This was a special morning of worship we called More to Your Story. We dedicated an hour to sing and pray together, engage with scripture, and reflect upon our own stories. This summer we’ve been revisiting some of the most famous and familiar stories in the Old Testament and allowing the enduring powers of these narratives to shape and reshape our lives.  

But instead of asking these questions of an Old Testament narrative, we’re asking these questions of ourselves. You can use the handout attached below to answer these questions. You’ll also need three different colored pencils, pens, or markers.

So, who are you and who are the people close to you with whom you share this life?  What is the setting of your story and why is it relevant to who you are and what you’re called to?  And how is God at work in your story?

In The Odyssey, Odysseus’ crew couldn’t trust his promise that they would survive without eating the cattle. In Exodus, Israel couldn’t trust God’s promise while Moses was on the mountain. And in our lives, we struggle to trust God while we’re waiting for the next chapter of our own stories.

Like the Israelites, who make and worship a Golden Calf, we often turn to other things to try to save us—whether approval, success, or security. The Israelites’ problem wasn’t that they stopped believing in God. Their problem was that God wasn’t moving on their timetable.

And we do the same thing. We may never melt down jewelry to make a golden calf, but we do become impatient with God’s timing, and in that impatience, we are constantly tempted to place our trust in whatever promises relief right now. But nothing we turn to can accomplish what Christ accomplished for us when he bore our sin, defeated death, and rose again.

None of us hear the stories of the Bible in a vacuum.  We show up to them with our own values, assumptions, and life experiences and we use these things to help us make meaning out of these stories.

Similarly, Abraham used his own values, assumptions, and previous experiences with the gods of the ancient world to make sense of this God, the God of Israel.

But what Abraham soon discovers is that this God is different than all of the others. That this God has our best interest at heart. God proves this to Abraham in Genesis 22 and Jesus proves to us, that this God longs to bless us, so that we might be a blessing to others.

Rocky. Mulan. Aladdin. The 1980 USA Olympic hockey team.

What do they all have in common? They’re all underdog stories. And we love them.

We often think of David and Goliath as an underdog story but there’s actually more to the story. It’s the story of what happens when people turn away from God and put their trust in something else. It’s a story about God giving his people what they wanted. It’s a story about a God who "having disarmed the powers and authorities, made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross." It’s a story with a hero, but we are not the hero. Neither is Saul, nor David, but it is the Lord.

Of all the ways God could have chosen to reveal God’s self to the world, why stories? Why not a systematic theology textbook? Or an easy to read list of principles? Why not just a giant collection of rules?

Often we just want the point, the lesson, the answer, the takeaway, but stories, good stories, work differently. Stories invite us to slow down and get curious. To notice details and ask questions.

This goal this summer is to allow ourselves to wonder and wander through the tried and true stories of the Old Testament and along the way, we might discover there’s more to the story than we thought.

The road to healing, strength, and peace is not a smooth digital superhighway spanning the universe. It's a river that grinds away our rough edges so that we can embody the other-oriented love of God.

The world tells us that the best life is one of comfort and ease, one without struggle, one that is padded and comfortable. 

But that’s a lie.  The best life is the one that Jesus lived in the real world. And the real world is full of friction. It’s one full of difficulty and injustice. Jesus could have cheat-coded his way through this life and didn’t. He didn’t opt out of painful things, and he followed the way set before him all the way to the cross. And there, he shows us what it means to be deeply human.

What happens online stays online, right? Surely the rage baiting and the angry comments sections don’t have an effect upon the real world?

Well, we’re learning they do and perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising when we consider that for the first 6 years of Facebook’s existence, the official slogan emblazoned on the walls of its corporate headquarters was “Move Fast and Break Things.” It seems that the whole world has adopted that slogan, moving faster and faster and breaking more and more things.

But the good news of Jesus invites us not to move fast or to break things but to move slow and heal things. The writer of James says to “be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.”

It takes wisdom and discernment to navigate the complex realities of interpersonal or social conflict or to find truth in the sea of disinformation. So, how do we become wise?

In this passage, Solomon recognizes he is still a child and does not know how to lead the people of Israel. Instead of asking for wealth, military victory, or a long life, he asks for “a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong.”

When we turn in prayer to the source of infinite wisdom, with humility as we acknowledge our limitations and rely on God’s revealed word and the community of faith, our hearts are shaped in such a way that we are able to walk in faithfulness with the one who modeled for us true wisdom and shows us what is true, what is good, what is necessary, and what is right.

Our passage this morning is one you’ve probably heard before, likely at a wedding. But Paul didn’t write these words for a wedding, rather, to a church that was in danger of falling apart.

Paul says that they’ve championed some gifts over others, some people over others. He says that giving everything to the poor and similar other-oriented actions, though good, can be done with selfish motives for the approval of an audience.

And if what we’re doing is performative, then we don’t have love. And if we don’t have love, Paul says we have nothing. We are nothing. And we’ve gained nothing.

Real love is a verb. It does something to us and then it invites us to move outward toward another human being not for the sake of being seen but because that is the nature of love.

In Greek mythology, after leading his fellow titans in a revolt against the Olympian gods, Atlas was condemned to hold up the heavens for all eternity. Over the centuries, the details of the story got kind of mixed up, so when we now think of Atlas holding something, we picture him holding the whole world. He’s, as we say, “carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.” 

We, however, carry the weight of the world, not on our shoulders, but in our pockets. Every injustice, every catastrophe, every outrage, piped directly to us, fast and loud. 

How then do we hear the still small voice of God beneath the noise of it all? To find assurance, comfort, direction, the next step, when it’s all too much?