Which Story to Tell?


I once had a professor ask during class presentations, “What story gets repeated over and over by the collective conscious of our country?  When families or communities gather to tell stories . . . which one always gets told?”

We spent several minutes tossing out ideas.  We thought maybe the American dream . . . people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps . . . is a retold narrative.  But that doesn’t really work.  Maybe the Pledge of Allegiance?  Everyone knows it but it’s not really a narrative.  Perhaps Santa Claus is a consistent narrative . . . but not even it bears the weight of our poly-cultural world.  Finally, we though Billy Graham . . . our world can stand and tell a story of how they were sinful and then set right, how they walked the aisle, how they joined the church.  But then we quickly remembered that not everyone in America is Christian and the youth today unfortunately don’t know who Billy Graham is.  So we concluded there must not a single, unifying story that connects our country, our culture, and our world.     

I left class sad to think that oral traditions, the story-telling generations, the collective consciousness of people are dying . . .  and that’s when it hit me . . . “Our story should start like this. . .”

 “Before time, creation, or even matter . . . before Genesis or the Big Bang . . . Before miracles, Santa, or even room for doubt . . . before Abraham, Isaac or Jacob . . . before planets, air, or Eve . . . Jesus says, “I am.” 

Frederick Buechner argues,
Before Abraham was – before any king rose up in Israel or any prophet bedevil him, before any patriarch or priest; temple or Torah – something of Jesus existed no less truly for having no name yet . . . or face, something holy and hidden, something explicit as sound or as implicit as silence; before the first atom was sent spinning through space at the creation . . . Jesus says, “I am.” 
Who can really say what Jesus meant by this?  Perhaps that just as his death was not the end of him, so his birth was not the beginning of him.  Whatever it is that history has come to see in him over the centuries, seen or unseen, it was there, from the start of history, he seems to be saying, and even before the start.  
Jesus does not say that before Abraham was, he was, but before Abraham was, he is.  No past, no future, but only the present, because only the present is real.  Named or unnamed, known or unknown, there neither has been nor ever be real time without him.  If he is the Savior of the world as his followers believe, there never has been nor ever will be a world without salvation.

What a difference it would make if our collective conscious started talking about the mystery and majesty of Jesus!  What a difference it would make to our community, country and world if we took seriously the mystery between Jesus’ birth narrative in Luke 1 and the fact that in the beginning Jesus was with God (John 1).  We should take it seriously because our poly-cultural, postmodern world is looking for meaning and something to follow.  I believe we have it in Jesus – we just have to start telling it with more frequency.  

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