Storytelling

People have been telling stories since before recorded history. In our telling of stories we work out who we are, what is important to us as a people, give moral instruct, and answer questions of ultimate meaning. We can’t get away from storytelling. Narrative is the mechanism of persuasion employed for motivating people to work for change; or to hold fast to the timeless and eternally meaningful stories of a people.

The medium of storytelling has changed in the last 100 years but the themes of the stories are timeless. Within the stories of Greek Tragedies, and the texts of Scripture, right up to the present day, timeless themes persist. Murder, rape, family dysfunction, the meaning of life; all of these along with the stories of love, perseverance, and triumph over adversity and against overpowering odds are woven into our text we Christians claim as sacred scripture. From the oral traditions right up to the book and beyond to flash on the big screen, story telling informs and enriches human existence. Storytelling carries transformational power.

Preachers are storytellers; interpreting the scripture and using our own bridges to the present context, we seek to inspire and motivate our listeners to excel in their quest for companionship with Christ, with the Holy Divine. To find meaningful connections with the stories of scripture, we listen and look around at the stories being told in the world in which we live.

I was listening to the podcast of Chicago Radios’ program, “This American Life” last week and thinking about the importance of the stories we tell as a people. At the opening of the episode,(Rest in Peace)* was an interview with Rachel Howard, author of The Lost Night. Rachel’s father was murdered when she was ten years old. Rachel explained her own distaste of pop cultures’ fascination with murder stories. She tells host Ira Glass, that the national support group Parents of Murdered Children draws an analogy of murder mystery theatre with another form of common criminal activity. “You wouldn’t want to go to a Rape Mystery Theatre would you?” she asked.

Over the past month I’ve been to the theater to view five movies and each of them touched on themes of human suffering but the most poignant of them was the movie “Precious”. Precious is based on a true story. One young man told me, he had no interest in seeing a story about a fifteen year old pregnant black girl; he saw enough of that in real life. No interest in hearing what the story was. It had no entertainment value to him.

I suppose moral value is not always entertaining, no matter how you present it. But it is a story which requires telling, just as much as the rape of Tamar required telling. For me, that was exactly the point of seeing the movie. Of course, you might wonder if the movie has been a box office success. $40,084,412. to date compared to the production budget of $10 million, it is certainly not a “Starwars” blockbuster. Success isn’t always measured in dollars.

Sometimes success is measured in the change that it creates. The story of the objectification of women and children, and the destruction it causes to the fiber of the community cannot be easily measured in monetary terms. Not for profit alone is it a reason to tell the story, and neither would it be a suitable reason to ignore the telling of the story. The success of telling this story would best be measured in the degree of new understanding, new awareness, some measure of healing that occurs as a result of the telling.

Those preachers who use the revised common lectionary to prepare their sermon each week will have danced right over one of the two great rape stories, that of Amnon and Tamar. The story starts out innocuously, “Some time passed. David's son Absalom had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar; and David's son Amnon fell in love with her.” ( 2 Samuel 13:1) It closes with the fabric of family and community rent. “And though Absalom never spoke to Amnon about it, he hated Amnon deeply because of what he had done to his sister. (2 Samuel 13:22) Dirty secrets of a family that impair God’s intended plan for shalom. What is the church to do with this story? How is the church to bring healing for this ageless story?

What always interests me is how the lectionary planners, presumably guided by the Holy Spirit, manage skillfully to excise some of the most troubling passages of the Old Testament. The leap over the Rape of Tamar is just one instance of the difficulty we preaching storytellers have with deciding what to say and when to say it.

Having more time than usual to spend reflecting on the task of preaching it struck me that we preachers are somehow complicit in the perpetuation of an age old problem. Most recently I observed the lectionary leap across Tamar’s story which the church really needs to spend time reflecting on and retelling in my humble opinion. Because the church fails to spend time reflecting on this problem, pop culture is assuming the lead on the issue. Thanks to Sapphire, and Lee Daniels, this timeless story is not being completely ignored.

Deciding who should tell the story is as important as deciding what story should be told. Deciding the venue of storytelling also at least as important as deciding the medium employed. All these questions played out in Sapphire’s decision to allow to the story of the book to be taken to the screen. Fear of creating stereotypes for the African-American community weighed heavily in Sapphire’s decision. Persuasion from Lee Daniels, himself a victim of childhood abuse, convinced Sapphire that the story would be told with integrity.

Since viewing Precious, I did a little research on sexual assault crime statistics. It boggles the mind to consider how many victims of various forms of sexual assault are sitting in the average room of any gathering. According to formula of statistics provided by one national organization I figure the likelihood was that one in six female viewers were victims of some form of sexual assault in addition to 1 in 33 men. Which causes me to ask, how is the church going to respond to these open wounds? How will the church be a source of healing to victims of sexual assault?

Remember Rachel’s audaciously preposterous proposal to hold a Rape Mystery Theater? Host Ira Glass agreed, that would be creepy, and so did I at first hearing. Who would want to go to a rape mystery theater? Certainly not me!
Of course we wouldn’t go to participate in that!

Or would we?

*find the episode click on the link all episodes and search for "Rest in Peace"