Our hearts traffic in stories...we are narrative animals whose very orientation to the world is fundamentally shaped by stories.
~ James KA Smith, Imagining the Kingdom

What are your favorite stories?  It could be your favorite ones that your grandpa used to tell you about growing up or being in the war.  It could be a movie or tv series. It could be a story in a song or a scary story told every Halloween.   It could also be a favorite book or type of book.  When I was a kid, I voraciously read sports books.  Books about sports heroes like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Roger Staubach.  I’d hit up the library at my school on Friday, check out 2 sports books and have them read by Monday.  I wouldn’t just read them.  I would read them and then re-enact them.  Like after reading their story.  I became them in my back yard.  I’d have a glove in hand and throw a ball in the air and pretend I was Mays making an over-shoulder catch to end a rally or I’d throw a ball and it would meet my bat, and suddenly I was Duke Snyder helping the Dodgers win the pennant.  And of course my favorite re-enactment was being Roger late on a Sunday leading the Cowboys on a game winning drive before the clock expired.  Jamie Smith gets at this in the quote above.  We are storied creatures.  We love stories.  Karen Swallow Prior says we first make sense of our world aesthetically — through our senses, more like poetry than propositions.  Stories shape us.  They train us.  They cultivate virtue and illicit response.  Stories convey to us a sense of life, as sense of what matters in the world.  When I would read a book and go into the yard, I was practicing the formative aspect of stories.  

Next week, we are starting a new sermon series called The Gospel According to Abraham.  Abraham is our father.  Right?  That might have become the first way you heard of him.  It was for me.  In Sunday school class, I sang a snippet of Father Abraham’s story.  Father Abraham had many sons and many sons had Father Abraham.  I didn’t really know what that meant propositionally, but I was sensing the story by what I sang and how I threw my head and bum in the middle at command.  Abraham is our father, because the Bible tells us that he is the father of many nations, many peoples, many ethnicities.  This doesn’t mean it is by lineage, but it also doesn’t mean no lineage.  It is a crazy story, how God called Abram out of a place called Ur, while he was worshipping the moon with his relatives and said to him, “Go! and I will make you a great nation,” and he went.  It is an incredible story.  And it is story that is meant to shape us.  Now, we are calling the series The Gospel According to Abraham.  What that means is that Abraham’s story is meant to shape us, but not simply around Abraham.  Like, I could easily say, you need to go and answer God when He calls just like Abraham.  And if you do, you will be blessed like Abraham was blessed.  Now this isn’t wrong, well, not totally.  But Abraham’s story fits into a much bigger one.  Abraham’s story is part of the story God is telling.  And in this story, God is the central character and actor.  Abraham’s story makes sense within God’s story.  And God’s story is that he is going to crush the serpent through the seed of the woman.  Genesis tells a part of the story and Abraham’s story makes up several chapters.  Abraham is the good seed through which God will crush the snake.  

Now, like any good story there is conflict and tension.  The conflict in this story is how can Abraham be the good seed, when his wife is infertile and they are both so old.  How can God bless the world through THIS couple?  How can he have descendants as many as the sand on the seashore when they can’t even muster up one grain of sand.  This creates tension.  We can relate.  We have felt the tension of impossibility.  We have lived there, some of us daily.  Now, let me remind you, stories are meant to shape us and form us.  But not into Abrahams.  We are to feel the story through Abraham.  We are to resonate with his failures and the impossibility of his situation.  We are to rehearse how we too know this tension.  But the hero of the story resides beyond Abraham.  The hero of the story is the snake crusher.  The result of the good seed, the ultimate seed.  This is why it is the Gospel According to Abraham.  Where is the good news that rolls out from this life.  And consequently, where will the Gospel be squeezed out in our own lives.  The little drips, the flowing stream…where will God work in our lives to show forth the good news of the dragon slayer?  How will we be formed into the image of Jesus through the story of Abram and Sarai?  How will we be people through which the world will be blessed?  Stories shape us.  We are narrative animals, and I hope the Gospel of Abraham causes the story of the Gospel to reenacted in us, in City Pres and in our city. 

~ Rev. Justin Edgar