Sermon

Stories of Significance

 by The Rev. Canon Joe Behen

A friend of mine who is a hospital chaplain, once told me of a discussion he had, with a man who was struggling to deal with his stage-4 cancer.  The man was under considerable distress, and was having a hard time putting his feelings into words.  Conversation with the chaplain circled around faith, and the possibility of life after death.  But unable to say what he wanted to say, this man then moved their discussion into what seemed on the surface, like small talk.  He started telling my friend about his yard, and how he loved to spend time there.  He talked about a particular tree in the yard that held great meaning for him.  He had planted this tree with his father many years earlier.  But in the last year, the tree had been showing signs of disease.  The leaves were fewer, and fell off entirely too early in the year.  He wondered if it would bloom at all this year.  The chaplain said to him, “I think there’s a reason you’re telling me this story right now.  You may not even know what that reason is.  You’re that tree, aren’t you?”  The man broke down and wept.

Someone once told me that, at any given moment in our lives, we all have a story that we need to hear.[1]  We don’t always know what that story is, whether we’ll read it, or someone will tell it to us, or if maybe we’ll tell the story ourselves.  It could be anything - but when we hear that story, we know that it truly was, what we needed to hear.  The man talking to my friend had known that his story about the tree said something that was very important to him now.  But he was unable to name precisely what this was. 
With the coming of Palm Sunday, or what we sometimes call Passion Sunday, we enter into the story of Jesus’ betrayal, death, and resurrection.  For the Christian community, it is the most significant of stories, binding us to one another in ways we can hardly fathom.

Stories of significance are like that – they help us to see both the continuities as well as the contradictions in our life.  Stories rich in truth help us, not to resolve those contradictions, but to maintain them, in all their contradictoriness.[2]  Healing happens, when the powerful truths of story, meet up with the current and, as yet, undecided story we’re now in.  They express and shape the meaning our present story, but these stories of significance also find a new depth in themselves, as they find new layers of meaning for us here and now.

The story that we heard today, and will continue to hear during the next week, is unrivaled, in its power to challenge, heal, and renew us.  “For Christians, the desire to become part of God’s story, and simultaneously hoping that God will be present to our own narrative, finds convergence in Jesus Christ…” – it is here, that “…the human and divine narratives meet.”[3]

Beginning today and continuing through this week, we gather to listen once again, to our common story of significance.  We’ll hear together, that the one who loved us all so deeply, and who changed the world, is abandoned to suffer and die alone.  It speaks to the truth of our own occasional abandonment of Christ.   Our story speaks to us about our fears, and how those fears take shape in our lives.  It’s hard and painful work, to hear the story of the cross speaking directly to us like this.  But when we engage our narrative so intimately, we create space, in which to be shaped also, by the redemptive nature of the resurrection stories, that follow soon after. 

The cancer patient talking with my friend could not engage, in discussion about his approaching death, until first, he had truthfully named what was now happening, in his own narrative.  With the emotional release that came with this truer narrative about himself, he was able to begin to look with a new sense of meaning at what must be.

Resurrection could only happen only after the cross.

Amen. 

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[1] My friend Greg Garrett told me this when were classmates in the Episcopal seminary in Austin, Texas
[2] Herbert Anderson and Edward Foley.  Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals: Weaving Together the Human and the Divine (San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass Publishing Co, 1998) p. xxi.
[3] ibid Anderson and Foley, p. 40

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral