Story Lines / Story Lives

1/5/2025

“Story Lines, Story Lives”

We know very little about ourselves, others, our faith, and our choices until we hear, tell, and share our stories. This is a sermon I preached recently.

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Stories are a cohering force in human life. A society is composed of disagreeing - and often disagreeable - people with different personalities, goals, and agendas. What connects us beyond family ties? Story. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold. Stories supply the symbols that carry us forward.

We are going to start this sermon story with perhaps my favorite bible story. The story of The Prodigal Son. FYI: the word Prodigal was invented in the 1600’s. Until then it was “the story of the father with two sons”.

Luke 15:11-32 New International Version The Parable of the Lost Son

¹¹ Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. ¹² The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

¹³ “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. ¹⁴ After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵ So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. ¹⁶ He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

¹⁷ “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! ¹⁸ I will go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. ¹⁹ I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ ²⁰ So he got up and went to his father.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

²¹ “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

²² “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³ Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. ²⁴ For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.

²⁵ “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶ So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ²⁷ ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’

²⁸ “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. ²⁹ But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. ³⁰ But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’

³¹ “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. ³² But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”

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Why do I love this particular story so much? Let me tell you a true story from my life. I wrote this in 1987 when I was a contributing writer for The Other Side, a magazine for leftist evangelicals. Not a huge audience, but an interesting one, for sure.

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I started my story this way:

“A few weeks ago, while listening to yet another sermon on the Prodigal Son, I remembered the night my brother came home from Vietnam. It was 1970 and a crummy year all around. Three years earlier my father had died of his heart attack. Up until that time our family had played out a kind of fundamentalist Father Knows Best. We were clean, respectful, and most of our problems were minor. However, we were growing up and that picture perfect family life was dissolving. My sister Karen was finishing college and had told Mom and Dad she wasn’t coming back to our home town to live. I was 14, moody, and balked at to our piety-soaked church youth group.

My brother Paul quit his Christian college and got a factory job in a town an hour from where we lived. One Saturday night he came home to tell my folks he was enlisting in the army. The next day Dad had his heart attack - and two days later he died in the hospital. Father Knows Best was off the air. No one knew what was supposed to come next.

Paul didn’t enlist in the army after all. Instead he stayed home and at the tender age of 21 he started his adult life by becoming partners with mom in operating the family printing business. He’d been working in the print shop after school and in the summers since he was 12 - he knew how to operate the presses and equipment. Now he was working long days and when he wasn’t working, he was with his girlfriend Janice.

Still, in his half-teenage and half-adult way Paul was my strongest relationship, a link to love in my weird and grieving adolescence.

He’d pick me up after school when he had to drive a complicated printing job to another printer 70 miles away and those rides were our times. We talked and play AM radio rock-and-roll super loud. There was a deserted stretch of country road where we played Guess How Fast Paul is Driving His Firebird. I developed a sense for the difference between 90 and 120 miles per hour. (You watch how fast the utility poles are moving.) No one ever said love would be safe.

Six months later Paul got his draft notice. Let’s hear it again for old fashioned small town American values. The local draft board decided Paul was draftable. Paul, my mother, and a lot of other people pointed out that without Paul’s contribution the business would likely fail. They reminded the draft board of America’s tradition of letting widow’s only sons stay home to help support the family. The draft board was unmoved (and 50 years later I’m still angry about this).

So Paul went in the army and once in, tried to get out. While he and mom and many of Paul’s military superiors filled out “early out” forms, the army also sent him to Boot Camp, medic training, and paratrooping school. Finally they gave him orders for Vietnam. I remember hugging him one November morning as he was going off to war and I was going to school. I shoved my face into the shoulder of his uniform but a uniform doesn’t smell like family. Also, because of that goodbye I was late for my first period government class so my mom wrote a note for me. The irony of these things sometimes doesn’t hit for years.

Mom and I watched the Bob Hope Special that January. We still didn’t know where Paul was and he wasn’t telling us in his letters, which felt ominous. All we knew was that he was a medic in a large camp and we sent our letters to the 101^st Airborne Division. As we watched the TV show, Mom noticed a hand scrawled banner some soldiers held up which read, 101^st Airborne, Hue. We looked on a map to discover Hue was two miles from the DMZ that separated South and North Vietnam.

Mom carried on in the shop. She hired several printers who failed. She was audited by the IRS who wanted to know why the formerly prosperous business was going broke. Mom mortgaged everything that year: the building, our house, the equipment, the land. It was amazing that she kept Danielson Colorprint going.

Then, that August, the Army finally decided Paul should be released from enlistment. After 22 months – two months before he would have been out anyways – he was put on a plane back to Chicago. He called my sister, went to her apartment, collapsed asleep.

