The Story of Your Life

The World is Full of Stories
A Baccalaureate Sermon for the Ar-We-Va High School Class of 2010
Genesis 1:1-2:2
Revelation 5:1-14
John 3:1-17

The world is full of stories.

There are jokes, novels, fairy tales, epic poems, parables, histories, biographies and a dozen other kinds of story I can’t think of right now.

There's your story.

And there's my story.

Donald Miller says that the most important thing we can do with your life is to make a good story out of it. But most of us don’t pay any attention to the story our lives are telling. Donald Miller says that he began to think about his life as story when he was contacted by a producer who wanted to make his book, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie. Since the book was based on his own life, he had some pretty strong ideas about how it should go. But the producer and the screenwriter convinced him that if they just filmed his life the way it happened, it would be—well, dull. Steve, the producer, put it to him this way:

“While you’ve written a good book, thoughts don’t translate onto the screen very well. The audience can’t get inside your head like they can in a book. They will be restless. They won’t engage. Trying to be true to the book is like asking people to read your mind. A story has to move in real life and real time. It’s all about action.”

“You think they might be bored if we just show my life the way it is,” I clarified. I guess I was asking for reassurance that my life was okay.

“I think they’d stab each other in the necks with drinking straws,” Steve said. “Nothing against your book. It’s a fine book,” he added after I’d sat silent for a moment.

I imagined people stabbing each other with straws.

“You in?” Steve asked.

“With their drinking straws?” I asked.

“Crazy, right? We can’t let that happen...”

I thought about it for a moment. I thought about artistic integrity. I was going to tell him I needed a couple weeks to consider the idea, but then he said how much he’d pay me, so I told him I’d do it. (Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, p.20)

In the process of writing the screenplay, Miller realized two things. One, that his life was boring, and two, that he had the chance to edit his life. In movies, editing involves taking the thousands of feet of film and cutting it and fitting it together so the story flows, makes sense, moves along, and doesn’t inspire people to stab each other in the neck with their drinking straws.

Of course our stories as we live them out are a lot messier than any movie. Things happen to us that we don’t choose and can’t foresee. We are given and denied opportunities; we make some good and bad choices that have consequences that we have to live with; we have a set of gifts and limitations that we can’t do much about. But that doesn’t mean we are stuck with what we’ve got.

The world is full of stories; there’s your story, and there’s my story, and over all our stories there is God’s story, which is a lot more exciting than the most exciting human story.

God’s story begins before the beginning, but our story begins in the beginning, as we heard from our first Scripture reading. It begins with God creating the heavens and the earth, and ends with God saying, “It’s all good.”

So what happened? There’s a lot that’s good—sunrises, sunsets, music, art, mathematics, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream—but there’s also a lot that’s bad—earthquakes, famines, cancer, heart disease, American Idol—and that can make us wonder if the story we’re living in is really going to have any kind of happy ending.

Our gospel reading tells a story, a small part of the story of Jesus. This story has two main characters: Jesus, whom we know a lot about, and Nicodemus, about whom we know almost nothing. He was, John says, a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews, and later Jesus calls him “a teacher of Israel,” so we know he was a pretty smart guy and important in his way. But let’s face it, we probably never would have heard of him if he hadn’t come to Jesus that night.

What Jesus says to Nicodemus shakes him up and causes him to question his own story. “You have to be born again,” Jesus says, and Nicodemus says, “How can a grown man be born again?” That’s not the way it works. You get one chance. You’re born, you grow up, you get old, you die. The arrow only goes in one direction. But what Jesus says is that God is offering you a chance to start over. In fact, he says, it’s not an option: “no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again.” Unlike some modern preachers, Jesus is not real specific about how this being born again business works. In fact, he says, it’s a mysterious thing, involving the Holy Spirit, which is like the wind: you can hear it and feel it but you can’t see it. You understand the wind by its results, and Jesus says it’s that way with the Spirit, too. You can’t see the Spirit, but you can experience the Spirit’s presence in your life and you can see the Spirit’s work in the lives of other people.

See, God loves the world. He’s disappointed in it a lot of the time, but he loves it. He made it and he plans to redeem it. And what he wants from you is for you to be part of the story he’s telling, and that story is anything but boring.

This Story is of a God who made the universe and everything in it. He did this for love, because he wanted to share love with other beings. The beings he created, human beings, turned away from his love and threatened to spoil his creation. But this God was not so easily defeated. Out of all the people of the earth, he called one man and one woman, Abraham and Sarah, and made them a People, a Nation with whom he shared his vision for the whole human race. This nation came to be called Israel. They, too, turned away from his love and threatened to spoil his vision. But this God was not so easily defeated. At the right time, he sent his Son to bring human beings back to himself. The only way the Son could do this was to die, but he was willing to do even that if it would save the people God had made. And now there is a new people in the world, a people who follow the Son of God. They, too, are always turning away from God's love and threatening God's purpose. He continues to forgive and nurture and challenge his people, because he plans someday to make a new heaven and a new earth for them, and he wants them to be ready. In the meantime he wants his new people to act like that new heaven and new earth is already here, and show the kind of love that he has shown them from the very beginning.

That's The Story.

You're part of it, and so am I. Find your place in the story, and, whatever you do, don’t make it boring. Donald Miller changed his life. He tracked down the father he hadn’t seen since he was a child, he joined a cross-country bike ride to raise money for charity, he started a program called The Mentoring Project that matches up fatherless boys with men who will support and nurture them. And he keeps writing books like A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

You may never ride a bicycle across country or start a nationwide program to help other people or write a book. But you have gifts that no one else has, experiences that no one else is having, dreams that only you can dream. God has given you those gifts and those dreams so that you can make use of those experiences. You can only do it when you’re part of God’s story. Go in peace, live your story, and your story will touch the world in ways you can’t imagine.