August 8, 2004
A Personal Testimony
Riley E Jensen

I buried Ella Tuthill on December 16 -- over a decade ago.  It was a small service with 40-or-50 people in attendance.  In its outline, it was brief and to-the-point (and rather unremarkable) except that Ella had insisted that no music be used.

However, what did set this service apart was that Ella had planned it.  She detailed who would be asked to speak and what scriptures and poetry would be read.  As various ones spoke, stories poured forth about their experiences with this woman.  The stories were filled with obvious affection and considerable humor.  I even had one of my own.

When I first arrived at that church, one of the first persons to make an appointment with me was Ella Van Dyke Tuthill.  Ella came into my office that day, sat down, looked me in the eye, and said, "I want to introduce myself to you so that when you have my funeral you will know who I am."  That was the beginning of a relationship which was always interesting and often unpredictable.  I share that experience because Ella's memorial service has imbedded itself on my memory as a marvelous example of how we deal with our grief by telling stories.

Somehow a story fits into Mary Poppins prescription, "A little bit of sugar makes the medicine go down."  There is something compelling about personal experience -- the stories which you and I carry with us all the time but which we may have thought would not be interesting to anyone.

Why is it that I would rather have a person share with me her personal experience than have someone tell me what he believes?  Why is it that people would rather read novels than non-fiction?  Have you ever thought about why the Bible is not a book of religious philosophy, but rather a series of stories.  If you want to know me, don't ask me what I believe, don't ask me to expound on my philosophy of life; ask me rather to share how I have seen God at work in my life.

Robert Coles, Harvard psychiatrist and prolific author, has a work entitled The Call of Stories.  In it he points out how in using stories he experienced a breakthrough in relating to his patients.  We are not talking about fairy tales or parables with a point, but rather about how two people share something of themselves.

Coles recounts how one day when visiting a patient's bedside, he asked the patient how he was feeling.  The response came back, "I will tell you my story if you tell me yours."  At the time it seemed to him as the height of arrogance for a patient to challenge him in that way.  However, later he found that when he acted more like a human being who was willing to share something of himself (rather than the professional physician who only pronounced judgment), that he was more satisfied with the healing process which would result.

Her name was Karen, and she identified herself as part of an evangelism team related to the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.  She was an attractive young mother who was somewhat apologetic that she should be found speaking to a church group on the subject of evangelism.

She had been brought up in Texas and trained to keep those Bible-thumping, Southern Baptists at arms length.  When she was recruited by her Episcopal Church in Hoboken to go to their national evangelism workshop, she attended only out of a sense of duty and loyalty to her priest.

But when I heard her, she held her audience in rapt attention -- not so much because of her rhetorical skills, but because it is always refreshing to be in the presence of someone who is willing to simply tell the story of how God has intersected her experience.

My ministerial training taught me not to be personal.  After all, who am I?  It is God's word that I am called to proclaim, not the musings of a laid-back philosopher.  Certainly you would be bored-to-tears (not to say spiritually famished) if all you heard Sunday-after-Sunday were the trials and tribulations of a preacher trying to share happenings in a Midwestern city.  We wouldn't call it a sermon; we would call it a pulpit chat with our guy Riley.  However, I would argue that is how God did it.  We call it the incarnation, the word made flesh -- true commitment through a person.

The Southern Baptists call it a personal testimony.  Robert Coles puts it under the caption of stories.  Karen calls it evangelism.  Whatever it is called, it involves sharing the good news of how God has touched our lives.  But we resist this mode of evangelism because we have been brought up to be excessively private, trained in good godfather fashion never to share our thoughts or feelings lest it be mistaken for a sign of weakness.  However, another reason why we have never thought about using our own personal experience as a vehicle for evangelism is because we have never thought about how God has worked within the most mundane events of our existence.

When one charts his or her life as a timeline (and is asked to indicate those points where God intersected it), one's life is viewed in an entirely different way.

I would suggest that most Christians are far too humble about their own stories.  They are reluctant to see in their stories anything unusual.  "My life has been pretty much the same as everyone else's," is a familiar response.  And of course, that is exactly the point.  That is exactly why your story has meaning.  Because your life has been pretty much the same as everyone else's, when you see God working in it, maybe they can too.

Sometimes the Bible is not helpful to us in this regard for we have lifted up before us the dramatic experiences and we are left to think those dramatic experiences are normative.

I bless the apostle Paul for his great missionary activity, but sometimes I wish his conversion experience had been a little less dramatic.  It is hard for some of us who were raised in Sunday school (and whose worst act of rebellion was stealing some chewing gum from the corner grocery) to relate to this one who changed overnight from harassing Christians to making Christians.

