Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, January 13, 2008
Scripture: Matthew 3:13-17
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Shakespeare’s famous line, from his play As You Like It, offers a vision of our days lived within a plot line, under a guiding narrative that shapes us and all we experience. Depending on what role we have been cast in, our life narrative may offer us considerable freedom to improvise and choose, or we may instead feel as though choices are made for us and our options are limited. The narrative we live out could be simple and straightforward, complex and multilayered, well-crafted or slapped together, coming together in a dramatic resolution or ending with stories only half finished, characters never quite fleshed out, tensions unresolved.
“All the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players.” And just what sort of story is your life telling? Him, there: he lives a story written in short sentences, the grammar always correct, but nothing of substance ever communicated, perfect form without content. Her, there: she lives a story full of significance but so poorly written as to be incomprehensible, terrific content but lacking in form. Them, there: they live a story that never unfolds, an existence that says nothing, dominated by images of silence, sounds of loneliness. These here: these live stories with a surprise on every page, richly patterned, dense with meaning.
My own life story seems to be one from the mystery genre, a story more obscured than revealed, more unknown than known, with more questions than answers and no promise of an easy ending anytime soon. I suppose a pastor’s life should probably be a story of answers rather than questions, but mine has resisted such shaping; in fact, each time that I felt something was about to be settled, the story took a new twist and I found myself back in the mystery once more.
The story in today’s scripture reading, Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism by John, is a familiar and seemingly straightforward one. But theologian Walter Breuggeman calls this a “thick story” because it holds several stories woven into one narrative, a story that echoes Moses as a baby in the bulrushes, Elijah passing the prophetic torch to Elisha, all the significant events in Israelite history that had unfolded in and around the river Jordan—and those stories come before one even begins to process the given story of Jesus being baptized and what the baptism means in his own life and call to ministry.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” This church similarly has a “thick story,” not one straightforward narrative but multiple layers of stories, stories of individuals and the congregation as a whole and the American Baptist tradition and the history of the village of Granville, all stories that have shaped this church to be the church we experience today, and stories that will continue shaping us in the future. As we prepare for next Sunday’s annual meeting of the congregation, when all members gather to hear reports of the previous year of church life, elect congregational leaders, and adopt a budget, it seems timely to review our church’s story. But rather than roll out that story in the fashion of academic history, as a chronology of famous names and dates and events, I prefer to look at the arc of our experience as a story, the story we find ourselves in today, at what sort of story our church has told up to now, what might be the next chapter in our story—and whether that chapter is one we truly want to write, or whether we would do well to attempt to write a very different sort of chapter in order to create a story with a different meaning.
How many of you, when asked to define your own personal belief perspective or to describe our church, begin with a negative, stating what it is you do not believe, or what this church is not? This common tendency among us, to define ourselves in the negative, by what we are not, is a continuation of the story our spiritual ancestors began, when they likewise looked at the tradition in which they found themselves, the belief systems they had inherited, and proceeded to reject and rebel. Thoroughly convinced of the soul competence of the individual, the ability and responsibility of each person to work out his or her own understanding of Biblical teaching, a relationship with God, and how one is called to be a disciple of Jesus, our Baptist ancestors began our story as a story of rebellion against systems of control and uniformity and rigid boundaries in order to ensure the greatest degree possible of religious and spiritual freedom. Each individual is free to believe or not believe as he or she sees fit; each church is free to determine its own affairs however it chooses; all churches are to be free from any sort of governmental or political interference or control. From its beginnings in Europe, continuing in this country, continuing to this present day, ours is a story of individual and congregational freedom, of personal and church autonomy, of rebels and revolutions, a story in which “No!” was declared again and again.
Despite these clear beginnings that reject uniformity and control, the itch to control and conform keeps insinuating itself into our Baptist tradition, sometimes even into our individual congregations, so that churches and individuals find themselves having to remain vigilant, to keep sounding the “No!” in response to efforts that would prescribe how we should believe or how we should function as a church. This particular congregation most recently has found itself speaking up for autonomy and freedom when we declared ourselves to be a welcoming and affirming church and heard, from our local Baptist association, sometimes even from our national denomination, that such a declaration could not be tolerated. Voices within our tradition, voices outside our church, persist in wanting to define for us what it means to be Christian, specifically that a Christian church and Christian practice cannot include gay and lesbian persons, and we discover that we still have to push back, still have to rebel, against those who would impose a spiritual and congregational definition on us.
When Jesus presents himself to John for baptism, John first resists: recognizing who Jesus is, John feels that it is not appropriate for him to be the baptizer, but rather the positions should be reversed and Jesus should baptize him. Such a move makes sense, given the respective positions of these two men in terms of the roles they will play in the unfolding of God’s story—but such a move would also fly in the face of tradition, call attention to itself in ways that could minimize the meaning of the baptism. So Jesus insists that the baptism go forward as all baptisms do so that he and John might “in this way fulfill all righteousness” (Matt. 3:15). That is, Jesus understands that his baptism should tell the particular story of a baptism announcing the beginning of a ministry, and that his baptism should also echo those other stories that onlookers and readers of the gospel yet to come would recognize and experience as enriching the meaning of this particular baptism. How the story would be told made an enormous difference, and Jesus was careful to ensure the story had a proper telling. That proper telling meant sticking with a tradition of baptism, done in a traditional way—but at the same time giving that tradition a fresh meaning, so that baptism became not so much a ritual that cleansed from sin but a ritual that signaled a kind of awakening to one’s identity and calling. Jesus is not baptized as a sinner, but is baptized as one who is preparing to launch his ministry and accept his call as the Beloved of God.
