This morning's devotional in our Mennonite Church publication Rejoice urged us to tell our stories as witnesses where God has acted in our lives. This is something that I have also frequently talked and perhaps written about. Indeed, I have even given related sermons. Indeed, there are writers in society at large to mourn the decline of storytelling. Like so many things in our world, including music and sports, storytelling is something that is relegated to professionals as in movies and novels.
There are those in our Mennonite circles who have written and continue to write about where God has acted in their lives. Much of this has focused on their deliverances from untenable living situations in the USSR. Many of those storytellers are passing on, and many untold stories with them.
Sometimes stories are not told because the telling is too painful. At other times, it is because we think our stories are such that no one else would be interested in hearing, or understanding them. Some people are not sure they have a listener. When it comes to we as Mennonites telling our stories, we have sometimes talked about how this function has declined in our circles because, in order to live peaceably, we agreed, in essence, at various places and times in our history, as we moved about to escape persecution, not to tell our stories, at least not to those beyond our circles. The larger world and the dominant church in the world in those days in particular, meaning either Catholic, Reformed or Lutheran denominations, was not interested in our version of how God worked in the world and in our lives. So, we became known, amongst ourselves at least, as "Die Stille im Lande," "The quiet in the land."
In our Western society today, with its emphasis on pluralism and tolerance, religious freedom and separation of church and state etc., telling such stories continues to be frowned on. It is one thing to have one's own belief, and that is accepted, but it is not accepted to tell others about it, particularly if there is a motive of wanting them to convert to your religion. We often hear the expression in our society that religion and politics are 2 topics that are kept out of polite conversation. Indeed, in many parts of the world, such activity is outlawed and Christians are put to death for breaking those rules.
A prominent Canadian lawyer recently epitomized the view in Canada when he clearly stated, as a well-trained lawyer would do, that in Canada we accept the right of people to believe what they want. However, when it comes to acting on those beliefs, the laws of the land supersede because those actions might impinge negatively on others. He was speaking about a recent situation in BC where Trinity Western University (TWU) continues to fight for the freedom to educate professionals in a Christian setting where they are requested to abide by certain covenants that govern behavior. The one in question here was to refrain from homosexual activity. A number of lawyers and provincial law societies do not want TWU-trained lawyers to be able to practice simply because their training is in a school where that is part of the code of conduct. As representatives of the school have said, that does not mean that homosexuals cannot attend their school, and indeed due in graduate.
This lawyer's attitude, in my mind, illustrates a basic misunderstanding of the role of religion in a person's life. Indeed, sometimes I think we should leave the word religion to refer to certain faith-based practices, rituals and celebrations, that the religious can do amongst themselves, without really at risk of infecting others. Indeed, sometimes these aspects have come to be seen as more cultural and accepted as expressions of that, then arising from religion. For such reasons I have sometimes said that we really should not use the word religion when we are talking about our faith and way of life.
True religion, as we Anabaptists know, includes a way of life. That was one of the big differences between our spiritual ancestors and the church at the time. There was little emphasis on living a life of discipleship as Jesus taught. Some have pointed to how the accepted creeds of the day fostered this by referring to the Trinity, God is creator, then Jesus' miraculous birth at the beginning, before jumping to refer to his death and resurrection, saying nothing about the years in between and all of his actions and teachings and what the meaning of all of that was.
