The Park Road Pulpit

  Sermons from Park Road Baptist Church 

      Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors

God, the “Good Ol’ Days,” and the Story of Christmas

Part 3: A Meditation on Story[1]

Russ Dean, December 15, 2002

            “Who shall I tell them sent me,” Moses asked God. “Tell them, ‘I Am.’” This name which God gave, “Yahweh,” is derived from the simple verb “to be” in Hebrew. The simple message is still inconceivable to our finite minds. There is no past with God. There is no future with God. There is only now: God (always) is.

            To the extent that God worked in days of old. God still works. There are no “Good Ol’ Days” with God. Every single day of human history has been equally full of divine possibility. To the extent that God seems distant, remote, active only sporadically, capriciously, as a force of divine intervening miracle. The Story should inform. God never changes -- if God acted through peasants and kings, in ordinary and extraordinary ways, God still works in such ways, seeking stagehands to become stars. Their Story is our Story.

            The question of this Advent theme is: Can you hear the story?

            Some have so sentimentalized and sensationalized the Story that it becomes only an event of past history. In so doing the active presence of God is removed. God is relegated to their Story. These need to hear in Story the mythic elements of great, religious narrative: God comes to earth, with us. Others have so dismissed the story as sentiment and sensation that they, too, miss its great, mythic truth. God, who once came as a baby, comes to earth, with us. For us. In us. I invite these among us, to hear again the story with the ears of “narrative innocence,”[2] – leaving aside your de-mythologizing and skepticism, and to hear the story and know that it is the greatest truth of all.

            One night, in our one-bedroom seminary (slum) apartment, we had friends over for dinner and a movie. We watched in horror a graphic opening scene in which a group of white men captured, released, and hunted a black man – just for the sport of it. I commented that surely this sort of thing never happened. I will never forget the sober reply which was returned: “It’s hard to write about something that has never happened.”

            Truth is stranger than fiction. Reality is more brutal than imagination.

            Our Story, is a story of reality. God’s story with us is one that will not be sentimentalized, because the God who is (love) has come to a brutal world of hatred and bigotry, a world in which tyrants still kill babies (it’s daily news, if you haven’t noticed). And this God still comes, with a message of costly love.

            Can you hear it?

            This Christmas Story is not “their story.” It is our story.

            Let us listen, that we may hear it again, anew. That it may be our story this day.  May it be so.