We human beings love stories. Joan
and I recently attended a conference. There were six speakers. I
can remember the gist of five of the six talks because the speakers
wove their points in to stories. The sixth speaker was clear,
logical, organized – and about half-way through I realized that I
wasn't listening. He was laying out a logical argument, but not
telling stories.
We love stories, but we are also
formed by them. When I was growing up I was the oldest in my family,
and got good grades in school. I got a lot of praise from my parents
and my teachers, and some of my classmates would ask me for help in
their studies. The story was, I was the smart one, and every time I
got a compliment or a good grade or a request to help with homework,
the story I was living was reinforced. By the time I was in the
fifth grade, I identified so much with this story. And then I got my
first and only failure mark in my entire educational career – I got
an F in penmanship. I guess even then I had the makings of being a
doctor, but at that moment in time I was totally devastated. After
considering dropping out of school and living in the woods, I set
about to learn to write legibly. And I can, if I really want to.
Stories form us. My story affected my
sisters. My older sister was often compared to me unfavorably by my
parents. My younger sister, I believe, thought that since she shared
by genes, she could be smart also, and indeed, she became a professor
in a university.
God tells a story. That's one of the
reasons we should make reading scripture a part of our lives. That's
where God's story is written down and elaborated upon. You may not
believe everything in scripture actually happened the way it says it
happened, or maybe you do. It isn't important. What is important is
that God, working through human beings, formed a very rich but very
coherent account of his story, the story of God's eternity- long
project of loving a universe into existence and working upon it until
it is worthy to be taken up into the heart of the Trinity. God's
project is summed up in Jesus Christ.
Today, Jesus tells his disciples a
little story. It isn't the whole thing, but it's a part. The first
thing we notice is that the sewer is incredibly wasteful. No peasant
farmer would even throw seed onto a road, or rocky ground, or into
thorn bushes. But our sewer casts seed everywhere – as though he
had all the seed in the world, as though he would never run out of
seed. And the seed is God's story, God's word.
We all live in stories. Some of us
hear God's story and want nothing to do with it. It's too much to
believe that God loves me, God wants me for his own, God wants to
raise me up in the flesh on the last day to spend eternity with him.
Either we don't believe it, or if we do, we like our own story
better.
And there are those who hear the story
and say, maybe it's better than my story, maybe I should try it on
for size. But when they do, it's too much trouble; it's a lot easier
to just keep going living my own story. Or we try it out, but before
we know it we are distracted by all the stuff in our lives, and we
wake up when we are old and realize that we've wasted our whole life
on a story that doesn't hold a candle to the one God invites us into.
But there are always a few who hear
the story God has for us, and put our whole hearts and souls into
living that story, into being shaped by that story.
In the days of Jesus, if you threw a
handful of seeds into even good soil and really took care of your
garden, you might expect a yield of six or seven handfuls, and if you
got ten you would consider yourself a rich man. But the seed our
sewer throws out can result in an unheard of abundance for those who
choose to live in God's story. And we see that all the time. People
who decide to form themselves according to God's story, and abandon
their own stories, are the ones who produce abundant crops, more than
anyone would have expected. Mother Theresa, Mother Angelica, Bishop
Fulton Sheen, Father Benedict Groschel, Maximillian Kolbe – the
list goes on and on. People who set out to live the story God has
for them, who allow themselves to be shaped by Jesus' story, are the
ones who are the hope of the world.
The story in the Bible is a love
story. It starts with an incredibly generous God who makes a world
in which to place human beings – for we are the object of the love
story. God does not just put people on earth, he places the first
parents in Paradise. But soon they spurn his love. And the rest of
the scriptures is an account of God's efforts to win back the love of
the creatures that he loves, until finally he does the unthinkable –
he becomes one of them, and he lives their life, and he dies their
death, and he defeats death and gives them everything they will ever
need to live his story – the Church and the Sacraments. And he
promises, in his story, that nothing of his will be lost, that those
who choose to live his story will be taken up into the New Jerusalem
at the end of time and reign with him forever. And he promises that
he will do all the heavy lifting; whatever is lacking in me he will
make up. And his story is one of abundance – of giving as though
he will never run out of gifts, and of harvesting from us more than
we could ever give him – because he works in us so that we will be
able to give him more than we could ever give by ourselves.
