大象传媒

The Power of Story

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It may contain gaps to be filled in at the time so that prayers may reflect the needs of the world, and changes may also be made at the last minute for timing reasons, or to reflect current events.

大象传媒 Radio 4. 聽Costa First Novel Award Winner Francis Spufford and Catherine Fox join the Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London's Trafalgar Square for today's Sunday Worship which looks at the power of Story. 聽It begins with the hymn 'When a knight won his spurs, in the stories of old.'
When a knight won his spurs 鈥� arr. Andrew Earis Flute, Piano, Choir
Good morning and welcome to St Martin-in-the-Fields. We learn how to live by working out of what story we find ourselves we find ourselves to be a part. We learn how to believe by finding our place in God鈥檚 story, and working out what character we are called to play.Story鈥檚 the way we discover who we are and how we are to work out what we are to do. The first question is, 鈥榃here am I coming from?鈥� and it leads to recognition of our family, community, race, nation. But the second question is, 鈥榃here am I going?鈥� and that discloses vocation, destiny, and hope. Story is a profound and powerful way of identifying where we are each coming from and where we believe we are going. Being baptised is, more than anything else, setting aside a story that I desperately try to author for myself and gladly being clothed in a story that is fundamentally being authored by God.聽
Let us pray.God of the past and the future, in your scripture you show us your character and the way you tell your story; in your church seek to imitate your love and we anticipate the truth to which you draw us. Open our hearts to the depth and texture of your purpose; humble us that we may participate with joy in your unfolding drama; and bring all your people into the wondrous promise of your glory, revealed in your son Jesus Christ. Amen.

Francis Rowley turned story into song, when, in 1886, he saw that our identity was as those who鈥檇 been lost, and now were found. I will sing the wondrous story.
HYMN: I will sing the wondrous story [Dim Ond Jesu]
When the prophet Nathan confronts Samuel over his murder of Uriah and marriage to Bathsheba, it鈥檚 through story he changes the king鈥檚 heart.
READING: 聽A reading from Second Samuel chapter 12.
Nathan said to David, 鈥楾here were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meagre fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveller to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.鈥� Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, 鈥楢s the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.鈥� Nathan said to David, 鈥榊ou are the man!鈥�

The novelist Catherine Fox was enthralled by the power of story from an early age.
TestimonyI grew up in a world of books. 聽I didn鈥檛 love them, particularly. 聽Books were just there, like the weather, like dust. 聽What I did love was stories. 聽I loved reading them and playing make believe鈥攗p trees, in the old shed, on the wasteland. 聽The pretend world was far more interesting than the world of doing sums, and putting things away properly.I learnt early on that stories had a way of getting out of the covers of books into the real world. 聽What if鈥攁t the bottom of the stone steps in the dank cellar under our house鈥擥ollum was lurking, Precious? 聽It seemed probable. 聽Robin Hood wasn鈥檛 content to lie flat in Rosemary Sutcliff鈥檚 Chronicles, either. 鈥楲ook,鈥� I鈥檇 say to my sister, 鈥榯he hall is the stream. 聽I鈥檓 Robin, and you鈥檙e Friar Tuck, and you鈥檝e got to carry me across.鈥� 聽It was two-way traffic. 聽People could vanish from the real world into a book just as easily鈥攋udging by how difficult it was to get my mum鈥檚 attention when she was reading a novel at the tea table. 聽My childhood was a place where hobbits, Little John鈥攁nd the characters from my own secret stories鈥攁ll wove in and out of the world of real people. 聽And then there was Jesus. 聽I grew up with bible stories, too. 聽鈥楾ell me the stories of Jesus I love to hear鈥�. 聽That was a hymn we used to sing in chapel Sunday School. 聽鈥榃ords full of kindness, deeds full of grace鈥�.聽I鈥檝e lived with the stories of Jesus for decades now. 聽It鈥檚 been two-way traffic here, too. 聽Jesus has come out of the pages, just as I have entered into a story far bigger than my own. 聽I turn the stories over in my mind often. 聽Jesus, asleep in the boat in a storm when all hell breaks loose鈥攈ow can he sleep through this? Or I鈥檓 fighting my way through the crowd, just to clutch the fringe of his prayer shawl. 聽With every passing year the story becomes more real to me. 聽
And increasingly, I ponder the final chapter. 聽How will it end鈥攖he world, me? 聽I sense the company of that huge cast of characters who have gone on ahead, who already know, who have met the author and finisher of their faith. So yes, tell me the stories of Jesus. 鈥榃ords full of kindness, deeds full of grace鈥攁ll in the love light of Jesus鈥� face鈥�. 聽
MUSIC: Tell me the stories of Jesus 鈥� Spiritual/American song聽
Jesus is the storyteller who becomes the story. We hear one of his most famous stories, after which Francis Spufford tells us about the power of story.

