Harry Spiller collects things. I have learned that Harry collects string, for example: he has mounds of it in his New York City apartment. Harry collects plastic spoons, too: bags upon boxes of plastic tableware. And Harry boasts the world’s largest collection, I am sure, of menus from take-out Chinese restaurants: he has accumulated more than 10,000 of the documents. “I have close to a million things in my apartment,” Harry admitted.
I met Harry, actually, on the radio. He was selected recently to share his story with an organization called “StoryCorps“. StoryCorps travels about the United States collecting, well, stories — more than 30,000 of them so far. They roll up in a specially adapted Airstream trailer, record bunches of stories, and make them available on the internet. Week by week, they are broadcast on the radio or distributed by podcast. The entire repository is available, too, at the Library of Congress online. Stories. Fun, quirky, extraordinary, life.
Has the Airstream appeared in your neighborhood? What kind of story are you weaving through the pages of your life?
Actually, for Christians, the question is a little sideways. Christians have discovered a fundamental truth about the universe that surrounds them: it is not so much that we are weaving a story through the pages of our lives; God is. God is the Master Story Teller. God is the Author. The only story worth telling, in the end, is the Story that emerges from the Master.
If I were the author, I am sure, the plot would have turned out rather differently. I might not have included such a prominent role for sin and death, for example. I would not have a cross in the middle of the story, either. And why permit illness and rebellion to appear so frequently? I would have authored a story that was happier and tidier and more consistent, in my humble estimation.
But God has taken an Entirely Different Track. He does not ignore our sin or paper it over lightly, as I might have done; God faces our sin and death head-on. He judges and defeats them in a Twist of Plot that is so extraordinary, so unexpected, that it takes your very breath away. He calls it “Good News.”
“Good News” is the story of God’s judgment and grace in the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. In the person of this Jesus and his sacrifice at Calvary, God judges our sin: “He made him to be sin who knew no sin.” And then he sets us wonderfully free: “…that we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Martin Luther called the transaction “the Blessed Exchange.” We might call it, simply, salvation. You heap your brokenness and sin on Jesus Christ; he trades you back again his blessedness, his grace, his life. Even up. And he offers “the Blessed Exchange” to absolutely everyone who will receive it.
And there is even more. When we are ourselves “exchanged” — when we have met Jesus at the foot of the cross, left our sin there and received his grace in return – why, we are made exchange agents for those around us. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18). It is as if God rolls up in an Airstream trailer and makes us a part of his very own “StoryCorps”: he gives us the opportunity to share the Good News that we have ourselves received. “God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing” (v.20, The Message).
This is the story of Jesus Christ. This is the story of his cross and empty tomb. Yet if we have met him, if we have exchanged our lives, his story becomes our story, too. He has made us a part of the corps. He has written us into his story.