Advent: 8 Ways of Telling The Story

Dear Christians, no one has taken Christmas away from us but ourselves.  Advent is a time when we’re invited to travel back into the story, so maybe this advent season, we can use some family time in creative ways to tell and retell the story of God’s entry into time and space in the person of Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph and God.

1. Read the story aloud – from the Bible – specifically from Matthew 1.18-3.23 (you can stop wherever you like, but including the death of the children at the hands of Herod is part of the story) or Luke 2.1-21 – over and over again.  You might read it every night as a bed-time story.  Repetition is how children learn and they don’t mind it.  Even if you’ve no children in your home, reading and rereading the story ingrains it into your very being – you might think of it as an act of prayer.

2. Watch A Charlie Brown Christmas.  Charlie Brown, at a moment of despair, wonders what Christmas is all about and Linus takes center stage and tells it – stars and wise people and Mary and Joseph and shepherds and baby Jesus and all.

3. While you’re driving in the car to the mall or work or wherever the car is taking you, tell the story from your own memory out loud.

4. Whenever you watch a Christmas movie, think about and say out loud (doesn’t matter if you’re by yourself or in a room full of family, story-telling is always done out loud) how this story (doesn’t matter if it’s A Wonderful Life, The Christmas Story – you know, the one about Ralphie and his BB gun, or the latest Hallmark romantic incarnation) how this story ties in to the story . . . the family in the car can tie to Mary and Joseph journeying to Bethlehem. . . buying presents to the magi . . . and there’s always a star somewhere.

5. Tell the story with finger puppets.  Don’t have any?  Make little faces on your fingers with markers or pens and tell away.

6. If you have a nativity, tell the story as you put the pieces out.  You might try putting the wise men and camels in different places, moving them closer to the creche every day and keeping the baby Jesus out of the manger until Christmas morning.

7. Retell the story as if you and your family are the characters.  Who would each of you be?  You can change that up, so that one night you’re Mary and the next a shepherd and the next King Herod – or you can stay the same person.  Entering the story opens eyes and hearts to new understandings.

8. Sing the story.  Pick a favorite Christmas carol everyone knows the tune to and just sing the story – don’t worry about how it sounds or whether the words rhyme or not – just sing away.

It matters whether we know the story or not.  Shouldn’t we devote at least as much time in the story as we do in the mall?  Just a thought.

The Little Blue Marble

Friend Chris Little spoke during our study time today about the pictures showing earth from the vantage of planet Jupiter, as a small blue speck in the darkness, what he called “the little blue marble”.

I hear the phrase, and among other thoughts, ponder it as a great title for a short story.

Borrowing shamelessly from All Things Considered and its 3-minute fiction contests on NPR, I offer my own 3-minute (more or less) short story, The Little Blue Marble, an homage to small boys and their wondrously large imaginations:

A boy, too big to ride in the shopping cart and his Gran deeming it too dangerous to allow him to ride on the back, takes it upon himself to push the cart – his first solo drive.

Soon the boy’s mind wanders and an amazing thing happens:  the roof of the large store disappears leaving only the night sky before him.   

Open-mouthed, the boy  pushes the cart upward, slowly at first, step after magical step, until he and the cart, one in intention, hurtle into the vast sky. Only upon landing does it occur to the boy, still clutching the bar of the cart tightly in his small hands, to look back into thousands, maybe even millions of little lights he knows to be stars.  

As the boy seeks he knows not what,  suddenly, one light – the smallest of all that his eyes can see – pulses an insistent blue.  It looks like the smallest, the tiniest, blue marble ever made.  The boy cannot look away.

A word creeps slowly into his mind: home.  

As soon as the word takes shape, maybe even a second before, boy and cart turn towards the tiny blue marble and find themselves traveling even faster than when they left.

Back in the store, boy and cart continue down the aisle in front of Gran, who is none the wiser.

Atop the tiny blue marble, the boy begins to whistle with a smile in the tune and a skip in his step, and if you listened closely, you could hear the cadence in the whistle, the slight dipthong that says . . . ho-o-me . . . 

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*Maybe you have your own little-blue-marble story you’d like to share.  I’d be happy to post it here (the obvious caveats apply).

Just a Story

“Jesus is just a story” - read on a fb post this a.m.

just + story = does not compute

When it comes to story, nothing is ‘just’, diminutive, reductive, only, merely, or ‘just’.

Story continues to be the way we humans make sense of ourselves and our world.  The narrative framework sets up how we share ourselves and others with each other.

You may know my father, if at all, only through my stories of him.

Granted, that’s not the same as knowing him, but it’s as good as I’ve got, and at that, it’s actually pretty fine.  When I tell of his life-shaping trip to buy his first pair of shoes (for school), you will know some of his sadness.  When I add the context of the Depression, you will know of his shaping.  If I told you of his penny-pinching ways as an adult without adding the story of the shoes, you would know something of him, but in a very real sense, what you would know would be wrong; worse, it would be false.

So to the unknown fb commenter, all I can say is that Jesus may well be a story, but never just a story.  And what a fine story he is.