November 1, 2009
SERMON: “Lessons from the Ancient Storytellers”
TEXTS:
New Testament Reading: Luke 1:1-4
Old Testament Reading: Ezekiel 2:8 – 3:3
This is the first of four sermons following a theme of “Lessons from the Past,” where I will attempt to draw some basic, but important lessons from our Christian history. While the span of thousands of years is too vast a time to span in a few short sermons, I’ll do my best to identify some valuable lessons from reflecting upon our past, from the ancient period, through the middle ages and into the modern period finally ending up here at Lime Rock Baptist Church.
When we think of our Christian past, the ancient history of the church, we are understandably inclined to think of the scriptures as carrying, this rich history of the origins of Christianity. There is no question that what is contained in the New Testament are words that capture for us a most critical time in the development and growth of the earliest Christians, struggling to proclaim and preserve the message of Jesus. For this reason alone, regardless of our differing views of the sacred text, the New Testament remains an indispensable record for the church.
But the Church did not begin with these New Testament Scriptures. The Church began with story telling and storytellers. For decades the story of Jesus life and ministry were made known through an oral tradition, the process of telling and re-telling the many stories and teachings that make up the gospel story of Jesus. Nearly 40 years or more will elapse after Jesus death, before his story is recorded in a written form.
But this is the way it has always been – the storytellers have had an important role in most cultures. It’s easy, living in a highly literate culture such as ours, to forget the importance and value of story telling, passing on stories by word of mouth – not in a book, not even in an email, but in our common, everyday stories
In a world where more than 100 nations have literacy rates of 95% or higher. It can mistakenly lead us to associate all forms of knowledge with the written form. Many people today often associate reading ability with intelligence, but this is an oversight, as important as reading skills are, and as important as literacy is for social success. It still can cause us to fail to appreciate the importance of things that are known through the telling and hearing of stories.
Most of human history is marked by oral cultures, not literate cultures. The Homeric tales are themselves the products of once circulated oral stories of the Greek gods. Some of these stories could have been passed on for a hundred years or longer before becoming part of a literary collection of sacred texts.
The power of “the story” is still with us and it happens when we tell our own stories, each of us. One of the first important tasks of a parent is the telling of stories to their children, whenever those traditional parent-child opportunities for story telling arise.
I can’t help but imagine that Paul must have been a great storyteller. He takes time to tell us in some places that he is not a person who makes a great impression on his speech or appearance, but his language and artistry with the language tell me that there is a good chance that Paul gained adherents partly because his story was impassioned and his story telling perhaps charismatic. The story of Jesus would be passed along for several decades by a compelling oral story.
As simple as this sermon lesson is, it is nevertheless, easy to underestimate the value of oral stories of our lives that will never be written, but when shared and re-told in different context to different people, our personal life stories serve as a means of strength, support and inspiration. We are all storytellers; we have family stories, friendship stories, stories of struggle, stories of triumph.
The lesson from those voices of the ancient past – is not to forget our story, and not to forget the simple but profound power that lies in our story telling.
**Next week’s sermon, the third in a series of five, will talk about “The Lesson of the “Middle Ages,” the stuff in between that we would like to forget”
.AOLWebSuite .AOLPicturesFullSizeLink { height: 1px; width: 1px; overflow: hidden; } .AOLWebSuite a {color:blue; text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer} .AOLWebSuite a.hsSig {cursor: default}
