Storyteller

This is a thought that I've been mulling over for a while. It was born out of some ongoing conversations I've been having with a few of my close friends over a question:

"Do you need to consider or describe yourself as a Christian to truly follow Jesus?"

Or, stated from the other direction:

"Given the state of cultural Christianity in America, is it possible to remain relevant and sensitively faithful to what God is doing and still be 'Christian'."

It's a question I've really wrestled with a lot lately. At times it's felt like I've been spinning my wheels on a symantic or philosophical issue, but I've found that discovering an answer to that question has become very important to me and to many of my friends.

Until recently I had thought it was one of those "endless questions", the kind that everyone needs to determine their own answer to, and perhaps it is. But since my earlier post about the importance of storytelling, my whole perspective on the question has been simplified by a realization I've had: Jesus was the greatest storyteller in history.

"What the hell does that have to do with anything?", you may be wondering.

Well, I've gone back and looked at his life in the gospels, at the things he taught people and the kinds of conversations he had. Many of them were stories, it's true, but what struck me is that the great message that he brought, his great purpose, was to tell a new kind of story to the world.

Jesus lived in a world that didn't exist. He lived in a world where people fed and clothed the poor, where sick people who were about to die could be healed by a touch or a kind word. In his world, the universal constants of gravity and death were negotiable, but the command to love God and everyone around you out of the deepest fabric of your being was not. In this world, love was everything, and those without it were nothing. It was a world that crazies and dreamers and been whispering about for centuries. It had been hidden in songs and laws and prophecies, and all the sudden here was a man who just lived there, all the time.

It freaked everyone out. Not surprisingly, no one really believed him. But the story was so beautiful that some people just couldn't help themselves. They followed him around, hoping to hear it again, needing to feel the color of it in their own lives, even for a small moment. It didn't matter that there was no way it could ever really be true.

But something happened to them. Over time, they started to believe that this story could be real. Sometimes they even acted like it was. Sometimes they didn't. But Jesus forgave them quickly when they didn't, because he knew how hard it can be to live in a story like that. He knew how painful it can become when the life you live becomes unreal, and goes to war with the very fabric of the world you're living it in.

And basically the whole history of the Church from that point on has been pretty much the same thing. Lots of people trying their best to tell that story. Some people added things that weren't there before. Some forgot parts. There were times when the story honestly didn't sound anything like the one Jesus had told, but there were always people who went back and found the old story again. Some of them were killed for it.

This is such a simple thought that it doesn't seem like it should make much of a difference, but I can't describe how much relief it has brought me. It's answered the question I began this post with. As long as I keep coming back to this impossible story we've inherited, it doesn't particularly matter what I call myself.

The fact that we speak with different accents shouldn't stop us from learning to tell this story together.

As Shakespeare would say, "the play's the thing."

These thoughts are very new for me. I'm not convinced that they're completely accurate or valuable. They certainly aren't complete. But it's something I've been thinking about a lot these days, and I thought I'd throw them out to all of you, my fellow storytellers.