"The Truest Story"

Dear WRC,

You may know that I was away last week at Doxology, the annual gathering hosted by the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination. It was the third rendition of the gathering, but the first one I’ve attended. Now that I’ve completed my D.Min., this is one of the ways I hope to stay connected to the Peterson Center and these friendships and conversations that have been so lifegiving and important in shaping my pastoral imagination. One of the gifts was that Sam joined me—shout out to my parents who switched places with us and watched our kids! It was great to receive and digest all of this with her. 

Winn Collier (I’m sure I’ve mentioned him before, he’s the Director of the Peterson Center and was my doctoral advisor. I hope you have a chance to meet him some day!) gathered us in on Monday afternoon by launching into singing the Doxology. After some opening comments he began to talk about what Doxology is and what their hope was—and wasn’t—for our time together. In the midst of these remarks, Winn offered us this line, which sent me frantically searching for my notebook to open and scribble it down: “What God has done in Jesus Christ is the truest story ever told.”

Winn tends to say things like that, and to say them with the conviction of one who believes them to be absolutely true. I find that most of the time I think that that’s true, but Winn believes that it is. One of the gifts of being with him is that I find these things slowly moving down from my head into my heart.

Winn went on to tell the story of being a pastor in Charlottesville, VA during the Unite the Right rally in August of 2017. That Sunday their church faced a number of difficult questions, but the most pressing one was whether or not anything they were about to do—singing songs, praying psalms, preaching the Gospel—mattered at all in the wake of what had just happened around them. Wasn’t the worship service they were about to enter a waste of time in the midst of death and violence and trauma? Were they completely out of touch with reality?

We might ask some similar questions. We’re quickly approaching another election day with a speed that seems sure to end in a multi-car pileup. It’s the first anniversary of the October 7th attack in Israel and there appears to be no offramp for the retaliatory violence that is spilling further and further into the Middle East. Another hurricane is preparing to pummel Florida while much of the southeast is still crippled from the last one. There are tragedies and struggles and heartache in our own lives that seem, most days, insurmountable.

Could it be that what God has done in Jesus Christ is the truest story ever told? Looking around, it seems so clear that the story we’re living is one of violence and trauma, struggle and destruction, that death gets the last word. I sometimes need help remembering what I believe is more true than these realities. I need someone like Winn to stand up and say God’s name in a way that calls me out of my myopic view of the present moment and into the much larger story that God is telling in Jesus.

What God has done in Jesus is the truest story ever told because none of these other stories have yet reached their conclusion. It’s in his story that we see the true ending of our own, and only when viewed from the end can we put our present in the proper context. God is so much bigger than we had imagined. There is a throne and Christ is the one seated on it.

I’m grateful for the reminder that I was given. I’m grateful, too, for the opportunity to stand with you every Sunday to offer our praise to Jesus and extend this same reminder to one another. We don’t gather to praise God naively—we understand the realities that surround us—we just know which story we’re in: God’s.

In Christ,

Pastor Andy