You might have noticed that I like stories. 

At Christmas last year, I proposed “In the beginning was the Story” as a perfectly valid translation of the beginning of John’s Gospel. Before that, I preached a story of the Trinity—the Love of God, the Grace of Jesus, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit. And this past Sunday, I invented a new disciple, Sophia, as a participant in the conversation about who Jesus is.

I believe that stories are tremendously important to us as human beings. They tell us who we are, as individuals and as members of a community. According to Rachel Held Evans’ book Inspired, which a number of us read as part of a book group this summer, “Storytelling always has been, and always will be, one of humanity’s greatest tools for survival.”

On a personal, individual level, our stories help us understand how we got where we are and where we might be going. For me, for a long time, the years that I spent in seminary and practicing ministry felt like a chapter from someone else’s book that got taken out of someone else’s life story and inserted into mine somehow. Figuring out how to tell the story of my life as a continuous narrative has been really important for me in understanding what church means to me.

Understanding that everyone you meet has their own story is just as important. That’s the root of empathy—recognizing you as the protagonist of your story, with all your trials and triumphs, and not just a background character in my story. 

On a larger scale, the stories we read every Sunday morning (at least)—the stories of the Bible—connect us to stories that are larger than just our own lives. The stories of the first Christians, as different as their lives were from ours, connect us to the earliest traditions of our faith. When we hear the words, “On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread . . .” that puts our Eucharistic meal in the context of Jesus’ life and the practice of Christians for two thousand years since then. And our use of the Hebrew scriptures ties us to even larger and older communities, and gives us common ground with people of other faiths who share the same stories.

In between the personal scale of our own lives and the cosmic-historical scale of our faith, there are the stories of our community. The story of how a former vicar's wife got interred under Erskine Hall without permission gives a little insight into the character of St. Columba’s: our spunk, our attitude toward authority, our devotion to our people and our place. Stories of our individual members—each of us—tell us something about what draws us here and calls us back week after week. I suspect that every one of us could tell some story involving the children of this church that would reflect the incredible life and joy they bring to our community.

I love hearing your stories. One of the best things about preaching is when my stories inspire you to tell me yours. We have so many wonderful stories to tell, full of joy and sadness and humor and grief and all the stuff that makes human life what it is.

In the beginning was the Story . . . and the story goes on and on, woven through everything we do, reminding us who we are.