Rebels are inspiring figures, and the story of an ongoing resistance to control and affirmation of individual freedom is a noble one. Yet there finally comes a day when being a rebel becomes problematic because there is nothing left to push against, when all the controls and constraints have been cast aside, when some sort of collective action is needed that requires autonomous individuals to work in concert, to move forward as a group, to find some meaning in addition to the meaning that comes in the course of saying “No!” and resisting and denouncing and critiquing and tearing down. How does a rebel shift gears from his or her “No!” to a “Yes!”? How does a story of revolt become richer, a story with additional levels of meaning—or a new story entirely? Shall we continue to be a congregation of people that says “No!” and stands apart, the rebel in the group? Or is it time for our story to unfold a new chapter where something other than “No!” is being said? Within the coming weeks, you will begin to hear discussion about the possibility of this church becoming what is known as dually affiliated, a participant in not just one but two denominational traditions. A task force has been researching the ramifications and potential for our to join forces with the United Church of Christ (all the while remaining an American Baptist church, hence the designation of dual affiliation). In contrast to the Baptist story of vigilance on behalf of individual autonomy and freedom, a story which has resulted in standing apart again and again, the United Church of Christ tells a story of union, of coming together from diverse traditions and experiences. It lifts up as a denominational motto the phrase from the gospel of John, where Jesus prays for the future church, asking “that they all may be one.” A very different story than our Baptist story; a very different story than our congregational story; and a very different story than we tend to tell about ourselves, as a church where we cherish autonomy but struggle to understand how to bring diverse people together in community. Is this United Church of Christ story, the story of coming together, a suitable next story for our church? Be pondering that question, so that you will be prepared to participate in this particular story-writing conversation in the near future.
History is complex and never traces the arc of a single narrative. Perhaps we can see our church story in another way, with the same cast of characters and essentially the same plot line but with a very different meaning. If you have occasion to look at places where our congregation’s story has been written, in archival materials or on our church website, you read a story that highlights a tradition of activism. The people of this particular church have for a long time now been people who are engaged in doing work, the work of justice, and doing that work directly, in a hands-on fashion rather than at a distance. While we do, like all congregations, donate funds to assorted causes, we accompany those donations with feet on the ground and hands in the mix, bringing people along with money to the task of building a more compassionate world. Almost from the very founding, this congregation has been a congregation of doers, and active and activist, engaged people.
So here we stand in our story, the story of good works and engagement with the world, and where do we go next? Some churches have discovered that activism can be a recipe for burnout, as members grow weary of always heading off to engage in the next challenge to the culture, and with that discovery shift energy and attention inward or resort to handing out more money and keeping members at home. Is this the story we want now to write? Other churches have discovered that activism is only half of a total experience of congregational life, and that it needs to be balanced with reflection and contemplation if members are to avoid burnout or reducing their engagement to merely political action. Our church story has not typically included the contemplative side of spiritual life thus far; do we want to continue a story that is thoroughly activist, with little or no evidence of reflection? Or do we need to write a different story, a story that will still be meaningful but has a different narrative which takes account of the contemplative dimension of spiritual experience?
The notion of viewing lives and histories in terms of stories has become a popular and useful trend in many fields of study, especially among psychotherapists and theologians. Narrative theology developed as theologians realized that whenever a person or a church is asked to state beliefs, they tend to tell a story. Narrative therapy, likewise, grew as therapists found clients telling stories ot explain the problems that brought them to therapy. Dissatisfaction, lack of commitment and growth, and problem behaviors could be attributed by theologians and therapists alike to inadequate stories that somehow failed to account for the complexity of experience. And in both fields, changing the story in some way, whether by renaming characters or rewriting plot lines or recasting meanings or adding additional levels of interpretation was seen to have a profound effect, opening up new possibilities for enjoying more abundant, creative lives.
From time to time I have immersed myelf in reading mystery stories, some masterfully written, some formulaic. Those periods of intensive reading of mysteries have tended to coincide with times of transition, either from one developmental stage to another, from one job or living place to another, from one lifestyle to another. While I know that I selected mysteries as my preferred literary genre during such times in part due to the stress of being in a transition, I suspect that I also was boning up on mystery stories in the hope that the mystery story that is my life might yield some answers, some solutions to the puzzle, even a new kind of story for me to live out.
But no such luck: I continue to experience my life as a mystery, with the unknown elements increasing, rather than decreasing, as I age. While I might sometimes wish for a different kind of life story, on a deeper level I realize that I actually have come to value having a life that is a mystery. It seems oddly apropos for the life of a pastor, one who deals with the ultimate mysteries of life. And it spares me the work of having to be on top of things all the time, of having to be in possession of all the answers, of still being the smart kid in the class seeking approval for being smart, as I did so often when I was younger.
While I have no wish to discard the stories we have collectively lived thus far, the stories of rebels, of activists, of individuals, I do believe those stories could use some changing as we prepare to write the next chapter. I would like to see our story include chapters on community and coming together, along with all the chapters of revolution and standing apart. I would like to see chapters recognizing the richness of prayer and ritual and silence and spiritual practice to accompany our extensive chapters on activism and good works. A strong chapter on the need for humility and recognizing our limitations, as people and as a congregation, seems important to include. You could begin by writing about what it means to be a congregation in which most members are no longer part of Denison University, where an informal style of worship unfolds in a highly formal worship space, where charismatic leadership has been a prevailing style but is present no longer.
Our individual and collective stories may go in so many different directions, a fact that can sometimes be paralyzing or entice us into endless discussion about just which direction we will choose for our next chapter. But experienced writers will tell you that the longer you spend ruminating or talking about what you are going to write, the less writing you will get done, and in fact how you can eventually deplete your creative resources by too much ruminating and discussing. The important thing is to jump in and begin writing. That next page has remained blank long enough.
