Stories of the Way
Henry E. Neufeld
Energion Publications 2011
Copyright© 2011 Henry E. Neufeld
All Rights Reserved
Unless otherwise marked, all scripture quotations are taken from the Contemporary English Version, Copyright © 1995 American Bible Society.
Cover Design: Henry & Jody Neufeld
Aer.io Edition:
ISBN13: 978-1-63199-566-8
Print ISBNs:
ISBN10: 1-893729-12-5
ISBN13: 978-1-893729-12-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011944392
Dedication
To my children and grandchildren, who have taught me that just saying something isn’t enough. You have to live it. I am more thankful for you than you will ever know.
Preface
If you just read it, this book will be a failure.
That may seem to be a strange thing to say about a book. After all, authors write books so that people will buy them and read them. But that is not the purpose of this book. I have an ambitious agenda. I'd like to help change the way we think about spiritual, ethical, and social issues.
Jesus often used parables in his teaching. There is a troubling passage in the gospel of Mark that deals with the issue of why Jesus would use a parable when he could just plainly say what he meant.
10When Jesus was alone with the twelve apostles and some others, they asked him about these stories. 11He answered:
I have explained the secret about God's kingdom to you, but for others I can use only stories. 12The reason is, "These people will look and look, but never see. They will listen and listen, but never understand. If they did, they would turn to God, and he would forgive them."
13Jesus told them: If you don't understand this story, you won't understand any others. – Mark 4:10-13
Now we sometimes hear this as suggesting that more direct speech is better, and that those on the inside are able to understand it. But notice that Jesus is disappointed that the disciples don't understand the parable. Jesus told many, many stories as he taught. Consider how much of the rest of his teaching came in the form of actions and signs. He made few statements of fact, and many of those were in the form of aphorisms—short sayings that themselves make us think in order to make them come alive.
In fact, much of the text in the Bible is in the form of stories. From Old Testament tales of the patriarchs to the parables of Jesus, the reader is confronted with a variety of narratives. Even in those places where Bible writers are making and explaining statements of fact, there is a story in the background. What do these stories mean?
Many people ask why God couldn't have just said things outright. If he had written the Bible as systematic theology with neat sections on epistemology (how we know things) and ethics (how we should behave), it would be so much easier.
But that is to ignore the way we actually live and learn things. I recall when I was in the Air Force that we had a class in how to use a new piece of equipment. At the time, the equipment itself was not available at the training center, so we had pictures of keyboards and displays. We spent quite a number of hours in class hearing lectures about how to use the equipment. Everything in the class was marvelously clear. The problem was that we couldn't actually do it.
Later, when we encountered the actual equipment we found that we had learned essentially nothing. We had to get involved in actually using the equipment. We had to practice a great deal. When it came to actually using the equipment for what it was intended to do, many hours of experience was required. Just knowing the facts was not enough.
Similarly in our daily lives it's our experiences and the stories we tell and hear that have the greatest impact on what we do. We imagine that teaching people facts is the way to change their behavior. In fact, it is the influence of experience, our own and that of others that actually changes us.
Psalm 78 expresses this principle:
1My friends, I beg you to listen as I teach. 2I will give instruction and explain the mystery of what happened long ago. 3These are things we learned from our ancestors, 4and we will tell them to the next generation. We won't keep secret the glorious deeds and the mighty miracles of the LORD. 5God gave his Law to Jacob's descendants, the people of Israel. And he told our ancestors to teach their children, 6so that each new generation would know his Law and tell it to the next. 7Then they would trust God and obey his teachings, without forgetting anything God had done. – Psalm 78:1-7
Notice that it's by hearing what God has done that each new generation knows God's law. It is not accidental that the Torah, “instruction” or “law,” which is also the first five books of the Bible, includes both stories and statements of law. Many of the laws come as the result of stories. It's all so the next generation may know.
We often try to guarantee that our children and young people will stay away from drugs, remain sexually pure, and stay in church by repeating over and over again that they should say “no” to drugs, say “no” to sexual relations, and make a habit of going to church. Then we wonder why the teen pregnancy rate of churchgoing young people is not that much different from that in the rest of the population, why our young people use drugs, and why they leave the church at their earliest opportunity.
The reason is that we are ignoring the biblical paradigm for bringing up Godly children. It's not by explaining the facts to them that we make them obedient to God; it's by telling the stories of what God has done. “Just the facts” may work in a police show on television, but it's not nearly so effective in growing active, faithful believers and disciples.
Even fiction has an impact on how we think. Just like parables, fiction helps us think about things that might not occur in our daily life, not to mention things that might occur, but that we haven't experienced yet. We often start discussions of such things with the word “imagine.” We imagine situations we haven't experienced and we imagine how we would handle such situations.
So when we study Bible stories we need to study them as stories. We spend a great deal of time trying to reduce Bible stories to a series of statements of fact, sucking the life out of them in the process. We don't understand one of the parables of Jesus better when we've come up with a moral for the story. In fact, we've lost some of the meaning.
The idea of these stories is to imagine a situation and how that situation might be handled. We've listed scripture references with each story, but these are just examples. Think about stories in the Bible that might relate to the story that is told here.
Then we have questions. But if you just answer the questions, you'll miss a great deal of the point. What you need to do is look at those questions as a way to propose other stories. My stories are not the point; they are just the catalyst. They are there to get things started. They are not presented primarily as stories to read, but as a challenge to put your imagination to work as you study the Bible—to write your own stories. When you’ve let your imagination break the bounds of your life, the Holy Spirit can then show you how to live new stories in your own life and in your relationships with family, friends, church, and the entire world.
How do you do this?
I recommend using the stories as a starting point. Once you’ve read a particular story, read the scriptures and start your discussion of the thought questions. I hope you will think of many more questions. Add those to your discussion.
Here are some questions or ideas to use after every story:
1 Invite the Holy Spirit to be in your story.
2 Have