Yet the example of Paul that I would hold forth for us is his willingness to share his own story.  This man was a deep thinker -- the first systematic theologian of the church.  His letter to the church at Rome represents the most profound theological document in the New Testament.  He was unwilling to hide behind theological abstractions.  The driving force in all that he does is how God has worked in his life and he is anxious to share it.

We still have not gotten around to a pulpit chat with our guy Riley, have we?  It may be that in spite of all that I have said, I am as reluctant to share my personal story as anyone else.  Please bear with me while I take a stab at it because you have a right to know whether your pastor can move beyond talking about God to sharing an experience of God.

It all begins innocently enough in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle, Washington, when a conscientious young couple with two small children decided it was time to find a church home.

By this time the war was over and there was a national feeling that once again God had been on our side.  In the late 40s and early 50s people flocked to the churches out of gratitude for another deliverance.  And my parents were among them.  The actual denomination was incidental.  Mother had some Presbyterian roots and my dad occasionally attended a Methodist Sunday school while being raised by a single parent during the depression.  As it turned out there happened to be a nice little brick church down the alley and a half a block to the left which was Presbyterian.  The Queen Anne United Presbyterian Church became my church home and to this day I claim it as my spiritual family.

In it I was baptized; in it I was taken to Miss Nyman's pre-school Sunday school classes; in it I was given my first Bible when I finished the third grade; in it I was confirmed a part of a confirmation class of two -- consisting of the minister's daughter and myself; in it I said my Christmas pieces every year and even played the part of Joseph for one pageant; in it I preached my first sermon; and in it I was ordained to the Christian ministry.  Clearly the church was a part of my life from my earliest memory.  As such I often took it for granted and upon occasion was ashamed of my association with it.

There was a period in my young life when I desperately sought for the kind of dramatic conversion experience which the television evangelists market so attractively.  How I longed to be delivered from a life of great sin in order to witness to God's grace.  However, I was such a straight kid that I am sure part of my motivation was religious voyeurism.  It seemed that deliverance from sin was a nice excuse to get a little practice at sinning.

But I must confess to you with some shame that my greatest act of religious rebellion was a period during college when I became a Baptist for a short time.

I dare say that this outline of one person's religious history is unremarkable.  It does not dazzle; it does not glamorize; it certainly would not be awarded a spot on the PLT Club or even Robert Schuler's more respectable Hour of Power.  I have no case for arguing with the apostle Paul about who is the chief among sinners.  There is no dramatic conversion experience in my life through which the bad guy suddenly became a good guy.  There have been times when I wished there was but there is not.  Therefore, you may rightly ask of your minister, "Where has God been working in your life and how can you be so sure of God's presence that you are able to point us to it."

In doing that I am much more comfortable with C.S. Lewis's understanding of his own conversion.  When asked about how he came to Christ and what difference it made, he said, "When I came to Christ, I asked God to enter my life and my sins to be forgiven.  But much to my surprise, all of my vices have not been abolished.  I can only say that I smoke a little less, use profanity a little less, and seek the well being of my neighbor a little more."  I am helped by Lewis's outline of his own transformation because its gradualism rings true in my own life.

I am a child of the church who learned of Christ through the church, accepted Christ through the church, and have sought to serve Christ through the church.  However, one would be mistaken to assume that such a journey was without its detours.  My own detours were not as extravagant as those of the prodigal son, but neither was I a child of unquestioning obedience like the elder brother.

My own detours were largely intellectual tempered with some anger, and were a bit iconoclastic.  Early on I made my peace with the existence of God.  It seems clear to me that there is a higher power, a supreme being, a universal consciousness which is behind all of this.  However, the rubber-began-to-meet-the-road for me when I seriously encountered Jesus Christ.

Whatever the metaphysical relationship of Jesus is to God, in Christ I was gripped by a love that would not let me go.  I was captivated by the power of love as the means to transform the world.  Of course, for me the message the love of Christ has been mediated through the scriptures and the church.

It is from the community of the church and the resources of the scriptures that I draw my strength.

Some of you have been listening very carefully in order to learn how I do it.  And I have told you in a very shortened way how I do it.  But what I have left out is a huge section which could be entitled "Advanced Spirituality".  The content of that advanced spirituality course revolves around the theme "in weakness there is strength".

The central paradox of our faith has to do with the cross and the resurrection.  You ask me how I know God; where have I seen God work in my life; where have I felt the presence of God overwhelm me to such a degree that there is no doubt in my mind, not only of the existence of God but also of the power of God to transform a human life.  Where has all of this happened?  It has happened in the broken places of my experience.

Ernest Hemmingway has said, "We are made strong at the broken places."  That is how I have experienced God; that is how I am experiencing God.  How about you?

Amen.