Texts:

Psalm 25:1-10

Daniel 9:15-25a

2 Timothy 4:1-5

"They will turn away from listening to truth and wander away to myths..."

The word "myth," I think, has taken on meanings today that it lacked in the ancient world.  Story, truth, and myth did not always have the separation that exists for us today.  With the Enlightenment and epistemological debates, "truth" became confined to demonstrable experience; story and myth were relegated to "un-truth," to "fiction," and, sadly, were placed on the back burner as we set off to pursue the meaning of all that is, forgetting that much of our lives' meaning comes through story, through the narrative we share with others and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives.

There is lore that, in an exchange between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Tolkien accused Lewis' unbelivingness in not a failure to beleive but a failure in imagination; Tolkien advocated for seeing Christianity as the true myth.  Love of story has wrapped people up in the Judeo-Chrisitan narrative for centuries.

Even as Daniel writes of the confession of sin, he points to the story of the Hebrew people's deliverance from slavery in Egypt, the narrative wrapping up prophets who came several millenia later.  The story points forward and back - forward to God's promise of once again delivering God's people, and back to their forebears' deliverance.  Narrative, story, and myth do something that we cannot do for ourselves: they tell more of the truth than what we give them credit.  Once told, the story expands in the lives of the hearers, becoming a part of their narrative, a part of their reality.

Truth weaves in and out of story and in and out of myth.  Each story holds within it a seed of truth.  It is when we consider the Bible and the story weaved throughout that a pattern emerges: the truth about humanity is that we are no sooner made free than we bind ourselves to something other than God.  The truth about God is that God looses the bonds, again, and again, untangling us from the messes we knowingly and unknowingly create.  The task of story is to tell the truth.  The task of truth is to proclaim a story that is worth believing, that wraps people up in the story, propelling it onward, pointing both forward and back until we cannot see where God's story ends and our story begins, for they are one and the same.