We are people of story. We were made for story, made of story and it is story that helps us survive and evolve. To tell the important stories that have shaped us and to do so in new ways is the gift of imagination and creativity. But it also the stuff that saves us and breathes new life into us.

Personally, I have always been someone who loves to see a Shakespeare play ‘updated’, told with props, scenery and nuance that brings another dimension to a classic tale. While Elizabethan clothing is beautiful and I love looking at it, there is something to be said for hearing the verse of this great playwright spoken by people wearing clothes that are familiar, in scenery I may have experienced. Though, of course, I cannot know it to be true, I somehow like to believe that Shakespeare would also like to see these flights of his imagination brought to life in settings he could not have imagined, allowing him to see the timelessness of the stories he wrote.

Yesterday I attended a production of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at Lake Harriet United Methodist Church in south a Minneapolis. This 1970 rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice was a hit in its time and also one that was shunned as heretical by some. It was the stuff of my youth and I even had the gift of being in a production in college. It was fun to experience how the lyrics, the pauses, the phrasing, the music came flowing back and washing through me as if it had never left. Good stories do that. As the musical tries to answer many of the questions people have had over time about Judas and Jesus, their relationship, the balance of power and justice, Jesus’ own understanding of his life and role in what is the central faith story for the Christian household, it was a massive undertaking by two artists. The fact that this particular rendition of its telling has not been left to some forgotten shelf, to another time of rock opera mania, is fascinating.

And yet it is a story that can be…..actually must be…picked up from its 1970’s home and placed in a new time. This production used a homeless shelter to house its characters. Jesus, Judas, the apostles, Mary Magdalene, all were found in a shelter for the least among us. They were fed at a soup line and surrounded by the various, colorful characters that can be seen at any shelter, in any city, all across the country. Pilate, Herod and those in power looked like those many of us sit next to at desks and see moving along the avenues of business and government. Business suits, red power ties, cellphones close at hand, checking all the important information flowing to us at all times. It was powerful imagery and good theater. The fact that it was created by a church community, with people of all ages, made it even more so.

So much of the time we like to keep our faith stories where they were….written two thousand years ago or more. We like to do the work of studying historical context and unpacking language interpretation to better understand what the writers of the stories really intended. This is important work to do but it can also allow us to stay in our head, to think that this faith thing is a purely intellectual exercise. But the real test of a story and of faith is to bring the intention and power of that story off the page and into our living, to let it into our heart. That’s what this production did for me…..a show that in the time it was written, was likely thought might become just a campy musical created by people who wanted to have guitars in church, to distance themselves from the hymns of their parents and grandparents. To see the story we have all been walking through once again in this Lent brought to life by regular people, re-imagining it for our time, placing it at the intersection of one of our biggest challenges we know as a nation and a faith tradition…..homelessness….was brilliant and prophetic. To them all, I say ‘Bravo!’

I say ‘bravo’ and thank you. Thank you for reminding me of the power of story and that these stories we tell are ones that are ‘living’ if we allow them. In that living we we can come to know in new ways their transformational power which is the point, isn’t it?

This production is running one more weekend. If you are reading this in the Twin Cities, I commend it to. You will not be disappointed.