By Rev. Anders Nelson
Mabel-Henrytown Tri-Point Parish – Mabel First Lutheran Church, Scheie Lutheran Church and Henrytown Lutheran Church
There’s something really beautiful and interesting in the way Jesus teaches his disciples and, through the beauty of the Living Word, us by means of creative storytelling and meaningmaking.
Throughout these summer months, my parish has been dipping into the stories in the Gospel of Matthew that weren’t read during the more narrative part of the church year between the season of Advent and Pentecost Sunday. The Revised Common Lectionary, the means by which many mainline Protestant churches choose what to read each Sunday, guides us through many stories of Jesus’ teaching, preaching, and ministry, and they highlight a beautiful theme that should guide the way we interact with those we encounter in the wider world: we must be quick to share our stories, real or imagined, for the sake of making meaning together.
The common rhythm when Jesus shares of these parables like the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-9), the parable of the wicked tenants (Mark 12:1-12), or my favorite parables, the lost and found imagery in Luke 15, is that Jesus will first speak aloud the parable and then do the work of explaining the meaning. This pattern leaves room for the listeners to do their own reflection on what they think Jesus is getting at in these stories. They are creative, evocative, and meaningful in a way that only sharing the explanation of the parable would make Jesus’ ministry that much less engaging. We should not only learn from the explanations of Jesus’ parables, but from his act of parable-sharing itself.
I’ll give a more concrete example of what I’m getting at here. I play a lot of table-top roleplaying games (think Dungeons and Dragons like they play in Netflix’s “Stranger Things”), and while there is a lot of silliness at play and rules being used for those games, the central goal of such games isn’t in trying to win or lose, nor in trying to outperform those you’re playing with, but to tell a good story together. The “goodness” of these stories isn’t in their complexity or how compelling they are, but is instead in how much they invite our real-world emotions and experiences and knowledge into these playful, improvisational spaces so that we might continue to better understand ourselves and those with whom we’re playing. Studies of people who play in these imaginative spaces show that they not only bear deeper empathy for their neighbor, but that they can improve mental health on the whole.
In a similar way, when we are sharing of our own experiences and lives, and as our experiences and lives brush up against the holiness of these scripture texts, we should feel freed to not simply share about our lives in plain and matter-of-fact ways. We should follow Jesus’ example and be creative in our work of sharing of ourselves with our neighbor that we might all gain the benefit of a more rich and full space of imagination for the sake of visioning and working towards a world that Christ envisions in his parables. Blessings in your work of imagination and storytelling, dear friends.
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