer that."?

The tough news for churches to hear is that for too many Sundays the very living have been about as useful as Dead Aaron, just sitting there--decomposing!  If that's the case, preachers, it's time to tune up and play them a jig.  Shake them loose from what's holding them back from "hearing the word of the Lord"--and that very well might be themselves.

We serve a God who breathes new life into into dry, old bones.  We have a Savior who brings the dead to life and calls them out to be unbound, set free and turned loose (no, they're not synonyms).  It has happened before and it can happen again in your congregation.  It might be difficult at first to hear the word of the Lord through all the creaking and popping sounds of folks finally fighting off their spiritual rigormortis, but our revival can be a reality.  God knows that and wants us to know that, too!

We should STEAM instead of STEM

I recently had a conversation with a great storyteller/story collector Frances Flemming Chavous, and she introduced me to the term STEAM.  Many folks are familiar with the term STEM, an anagram for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.  These are the subject areas receiving much attention these days in our educational system.  As well, they are receiving much support from industries and corporations who partner with school systems.  One idea is that the emphasis will help us catch up to and keep pace with other countries who actually are surpassing us in STEM areas.  The push is necessary, or we are going to get left behind especially as it concerns business and industry.

A question arises, though.  Once our schools turn out more graduates who excel in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, will they also be able to communicate?  One might reply, well of course they can.  They master technology which opens nearly limitless avenues of communication.  They can tweet, blog and share.  They can vine, they can post and they can pin.  They can easily build tremendous platforms which they can use to submit tremendous amounts of information.  Here then might be a bigger question.  Will they be able to communicate such tremendous amounts of information, complex information, in ways that make sense to a would-be consumer of their innovation?

OR as my father rather eloquently puts it, "Can they put the hay down where the horses can get it?"

Finding positive answers to such queries might be determined by the difference between STEM and STEAM.  The A stands for Arts.

Here is an example of what I'm talking about.  With all of our progress in developing digital cameras, photography itself cannot be reduced to a tightly knit conglomeration of math, physics, electronics and mechanics.  We could also invent a robot which could adjust the aperture and the film speed and even "push the button" (actually that might be what happens when a novice buys an expensive camera and automatically dubs himself a photographer).  Instead, we need an artist.  In order for the pictures to communicate to an audience, the photographer must observe, reason and feel.  We want to see (and buy) photographs that are the results of the creative process.

In our schools, though, the emphasis is STEM.  Instruction time in the classroom is dedicated to the standards, or as I crudely say, "teaching to the test".  We need the A.  We need the arts.  The case can be made that it will help us be better communicators.  The arts can also help make us better innovators.

Here's one group working to make this happen:  http://stemtosteam.org/

Storytelling can be some of the vapor in STEAM.  On one hand it can help to pull students out of their shells to get them talking with each other as well as challenging them to learn the soft skills which might help them explain their world-changing invention as they're being interviewed on Good Morning America.  On the other hand, storytelling can be an essential part of helping our students learn to invent and innovate with a purpose.  It might even help tomorrow's innovators understand a sense of calling and vocation in their chosen fields.  The story they can tell about their innovation, then, moves away being concerned about getting rich off their invention and moves toward why and to whom it is important.  It will be a story they tell about what's possible.  It will be a story they tell about themselves and to themselves.

Ministries can help generate some STEAM, too.  Our congregations can be a part of this, but we will have to imagine the possibilities and work to make them happen.  Here are a couple ideas (of course, you should come us with many more):

• If your church is near a school, get involved.  Be a good neighbor to that school.  Send volunteers.  Help the the students, the teachers, the classes and classrooms have the supplies and furnishings they need.  Encourage the faculty and staff.  If possible, say it with brownies!
• A little more specific, if there isn't room in the curriculum for it, your congregation could start an after school arts program.  Whether it's the visual or performing arts, it has a payoff in personal development for the students.  Also, you could be training the next contributors to how the church's ministry is expressed through art.  It's a win-win situation.  
• Did I mention it would take work?

Story helps drive innovation.  Telling our stories can make dreams into reality and make a difference in the world.  It might even win a Nobel prize in physics.

Thanks, Lance, for "Preserving the art of Southern storytelling".

I love that I get to admit I haven't cornered the market on storytelling, the study of storytelling, the sharing of thoughts about storytelling, and even the telling of stories about storytelling.  So, today I present to you a good case of not reinventing the wheel but admiring one.  Below is a blog written by Lance Wallace.  I'm glad he included the video interview with Paula Martin Morell.  Within that video you'll find a good tutorial about storytelling as well as hear some good reasons why its important.  Pay close attention from 3:50 to 5:10 in the interview, but the whole thing's definitely worth a listen.
New South Essays, "Preserving the art of Southern storytelling"

Can we handle the truth?

Preacher friends, listening back over your recorded sermons, is this what you hear?

I come not to critique our attempts to be cool, up to date, or relevant, but to praise proclaimers who have made the effort to establish common ground with their listeners.  I appreciate a good friend and preacher who parlayed his love for movies into good sermon illustrations.

I confess to having offered up the long version of a memorized quote from A Few Good Men, just to prove it could be done.  I confess the temptation to bring some of my favorite lines from Pulp Fiction some Sundays.  The title of that sermon might be "I'm Pretty Far from OK".

I can tell you every movie quoted in the Pepsi ad.  We can even start a good debate as to whether one of them is from Good Will Hunting or Rio Bravo.

What I love about the ad, though, is that the quotes are brought together to tell a different story. No one's sitting around asking, "Remember when Tom Hanks said that?"  But we do remember.  We remember lines from movies, can probably even quote them and recall the actual scenes they come from.  Better yet, we might remember who was sitting with us in the theater the first time we heard it.  If we can connect with that moment again, perhaps there is some hope for continuing a conversation that helps folks get to know each other better.

There has to be more to it than the need to appear to be cool.  We create room for conversation.

So, here are a few ideas...

• Get people talking with each other.  
• Ask them to share their favorite line from a movie and then ask them why they like it so much.  
• Play a little trivia with some quotes, see who can name the movies they're from.  
• Start some conversations around a singular quote.  Find out why that line sticks with us.
• What if some of our favorite lines from the Bible were lines from the movies?  For instance, remember when Jesus turned to that fisherman and said, "Come with me if you want to live," or something like that?

Who knows?  Perhaps by telling one story, we get to tell and hear The Story.