New Worship Series for 2022-2023: Storylines

The world is made of stories, not atoms.

— Muriel Rukeyser

Picture it: the middle of the desert on a cloudless night. A campfire sends hungry sparks sailing into the blue-black oblivion to join the other stars. Around the fire, old and young together have gathered at the feet of a wizened elder, eyes wide, eager for a story. The matriarch pulls her cloak tight around her shoulders to stave off the chill, and after a moment, she begins: “once upon a time, when the world was still fresh and new and wild, just a child, moments out of the womb…”

Before the Bible was a book, it was flesh and blood. The library of texts that we call “the Bible” came into being over the course of millennia as stories were handed down from generation to generation at desert campfires and dinner tables alike. These are the stories of the Israelite people, told by a chorus of voices—strident, gentle, violent, peaceful, awe-filled, cynical, and full of longing. These are the stories, too, of the early Christians, struggling to live out Jesus’ path of radical, non-clinging, selfless love in the shadow of a crumbling empire. 

We hear how our forebears in faith struggled with what it meant to be human, what it meant to encounter change and fear and loss, what it meant to struggle with God and our place in this world. This river of stories has inspired prophets and activists, heroes and sages, revolution and resistance. And they’ve also inspired ordinary folk simply seeking to live this wild and holy life well. 

These stories are the bedrock of our faith tradition, and our reading of the Bible is meant to aid us in adding our own chapters to the sacred stories that have rolled down to us from ages past. Yet, it seems the Bible has become anything but a people’s story these days. It’s been waved around as a political prop for social clout. It’s been marketed as a cure-all for problems that nomadic shepherds would never have imagined. It’s been wrangled and jangled to condone violence, exclusion, and the very systemic evils the Prophets cried out against.

In the wake of all this, what is our responsibility as people who have inherited these stories? As people who steward them alongside people of faith all over the planet? Perhaps our starting place is simply to know our sacred stories well. If we can do that, perhaps we can begin to help recover the heart of our tradition’s text for the sake of those who have yet to add their chapters to the story. 

For the next nine months at FCCBC, beginning on September 11th, we’ll be walking through the whole arc of Scripture as story as we follow the Narrative Lectionary. Each week, we’ll take a look at a different story and attempt to hear it with fresh ears and fresher imaginations. We’ll learn (or re-learn!) to read these stories with the eyes of our hearts wide open, getting at the deeper truths that only the magic of story can convey. And we’ll imagine how these stories are calling us to live them out in our own day for the sake of justice and joy.