The other day a news story came out that Pope Francis was blasting the Vatican with a list of spiritual ailments. One of them was about humor. I understood him to say that we misunderstand what it means to be serious. Serious doesn’t mean to be stern and severe, but to seriously express the joy of being found in Jesus Christ. He said to keep a healthy dose of humor. And translated from the Italian, Francis called it the Disease of Funeral Face. I hope it’s not catching.
So here you go, Pope Francis. Little Eddie went to his grandfather’s church on Christmas Eve, and while he was waiting for the service to start, he looked at all the announcements in the bulletin, and he saw all these pictures of young men in uniform. So he asked his grandfather who all these men were, and his grandfather said to him, “Well, those pictures are there to remind us to be thankful at Christmas of the great gift that they freely gave us. These are all our boys who died in the service.”
Little Eddie then got very serious, and he gulped and said, “Grandpa, which service was that? The Christmas Eve service or Sunday morning?”
We love stories. We love to hear about adventures that take us out of the moment to far away lands and about things that we don’t believe we would ever be able to do ourselves. We love to hear stories that make us feel good, we love stories that scare us, stories that inspire us, stories that challenge us.
I heard a story just the other day from a young woman who called into K-Love radio to tell a miraculous story about herself. She said that she was a cutter, someone who cut on herself. She was, basically, suicidal, and one day she took a box cutter to her wrist and she sliced and sliced and pressed that blade as hard as she could because she had had enough and just wanted to end it all, but nothing happend. The blade didn’t even scratch her arm.
Of course she was discovered and an intervention was made and so she was actually calling the radio station from inside the hospital. What was so miraculous, she said, was that later her father took that same blade and tested it on a piece of copper wire, and it sliced cleanly through it, but it hadn’t even scratched her soft flesh!
It changed her life. She knew that God himself had saved her, and so she gave herself to him there in that hospital.
It’s an amazing story, but the story doesn’t end there. This isn’t about making a bad choice and getting over it and moving on. This young woman recognized that this is her unique story, and that she needs to allow her story to become a part of her, not to simply put it behind her and pretend it never happened, but to allow it to change her in ways that are unique to her and in ways that can bring healing to others as she herself has found healing.
So she said that she now has a dream to someday open a Christian cutter’s hospital. In our misguided and depressed society, cutting on oneself is really not that uncommon, but it’s a symptom of a much deeper psychological condition that this young woman is in a unique position to help other people find healing from.
Her story can help other people to find hope. Her story gives her a unique gift that not many other people have. It gives her a unique credibility as a witness to the power of healing. What I mean is that, I can tell people that there is freedom from depression. I can say that all I want, but I’ve never experienced clinical depression, so my credibility is not the same as one who has walked that road and understands the pain and the fear and the feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness that are depression, which people face day after exhausting day.
That’s not a part of my story. So I wouldn’t be as effective as a depression counselor as this young woman who can identify with debilitating depression and so make real connections with other people who experience this terrible condition.
But we all have a story that makes us who we are.
These past five Sundays, we’ve been talking about the stories of many of the different characters that are found in the birth narrative of Jesus. We talked about Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, who didn’t believe the testimony of the angel who said to him that he will become the father of the one who goes in the spirit of the Prophet Elijah to prepare the way for the coming of Messiah, Jesus Christ.
Zechariah didn’t believe him, he and his wife were too old to have children, and so as punishment, he was stricken deaf and dumb, but this only made his story more credible, but then when John was born, he began to hear and speak praises to God, proclaiming the prophecies that the Angel had foretold to him. Zechariah’s story of disobedience ended up giving him a unique credibility because of his witness to the power of God working in the world.
We heard the stories of the shepherds, simple men of the country who were not educated, not well-paid, and probably thought of as hillbillies. But the angels came to tell them the good news of Jesus’ birth in the manger in Bethlehem, so that they went to see for themselves. Shepherds had a unique place in society. They were watchers, it was their job to keep very careful watch over their flocks so as to protect them, because there was no one else around, so when shepherds came to town and had news of something they saw, it was usually taken seriously. Shepherds don’t care about gossip, they only told what they saw, and they were often a reliable source of news in an age without telephones or mail.
And so when they witnessed the baby Jesus in the manger, they went out into the streets shouting the good news to anyone who would listen about what the angels had said to them about this baby boy. The shepherds’ story gave them a unique credibility, it put them in a unique position to be trustworthy as the very first evangelists of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
We read all these and other stories in the bible, and we think that they are all about Jesus being born, about the miracle of God coming down from heaven, but they’re not. These are stories about us, about people just like you and me. The miracle is not that God came down from heaven, you can look into just about any religion in the world and find stories like that. The miracle is that God’s coming into the world can shape our own stories.
Our own, personal, gospel message grows out of our own, unique story, the story of our lives. I’m not saying that we should be glad that some bad, horrible thing happened to us years ago, but I am saying that we need to stop being defeated by that bad thing, and recognize how Jesus can use it to turn our story of bad news into a story of good news.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ for that young woman is that a lost, depressed, suicidal girl became a disciple of the Lord with a vision to help other people in ways that only she can, because Christ gave her the power to defeat a disease which would have otherwise defeated her.
Jesus Christ was born into a world very much like our own. The people we read about in the Bible are very much like you and me. Just people. They did things they regretted, they struggled through life just as we do.
Which is why God became one of us. God became a human being. He did it for us, so that we might see in Him the credibility that we look for in one who has been there, who understands our pain and our struggles.
That is Good News.
May you learn to see the light of Jesus Christ in the dark places of life. May you not be defeated by the shared suffering of this life, but May God show you how to harness the power of your unique story for His glory.
In the Name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