READING:聽A reading from the gospel of Luke, chapter 10.
Jesus said, A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, 'Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.'

SERMON:The Christian scriptures are unusual in the space they give to stories. 聽The Buddhist sutras contain some, but mostly they鈥檙e treatises. 聽The Quran has narrative bits, but they tend to be there as illustrations to support an argument. 聽The Bible, on the other hand, is stuffed with stories, right through the Old Testament, as we call the part of the book we share with Judaism.And then when you reach the New Testament, the part of the book sacred only to Christians, you find yourself reading the story of a storyteller, and of all the stories he told. 聽Jesus narrated, not just some of the time, but virtually all of the time. 聽Ask him a question, and he would tell you a story. Ask him what he meant by a story, and frequently he would tell you another story. 聽The stories were about everyday things, but they had the odd characteristic of lingering in the mind, and becoming stranger and more complicated the more you thought of them, so you could never be sure that they had quite finished giving you what they had to teach. 聽For my money, Jesus of Nazareth was the best producer of weird Jewish fable until Franz of Prague came along. 聽(Kafka, I mean.) 聽He was as reluctant to explain why he told stories as he was to explain himself every other way. 聽But he did once say this: 鈥楾he reason I speak to them in parables is that 鈥渟eeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand鈥濃��. 聽A difficult and ironic statement 鈥� but one thing Jesus might have meant was, that storytelling struck him as a way of getting around people鈥檚 inability to perceive, to listen, to understand. 聽People might understand something in the form of a story that would otherwise be blocked by the limits of our sight, our hearing, our deeply entrenched and well-established judgements of the world.And I think this happened because Jesus always left open the question of who his hearers were supposed to identify with. 聽The story was for you, about you, in some way, that was plain. But who were you supposed to be in it? 聽He would never say.

Often our response, over the two millennia since, has been to tidy the stories up. 聽Take the story we just had in the lesson: one of the most famous of all, the story of the good Samaritan. 聽It鈥檚 a nice, transparent fable about being kind to mugging victims, yes? 聽Don鈥檛 walk by on the other side; do pick people up and look after them.No, it isn鈥檛. 聽It鈥檚 an offence to common-sense and conventional wisdom, that鈥檚 what it is. 聽A deliberate provocation. Look at the context. Everyone knew before Jesus even opened his mouth that you were supposed to be good to your neighbour. 聽It said so in the Jewish law. 聽The perfectly sensible follow-up question, was: okay, who is my neighbour, then? 聽Where do I draw the line, because in a world of finite people with finite resources, it鈥檚 obvious that I can鈥檛 care for everybody. 聽And Jesus鈥檚 response is to pick, as the hero of his story, his demonstration of what you owe to strangers, somebody who is the least sympathetic kind of stranger. A 鈥楽amaritan鈥� is someone from Samaria, a place where in minds of everyone listening, they did their religion wrong, in a distorted and repellent way. 聽聽If you let this be just an example of a prejudice you鈥檙e naturally too enlightened to fall into 鈥� you鈥檙e missing the challenge. 聽You need to substitute for the Samaritan someone to whom you have a genuine, serious objection, backed by the principles of which you are genuinely proud. 聽Not, for you, the good Samaritan, but the good homophobe. 聽The good racist. 聽The good drug dealer. The good terrorist. The good Brexiteer 鈥� or the good Remainer, just as easily, because when it came to offence, Jesus was an equal-opportunity messiah. The priest and the levite, meanwhile, are not caricatures of selfishness and indifference. 聽They鈥檙e obeying the religious law, which says, no exceptions, that contact with blood, such as the poor muggee has all over him, is polluting and will stop them carrying out the duties the community depends on them doing. 聽They鈥檙e the reasonable, virtuous, well-intentioned boundary-preservers here, who know you鈥檝e got to draw a line somewhere.聽

