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Elie Weisel remarked that, “God made humans because God loves stories, and our lives are the stories God tells.”
Father Andrew Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest and a writer of novels. Once a friend commented to him, “You're working on a story, aren't you?” He replied, “How did you know?” His friend said, “Because you're not paying any attention.”
Father Greeley pronounced himself guilty as charged. He said it is the nature of writing novels. He said, “You create a world, fill it with characters and set them on a path toward a conclusion of which they are unaware and you but dimly aware. Then they invade your life and take it over.”
“You fall in love with them [the characters], and that makes their agony and their hope all the more poignant,” Greeley continues. “You struggle mightily to get their actions and their dialogue on paper or hard disk and to keep up with them as they plunge through their lives.”
[Pay attention here:] “The storyteller is a pale metaphor for God who creates out world and us, falls in love with his creatures, even obsesses over us because we don't act right, and always reserves the right to say the final world.”
Jesus came to point us to God. Jesus pointed to the God who obsesses over us and the birds of the air and the flowers of the field and every ounce of human suffering and poor human choices. Jesus obsessed over the fact that life could be so much better when bathed in love rather than wrapped in fear.
And in the coming days we will celebrate God reserving the right to say the final word right after the human family pronounced the word “death” on the life of Jesus.
God has reserved the same right for you.
Remembering all this is the work of Easter. Acting on all this is called the rest of your life.
Peace to your path,
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Lynnewood United Methodist Church
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