I recently started preaching/teaching through the Gospel of Luke @ Otter Creek. This past Sunday I worked through the first four verses of Luke’s Jesus Story. Here’s a paraphrase of Luke’s introduction (really, it’s his disclosure for motivation).

Various men and women have used their creative abilities to capture the events just as those events had been transferred by people who were present at the time of Jesus’ remarkable life, telling that story to everyone who would listen. Because I’ve done my own homework, surgically combing my way through stories, testimony, examples, and evidence–I was compelled to join in the creative process of retelling the Jesus Story for my good friend (your love for God is refreshing). I’m telling stories of Jesus as a part of The Story so that you will continue to be drawn into a deeper trust of the events you’ve been immersed in.

Luke realizes that he stands, two generations after the death of Jesus, in a long line of witnesses who believe that, in Jesus, God had forever rocked the world. The world would never be the same. Death, sin, poverty, power, oppression–they would all be turned upside down.

Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote that Jesus forever changed the history of human civilization and yet, remained in a square area of that of the state of New Jersey. Why? How could that happen? “All because people talk,” writes Taylor.

Some people believe that stories are fragile, untrustworthy, weak. But to be Christian is to be enrolled in a story.

My friend John York has influenced me profoundly in this manner. In a sermon he preached a few years ago, he said: Some of you have heard me tell the story before that I originally heard from Fred Craddock. It’s the story of Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet, also a Professor of Literature with a Ph.D. from Stanford, and a Kiowa Indian. When Momaday was a small boy, his father waked him early one morning and said, “I want you to get up, go with me.” His father took him by the hand and led him to the house of an old Indian squaw and left him; said “I’ll get you this afternoon.” All day long the old squaw of the Kiowa tribe told stories to the boy, sang songs to the boy, described rituals to the boy, told the history of the Kiowa to the boy. How they began out of a hollow log in the Yellowstone River, of the migration southward, telling the story of wars with other tribes, the great blizzards, the buffalo hunt, the coming of the White Man, the pressure and the war and the moving south, Kansas, privation, starvation, diminished tribe, finally Fort Sill, reservation, confinement. About dark, his father came and said, “Son, its time to go.” Momaday later looked back on that experience and said, “I left her house a Kiowa.” Craddock tells that story and then asks the question, “When children leave our church buildings do they leave Christian? Because to be Christian is to be enrolled in the story and anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan.” Anyone who can’t remember any farther back than his or her own birth is an orphan. When our children leave our church buildings do they leave Christian? Is this where they learn who they are?