Luke 1:1-4 A Gospelist’s Introduction
Date: 12/2/19 Monday, 3:22 PM, Writing room
Today I knelt before my little prayer table and lit three candles. I suppose these could represent the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; or Creator, Christ, and Spirit. But let’s face it, they’re perfectly ordinary candles; Moe, Larry, and Curly candles. Except. The story I tell about them in my mind serves to represent – make present to my senses – the Divine. Images cluster around the candles: they’re Shabbos candles, a gift from my wife; one’s in a votive holder that my daughter decorated as stained glass. An origami peace dove folded by my son is behind them. There’s a picture I made of Jacob wrestling with God. There’s a cross.
“New every morning is your love, great God of light,” I pray. “And all day long you are working for good in the world.”
Knowing the story.
I take guides on my story journey. Fred Craddock and M. Eugene Boring point out that “historical accuracy was not his [Luke’s] concern” but rather Luke tried to show “how the events fit into God’s plan for the history of salvation.”
Or, I would say, Luke writes “so that you may know the truth,” not “so you may know the facts.” Theophilus has been instructed; now he is to learn the truth.
I have memorized this prologue several times and got it back pretty easily. It’s one long sentence, both in Greek and in English. It rolls off the tongue, clause after clause. The only problem is getting started on the right word. For some reason, I first memorized the opening words as “inasmuch as many have undertaken”; in the NRSV, it’s “Since many….” Since. Since. Since.
Telling the story.
I imagine Luke sitting down at his computer, fingers twitching with excitement. He’s about to write a story about the truth, a story about Jesus. And as we follow his tale, we’ll see lots of storytelling features. There’s a character in a context with a conflict (or a character in a setting with a problem). The character will be likable; the problem will be world-threatening; the setting will be (to us) peculiar, even wondrous. The necessities for a good story. But all that’s still in Luke’s head. Even so, despite the formal literary language here, some of Luke’s excitement should show. In a live event, I would hit the words “you may know the truth” pretty hard.
Living the story.
My guides say that the audience includes “all present readers of the Bible and invites us into the narrative that follows, to hear it as our own story.” Well, I’m a reader. We’ll see.
My goal is to memorize the Gospel According to St. Luke. Why? A year ago I retired. Now I have lots of time to read the Internet. My own sin is ever before me as I waste time there, and I also find political upheaval, social tensions, injustice, despair, and anger. Its cute stories about cats do not satisfy my hunger for something bigger, something hopeful. Something transformative.
That’s my own setting, that’s the problem I bring to the story. Like Theophilus, I’ve been instructed. Like Theophilus, I need to know the truth.
Almost forty years ago, I lost my job, painfully. So I moved to Dayton, Ohio, to go to school. First day, first semester, I walked into a class on the New Testament. Dr. Tom Boomershine started the class by saying: “In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus…” Then he followed up with “Jesus said to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven.” And so on, nine full stories, all the way through “you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here.” Told from memory. I’d heard of preachers who could pull a verse from here, a verse from there, and connect them. I’d never heard of anyone telling whole stories.
And I was like, what? The Gospel is a story? Not a set of dusty laws and dry text and singleton verses?
Changed my life, back then. Because it turned out that knowing the story by memory is also knowing the story by heart. It has been the most powerful spiritual discipline in my life. I had given it up for years.
Memorizing a gospel? Sounds like the challenge I need.
Dave Raines, Writer 