Telling The Story

A Poem/Reflection for Trinity Sunday                                            St.Thomas Church, Ahoskie, NC Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant                                                 June 12, 2022 Telling The Story Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31       Romans 5:1-5        John 16:12-15

 In the Broadway show Hamilton, George Washington raps to Alexander Hamilton:                                             Let me tell you what I wished I known 

        When I was young and dreamed of Glory 

        You have no control Who lives Who dies 

        Who tells your story. 

 When I looked at the lessons for today I saw a theme of how the writers heard the story being told. In the Proverbs selection, God's Spirit of Wisdom is heard singing the story of God's continuing Creation. She sings of God's delight in all of creation as God is blessing all of creation. She is calling us, created in the image of God, to bless as God blesses. 

 In place of the Psalm for today, I substituted the Celtic Prayer Wednesday Morning by Phillip Newell who sings that the story of God's continuing blessing of all things, even you and me, is being told all around us, urging us to kindle our will to bless as God blesses. 

“There is no creature on the earth/ 

There is no life in the sea / 

But proclaims your goodness./ 

There is no bird on the wing / 

There is no star in the sky/ 

There is nothing beneath the sun/ 

But is full of your blessing./ 

Lighten my understanding/ 

Of your presence all around, O Christ/ 

Kindle my will. 

Phillip Newell, “Wednesday Morning” in Celtic Prayers from Iona: The Heart of Celtic Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1997) 

In the Epistle, Paul is writing to the Romans that he and his companions have had a rough time, but in how he tells the story he is telling is of the Holy Spirit of God's Grace in the middle of all those hardships allowing them to grow in faith. In the Gospel selection for the Gospel of John, the author remembers Jesus is telling his story to the disciples that he will be betrayed, and killed; yet in the middle of this deep trouble God will be redeeming all things. Jesus tells them that God's Spirit of Truth will come to them after his own death telling them the story to lead them into all truth. 

For the next couple of centuries, disciples became apostles and spread the Good News, telling the story of how God's spirit is alive and living in and through our lives. People lived and died by hearing the Story and telling it, not in words alone. but in deeds of love. They told the essence of the story wherever they went; using the understanding of the people to tell the story. 

The essence of the story was the same but there were different ways they told the story. The different sections of the known world would understand the story in different ways. The differences ranged on the question of Jesus. If there is only one God; if so who was in heaven while Jesus is on earth? Was Jesus a God, who visited the earth in human form, and when his human outer form was killed, returned to his God like form? Or, was Jesus a human whom God raised up and gave life after death, sitting next to the Father God as a secondary God? Or, was Jesus, what they called a “tertium quid”, a third thing, neither human or divine? And the answer of course in the public mind of most followers of Jesus was “Yes”. 

Then, in the 4th Century, the Roman Emperor Constantine grew up hearing the story from his mother, Helena. He was a soldier and he attributed his victory as a sign of God's desire to tell Christ's story unfettered. He decided that the Christian faith should be tolerated and later he put Christians in charge of some of the religious life of the Empire as paid bureaucrats of the state. There is some debate if he ever got baptized, because it was believed that if you were baptized you promised to no longer sin and to love your neighbor as yourself and to treat every human being with dignity and respect. All these were seen as barriers to a successful long career path as an Emperor to be feared. 

There is a painting in the Vatican of Constantine's baptism by one of Raphael's students, a thousand years after Constantine's rule, showing Constantine kneeling before the Pope. A lovely painting of a story, but more propaganda that fact during those times of political tension between the Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors. Now Constantine was a soldier, and like a soldier he decided that the Christians should have uniformity. So, he called for a Council of the Church leaders. He invited them to straighten out the details of the story. 

 One of the problems was that the members of the church in the Empire spoke different languages. The official languages of the Empire were Greek and Latin. Constantine understood Latin and could read Greek out loud if it were sounded out to him by his scribes. Greek, with a long history of philosophy, had access to a greater subtlety of language than Latin. Constantine did not have a theological bone in his body but he noticed that the pride filled Christian leaders from different parts of the Empire would argue with each other with the subtlety of a Duke- Carolina basketball game; calling each other heretics and arguing that “heretics” should not be paid salaries as religious bureaucrats by the state. Constantine really could care less who was right as long as there was unity. Constantine wanted order and the Councils at Nicaea and other places came up with Creeds and created official doctrine for all the Empire. 

Faith has a tendency to evolve into doctrine rather than the way we live life. Telling the Story was often reduced to a series of recited formulas rather a way of life lived in Christian Grace. Over the centuries there has been a series of re-discovering the story and telling it in the way we live- in seeing it all around us. 

The Hymn we will sing at the end of the service goes back to the 8th century and it purports to be a way that the legendary St. Patrick in the 4th or 5th Century Christianized the ancient pre- Christian Irish spirituality; binding oneself up in the Spirit of the God. It is not about the creed but about how we faithfully live each day 

Another one of those re-discoveries was by the son of a cloth merchant in Assisi in the 13th Century, a failed soldier named Francis. A prayer attributed to him, telling the story, is what we will use as the post communion prayer. “Lord make us instruments of your peace . . .” 

 In every time and in every place, the story is being told and rediscovered in the lives of everyday people; saints and sinners touched by grace. The story is bigger than could be contained in any one creed. How are you telling the story in your life today? 

“Let me tell you what I wished I known When I was young and dreamed of Glory You have no control Who lives Who dies Who tells your story.” 

Telling The Story 

Did you ever wonder who'd tell your story? 

Would it be a comedy of manners perhaps, 

with pratfalls of missing marks and maps, 

or tragedy as egos slip away from glory? 

Would there be a phrase of remembrance

 of reach achieving, or of exceeding grasp, 

or traits like a warm and firm handclasp; 

hint of having hero's strong resemblance? 

Would they see courage in being sailors 

together on the stormy crashing waves 

of odysseys taken on way to our graves, 

will they be kind to many moral failures? 

Will they remind us the spirits were alive, 

redeeming all, until we, finally, in love arrive?