We have all had defining stories happen in our families and our personal lives that would make great teaching parables. They are interesting stories in themselves but they also serve as vehicles which we can load with spiritual truths and deliver to our people.
Most congregations might enjoy this kind of a diversion in your preaching. (But, everything inside me cries, “Don’t overdo it!!!”)
By the way. We generally think of “parables” as stories made up to convey a point. What I’m talking about here–and which I’m calling your own personal parables–are true stories. Might need to find a different term for them. Anyway….
Here are three examples–
One. Eugene Peterson, in his book on the Psalms, “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction,” gives one of his own parables.
He begins, “An incident took place a few years ago that has acquired the force of a parable for me.”
Peterson was in a hospital room, recovering from minor surgery on his nose which had been broken years earlier in a basketball game. The pain was great and he was in no mood for fellowship.
The young man in the next bed wanted to chat. Peterson brushed him off–his name was Kelly–but overheard him telling his visitors that evening that “the fellow in the next bed is a prizefighter. He got his nose broken in a championship fight.” Kelly proceeded to embellish it beyond that.
Later, after the company had left, Peterson told him what had actually happened and they got acquainted. When Kelly found out he was a pastor, he wanted nothing more to do with him and turned away.
The next morning, Kelly shook Peterson awake. His tonsillectomy was about to take place and he was panicking. “I want you to pray for me!” He did, and they wheeled him to surgery.
After he returned from surgery, Kelly kept ringing for the nurse. “I hurt. I can’t stand it. I’m going to die.”
“Peterson!” he kept calling, “Pray for me. Can’t you see I’m dying? Pray for me.”
The staff held him down and quietened him and after a while all was well.
Peterson writes, “When the man was scared, he wanted me to pray for him, and when the man was crazy he wanted me to pray for him, but in between, during the hours of so-called normalcy, he didn’t want anything to do with a pastor. What Kelly betrayed ‘in extremis’ is all many people know of religion: a religion to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of….”
Here’s a second parable. John Ortberg tells this in his book “The Life You’ve Always Wanted.”
Tony Campolo was about to speak at a Pentecostal college chapel service. Eight men from the school took him into an off room to pray for him. They knelt around him, laid hands upon him, and began besieging heaven.
That was good, except they prayed a long time. And as prayed, they grew tired. And as they tired, they began to lean more and more on Campolo. Eventually, he was bearing the weight of all eight of them!
To add insult to injury, one guy was not even praying for Tony.
He was interceding for somebody named Charlie Stoltzfus. “Dear Lord, you know Charlie Stoltzfus. He lives in that silver trailer down the road a mile. You know the trailer, Lord, just down the road on the right hand side.”
Tony thought about informing the guy that the Lord did not need directions to find Charlie Stoltzfus.
“Lord,” the man continued, “this morning Charlie told me he’s going to leave his wife and three kids. Step in and do something, God. Bring that family back together.”
Finally the prayers ended, Tony was able to stand to his feet, they had the chapel service, and he got in his car to drive home. Just as he was merging onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he noticed a hitchhiker on the side of the road and decided to give him a ride.
As they rode along, Tony introduced himself. The man stuck out his hand and said, “My name is Charlie Stoltzfus.”
Tony could not believe his ears.
At the next exit, Tony left the interstate and turned the car around. As they returned to the interstate, Charlie said, “Hey mister–where are you taking me?”
Tony said, “I’m taking you home.”
He said, “Why?”
Campolo said, “Because you just left your wife and three kids, right?”
The man was stunned. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. I did.”
He moved over against the door and never took his eyes off Campolo.
Then, when Tony drove the car right into the guy’s yard, that really did it.
His eyes bulged out. He said, “How did you know I live here?”
“The Lord told me.” (He did, Tony insists, but not the way the guy thought.)
The trailer door threw open and Charlie’s wife ran out. “You’re back! You’re back!”
Charlie whispered in her ear what had happened. The more he talked, the bigger her eyes got.
Campolo relates this story and adds, “Then I said with real authority, ‘The two of you sit down. I’m going to talk and you two are going to listen!’ And man, did they listen!”
That afternoon, he led those two young people to the Lord.
That’s a story, a real one, and a parable from which Tony Campolo draws all kinds of spiritual lessons.
What’s your parable?
Your parable is a story that has happened to you. It’s yours and no one else’s. You tell it better than anyone on earth. You are the authority on it.
Third. Our family has a parable of our own, one we call the banana story.
I must have been 9 years old. Mom was seriously ill in the hospital in Beckley, West Virginia, and our coal miner Dad was left to look after the six children ranging in ages from 5 to 14. That Saturday morning, he had shopped for groceries at the company store, then took Glenn, the 13 year old, with him to visit Mom at the hospital.
That morning, Dad had bought a dozen bananas and left them atop the refrigerator. When he returned from the hospital, there was not a banana in the house. Dad was furious.
He called the five of us children in for an accounting.
For all but one of us, this was the first we had heard of the missing bananas. Obviously one had eaten them, but it wasn’t me and I was pretty sure it was not my sisters, Patricia 11, and Carolyn, 7. That left the 5 year old, Charlie, and the 14 year old, Ronnie.
It did not take a Sherlock Holmes to conclude Ronnie was the culprit. But why Pop did not figure this out, we never knew.
Dad announced that if the guilty party did not step forward, he was going to whip all five of us. And when he gave a whipping, it was a milestone in your life, something you would never forget.
Dad’s weapon of choice was the mining belt, some four inches wide and a half-inch think. It left a red path across your body.
The younger children started crying immediately. But Dad had no compassion. That day, he whipped all five of us.
He never did find out who had eaten the bananas.
Well, not for many years. From time to time, after we were grown and would all be together, someone would bring up the case of the purloined bananas. Finally, we must have been in our 30s, Ronnie owned up to it.
“A friend and I had come in and we saw those bananas,” he said. They ate one each, then another, and pretty soon there were none left. “I was going to admit it until I saw how mad Pop was.”
He said, “I figured better to spread the whipping out among five than take all of it on myself.”
No one agreed with that judgment, you will not be surprised to know.
Before making the application–all parables must have appropriate applications and lessons, otherwise they’re meaningless stories–let me point out that our Dad mellowed over the years and developed far more compassion than he showed that day. My assessment is that he was under enormous stress. Mom was not far from the point of death, we were to find out later, and his fear had to be incredible.
My dad was a conservative in a hundred ways. A conservative would rather punish four innocent people than let one guilty go free. A liberal, on the other hand, would rather allow four guilty to go free than punish one innocent person.
That’s my application of that story, and when I’ve used it in a sermon, it was as an introduction to preaching about liberals and conservatives (the Sadducees and Pharisees in the New Testament).
Of course, our brother Ron, a Baptist preacher in Birmingham, had forever stigmatized himself by that banana incident. When he turned 70, we all met him and his wife Dorothy at a Birmingham restaurant. As we walked in, each one of us was carrying a dozen bananas. He takes it in good humor and we all laugh at it now.
What’s your story, your parable? If you cannot think of one, ask your siblings, your children, your spouse. Because every family has them.