Shop Class

7^th grade shop class can be brutal.  No matter how they try to dress up the title “industrial arts,” we all know seventh graders are not particularly industrial individuals, bearing more in common developmentally with toddlers than they do with second graders.  The projects created are not so much artful or useful as they are something to weigh down papers, or become a shelf upon which papers might be set, or something to be given to grandmothers, who are the only people who can truly treasure such objects.  “Oooh, how nice.  Can you tell me about your creation, honey?” Shop teachers are not always so much craftspeople as they are storytellers.  And, once upon a time, in a particular small town in Iowa, a shop teacher began the class before they were to use the saws and power tools in the normal way, talking of a young man who tried to cut a golf ball in half but ended up cutting off two of his fingers instead.  He told a story of a young woman who didn’t bother to put the bandsaw guard down and cut off part of her thumb.  Today, the storytelling was a little different.  A smart redhead from the back of the room raised her hand.  She usually had something intelligent, or at least amusing, to say, and so he called on her.  “That isn’t how the story happened.  That girl is my sister.”  I don’t know what she said, whether she conveyed the fact that the guard was rusted in place, or whether she told the teacher he hadn’t been paying attention when the incident happened, but I don’t know I’ve ever felt such pride in my sister, who had the courage to say, “That’s not the way the story goes.”

In many ways, we are all storytellers, constructing our narratives as they bounce off of other narratives, shaping our identities as we bump into other peoples’ identities.  We tell stories.  We tell each other’s stories.  Sometimes we catch a glimpse of a truth that we would rather not see as we hear these stories.  We hear stories of people who have been oppressed by Christians, western Christians specifically, of how identities and stories came to Minnesota and didn’t recognize that the story of the Dakotas was already here or, worse, the refusal to make room for these stories, sending the stories and the people West, distancing one truth from another as though mutually exclusive.  We hear stories of quests for gold, for spices, for slaves, for land, for minerals, for sugar, for chocolate, and the grotesque details of the story make us want to turn away; sometimes the truth is too much to bear.  Do we force ourselves to listen, aghast at our capacity for cruelty, hating those “out there” whose actions and stories break into ours?  Do we turn away, “That’s not me.  That’s not my story,” because someone else’s telling has cast us not as the protagonist, but as the sinister villain?  Sometimes, I think the true power of a story is not what it tells, but what it does not tell.  From the margins of the page comes the question, “Is that it?”

"…it would be better if…" Jesus says, and the violent imagery explodes all over the page, littering our imaginations with threats of handless and footless people blindly groping, tripping, lugging our sinless deformed bodies to heaven.  The page doesn’t seem to have room for the margin, and we’ve all stopped listening, plugging our ears for fear that what comes next is worse than what came before.  We could look past the story, we could avoid it, we could allow the parts of the Bible that confuse, confound, or disturb us lie there, but they tend to become a voiceless echo that is impossible to shake as we hear their iterations in society around us.  We want to say, “That’s not me.  That’s not Christianity.  That’s not faith,” but our voices from the margin of the page seem to be so quiet we stand powerless to the bullhorn proclamations of what is sin and who is guilty.

But what if we are being asked to listen to what is not being said, to what is coming from the edges of script, from the limits of language, in a world that assumes what is printed is all that is?  We assume that what is printed on the page, these words that Jesus said, are about Jesus’ reality and not about ours.  But what if Jesus is saying all of this, inviting us to look at the story of humans oppressing other humans, of looking at other humans as responsible for the systems of sin in which we willingly and unwillingly participate, and looking at the crowd, waiting for someone to raise their hand and say, “That’s not how the story goes!”

Does Jesus really imagine handless, footless, blinded people lugging their crosses up to heaven, all the while debating amongst ourselves who is the greatest among us?  From the printed page, it looks like only the strong, only the beautiful, only the sinless, only the good, only the well-behaved, only those who get it right get into heaven.  From the margins, from the parts of the page covered with binge-reading chocolate thumbprints, from the parts covered with our salty snot tears of fear, despair, and unbelief, Jesus places us in the middle of the page, taking us into his arms.  You are the salt of the earth.  You are the reason for this story, this story of pain, of sorrow, of transcendent joy, and of stark beauty that catches your breath as you're ready to walk away, to call it quits, to let someone else’s story tell your truth.

It would be better if… and we raise our hands, “That’s not how the story goes!”  This is the story of a man who came to show us how to be, how to love, how a mustard-seed faith can move mountains, how a people so small and so insignificant can be beloved of God, and how God can look at snot-nosed crybabies and say, “You are mine.”  It is not from what is printed on the page that the story is told.  It is from the edges, from what we can barely see and can hardly understand, that we see Jesus, carrying the crosses we thought were ours, limping under the weight of love, not giving God a payment for our sin, but redefining the terms of what it is to be loved.  God has determined to write a story, a tragedy, a comedy, a romance, a drama, in which the motley cast of characters, in all of their weaknesses, in all of their failures, are deeply loved.  When wethink the story is about one thing, it’s about another, and when they think we have been written out of the story, we are brought front and center to tell the truth: you may not be beautiful, you may not be sinless, you may not be good, you may not even want to be good, and you may not get it right, but you are beloved of God.

You are the people of this story, both the ones who tell the story and the ones about whom the story was written.  You are the salt of the earth.  You cannot lose your saltiness because the salt-stained tears that stream across your face are the ones that inspire you to stand and say: “That’s not how the story goes!”  It is here you tell the truth not only about your story and the stories of those who may still be thinking that all that is printed is all there is; it is here you tell God’s story, of a broken-holy creation and a sinner-saint people and a God who is completely head over heels for the creation and its people. God refuses to let you tell the story without reading what lies between the lines.