Karen called my mom. I was doing yard work when I heard a scream from the print shop (the distance of a football field from where I was). It was my staid and pious Aunt Carol who was working for my mom that year. Carol was screaming as she ran from the shop towards me. (It was the only time in my life I’d ever see her run.) “Your mom is on the phone with Karen, Paul is back. She’s driving him home tonight.”

It took about five hours for Karen to get Paul from Chicago to home. That’s plenty of time to put on the gala of a lifetime if the cause is sufficient - and it was.

Mom closed the shop and started phoning people. Folks responded the way people did back then. They baked. In the evening those people and their endless dozens of baked things came to our house. Rogue men – my brother’s friends – appeared at our back door to sneak beer under the Ping-Pong table and that evening my fundamentalist mom didn’t care.

The most powerful image that is still in my mind is the lights of that night. As August dusk thickened into night we turned on lights. At first it was just the living room lamps and the candles stuck among the baked goods on the dining room table. Then the long hall skylight that could be seen from the highway a half mile away. The the back bedroom lights, even the Christmas star on the TV. As the house blazed, someone went out to the print shop to turn on those lights, too, causing the printing presses to look like dragons hunkered down, waiting for their boy.

Finally, those of us waiting outside heard Karen’s VW Beetle turn off the highway to rattle down our gravel road. We yelled to those inside; they were still spilling out as Karen turned into our driveway, veered straight across the lawn to pull up to a slam-bang stop at our feet.

Paul jumped out. People cheered and hooted and clapped. Janice fell into his first embrace, I hugged him from behind, my mom hugged his shoulders while weeping so hard it made us laugh. Even our dog Sheba was barking and barking and barking.

Paul kept saying, “But I was going to surprise you!”

The party went on a long time. The rogues drank the beer while the rest of us got punch drink and pastry plastered. We ate to accompany the feasting of our eyes, watching Paul amble around among us. My mother did nothing but refill cookie platters while mumbling “Thank you, thank you.”

Everything else was knocked out of us that night. That night our story was Thank You.

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“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.” Sue Monk Kidd

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion

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What is a good story?

I started with Jesus’ Prodigal Son because it is a story that feels so true. I told you my story of my brother - because I think concepts teach our minds but stories teach our hearts. In the lives we have already lived and in our lives going forward – we need hearts filled with courage and strength.

Here are some characteristics of stories that, I think, build our hearts and our spirits.

1. A good story is not just about one person and how he or she became the winner of everything. A good story has a variety of characters and one of those characters might pull you in. Stories that ask us to rethink our place in the world are stories populated by more than one attractive person who wants to win at something. In the Prodigal Son we might be the imprudent kid who wants to leave home and see the world. We might be the reliable son who stays home to run the farm, but who can get jealous and snide. We might be the parent loving the child who is here, longing for the one who isn’t.

In my story, the dazzling realization for me was realizing I was not omitted from the story because I was the lackluster little sister. I was there, I cared, I was one of the characters in the story.

I don’t trust a story that is only about winners. Good stories invite in all of us.

2. Money matters. How often do you watch a TV show and wonder where that cashier got her two bedroom apartment and her leather boots and that electric car? A story that lies about the how hard it is for modern adults to create economic stability – is a story that might lie about other things. A story doesn’t need to have a character’s budget breakdown, but a story should make economic sense.

In the prodigal son, it is the money taken, spent, and missing that drives the prodigal’s wake up call. In my story, it makes a difference that when my brother was drafted my mom’s already stressful life became so much more difficult. We missed the young man that my brother was, we also needed his contribution to our finances. If he’d been gone much longer the small business that my dad and mom started during WWII would have failed. It feels real to understand that.

3. Is there magic in the story? Too many religious stories are about how hard something was and then God did a miracle and everything became okay. People learn to consider religion as a Pez dispenser of grace. The Prodigal’s life doesn’t get better because money magically appears. His life becomes richer because his father still loves him.

Whether it’s called grace or magic – a valuable story is about people addressing complicated situations on their own and with others. Magic can give them courage and a magic wand, but then they solve their own problems.

4. Good stories are, sooner or later, about love. Some stories have romance in them and that’s fun. But love is not the same as romance. When a dozen church people showed up to our house with cookies and brownies, we felt the love that happens sometimes in communities. When in this congregation we listen to and empower each other – that’s love. Stories show us the paths people have walked to find a true and loving place to live their lives.

I hope we can consider where to find stories that will give us the courage and hope we will need going forward.

A quote from Woody Guthrie: I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.

To watch this service on YouTube: