“The Spirit of God made me what I am, the breath of God gave me life!” Job 33:4

This past Sunday our church community was blessed to have storyteller Kevin Kling with us to further Illuminate our theme of ‘A Story to Stand On’. What a gifted human being he is! The ways in which he can weave a story that makes you laugh down to the tips of your toes, and then in the next minute turn to a subject of such depth and poignancy that you want to weep, is a testament to his talent. And permeating it all is a humility and a full-bodied grace that is, quite simply, like being in the presence of a shaman.

The stories he told chronicled his experiences of being struck by lightning, the wisdom and diversity of the love for his two grandmothers, the difference in telling a story in Minnesota and in New York, and his motorcycle accident that left him with a permanent disability. All were very full and inspiring stories.

But the one statement that had me running for a scrap piece of paper and a pencil was his description of the Bible. He made it while talking about the gift of the oral storytelling tradition. He pointed out the power of stories that had their first lives, not on a printed page, but as tales passed down from person to person around fires and food laden tables, over tankards of mead and as tales that lured children(and adults) to sleep.

“The Bible’s first cover was flesh and its first words were breath.” he said. How often we forget that this is true! There were no reporters poised with pens or cameras to ‘get the perfect quote’ or ‘record the statement ‘word for word’ as spoken by Moses or Abraham or Esther or Jesus. The truth of the stories were told over time, again and again, reflecting the meaning the teller found in the content. These storytellers carried these messages in their bodies with hope and promise of passing them on and shaping their children and their children’s children. The words they chose were carried on the breath given to them by the One who breathed them into being and delighted in the unfolding lives of the story keepers. It was only over time that the stories were written down, again with an interpretive telling by those who had the training and resources to do so.

It was a great reminder for those of us in the church who continue to haul these stories out each week. It was an important message to remember that the words we hold as sacred have always been so but perhaps in different ways at different times in the life of the faithful. And these same stories, if we do our work well, will continue to be heard and embodied in still different ways for the church of the future-whatever that looks like.

So many times we want to argue over the ink on the page, assign it perhaps more power than it deserves rather than holding the story’s message lightly. Or better yet, allowing the story to get inside our flesh and be carried around while the words begin to fade into the distance and become a part of our very breathing.

Flesh and breath…..the embodied story of God.