So here鈥檚 the story. The victim lies groaning in the alley, and whoever it is that you instinctively trust in the world walks on by without stopping, for the best of reasons; and the only person who helps, who pulls up in his ratty car with the ISIS flag on it, or the vile bumper sticker, or the wraps of heroin strewn on the back seat, is the one in whom you least want to recognise yourself. 聽But those are the choices. 聽Those are the possible answers to Jesus鈥� perennial question, who are you in this story? 聽You could be the victim, but that鈥檚 too easy. 聽You could be the priest or the Levite, secure in their righteousness: but the image of their virtue鈥檚 limitations is the blood unstaunched, still pooling on the road. Or you could be driving to A & E as the agent of God鈥檚 unreasonable compassion, His insanely large definition of what a neighbour is, but only on condition that you step outside your sensible zones of good and bad, and onto God鈥檚 map of the world, where none of us are reliably virtuous, but even villains suddenly do saintly things. 聽The first hearer of the story, back in the Bible, doesn鈥檛 even want to say the word 鈥楽amaritan鈥�. He just mumbles 鈥榯he one who helped鈥�. Tell me honestly, how surprised are you that this storyteller ends up getting crucified?One more story. 聽Once upon a time, this one goes, the creator of the whole universe walked and talked and laughed and suffered and died among us, as a kind, fierce, tricky rabbi from Galilee. 聽Maybe you don鈥檛 think the universe is the kind of thing that requires, or even could possess, a creator. 聽Fair enough. 聽But the question the story of Jesus is meant to make you ask is the same one he prompted in the stories he told. 聽Who am I in it? 聽Who, in this story of hope offered whether we deserve it or not, and all our categories bust open, and the mess and drift of time turned to unexpected good, might I be? What news of me, troubling and wonderful, might it bring? 聽Who am I in it? 聽Amen.

MUSIC: A man there lived in Galilee聽

Bob Chilcott鈥檚 setting of William Walsham How鈥檚 hymn, which vividly describes what it means for a child to find a place in God鈥檚 story.
Let us pray.Storytelling God, you unfold the creation and call a people and send your Son to draw us into your story and make us your companions forever. Visit today any who feel they鈥檝e lost their place in your story, and see their circumstances as ones of cruelty, randomness, or hopelessness. Bring them the kindness of strangers, the company of the open hearted, and the life of your kingdom. Lord, in Your mercy 鈥� Hear our prayer.
Transforming God, through your prophets you continue to tell your story and invite us to find our place in your purposes. Bless those who are new to faith; inspire all on whom you bestow the gifts of telling your story; and show each one of us what character to imitate, what words to say, what life to inhabit that sings your praise. Give strength to all who face big decisions or anticipate vital news today. And place your story in our heart, that we may walk with you forever. Lord, in Your mercy 鈥� Hear our prayer.
Reconciling God, your people learned to sing your song in a strange land. Show your church how to dwell among people who tell a different story, who find its story alien, unhelpful, or impossible. By your Spirit shape a world where people of different stories may find a way to live together in peace. And when we forget how your story goes, sing it back to us in words of love.
MUSIC: We shall walk through the valley in peace 鈥� Spiritual聽
Our Father,who art in Heaven,hallowed be thy name;thy kingdom come,thy will be done on earthas it is in heaven.Give us this day our daily bread;and forgive us our trespassesas we forgive those who trespass against us;and lead us not into temptation,but deliver us from evil.For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory,for ever and ever. Amen.
Like the great Greek poet Homer, Fanny Crosby believed being blind only increased her ability to tell a wondrous story. In 1873 her friend Phoebe Knapp played her a new melody, and said to Crosby, 鈥榃hat do you think the tune says?鈥� Crosby replied, 鈥楤lessed assurance; Jesus is mine.鈥�

HYMN: Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine
BLESSING:May the God who invites you into the story of Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit enfold you in that story forever. And the blessing of God almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.
MUSIC: Organ Voluntary
Radio 4 Closing Announcement:聽Sunday Worship came from St Martin-in-the-Fields. 聽It was led by the Revd Dr Sam Wells and the music was directed by Andrew Earis. 聽The organist was Martin Ford and the flautist Sarah Maxted. 聽 聽 聽The producer was Stephen Shipley. 聽Next week's Sunday Worship comes from Manchester and looks at a Christian approach to the world of work.