“I wish you were giving another sermon,” is not something you expect to hear from a sixteen year old in a gritted baseball cap. But it wasn’t my speaking ability—it was the story.
I remember the moment the story first grabbed me. The Book of God proclaimed the title on of a dingy set of cassette tapes my mother brought home from the second hand store when I was about 11. Misjudging the cover, I thought it would be the driest set of sermons e-v-e-r, and ignored it on my bottom shelf. But when my mother pressed play. The dry voice of author, Walter Wangerin Jr. began word painting his self-titled “Bible as a Novel.” I was hooked. He retold the story of scripture with historical accuracy, theological acumen and short, striking sentences. To hear about the dessert, the politics, the weather of ancient Israel made it feel real. I listened to it over and over and from there I went on to read the original, the actual pages of scripture. All of my theology began to be organized on the shelves of this story, the story of this man, Yeshua.
My friends kept asking “How do you know all this about the Bible?” I brushed it off as being a history and language nerd, as having a family of Bible translators, as having access to good resources. But I realized it wasn’t anything special about me or my research skills. It was that I had been shown that scripture is a story. And the story made it stick.
Here, I retell some of the stories of scripture with all of the context that made it so powerful to me.
So I started re-telling scripture stories to my friends, but with the narrative skills and historical setting that make the original so powerful. I even gave a few sermons to a youth conference. Which is where that baseball capped young man yearned to hear more of the story.
