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“…it’s all about what you think the normal story is…”
The Rev. Samuel Wells
from the podcast Everything Happens with Kate Bowler
November 19, 2024
The cycle of church seasons, begun each Advent, proclaims God’s grace to all creation, so it may seem odd to begin this season alongside Jesus in his final days, overturning bankers’ tables and upsetting political stability at the center of Jewish life. We seem to say that our story begins at the end of his. But isn’t that always where we find ourselves, between the beginning and the end of God’s story that surpasses our personal one?
In the 2024 interview referenced above, Sam Wells, who visited St. Stephen’s two weeks ago, was reflecting on suffering and the fact that what we expect reality to be for us, that what we expect is normal, shapes both our experience of reality and our response to it. In this time when less and less fits what I have expect to be normal about life in America, I am reexamining the story I have held at the center of my life and pondering not its validity but how to live it more fully, how to “hold fast to that which is good, render to no one evil for evil, strengthen the faint hearted, support the weak, honor everyone, love and serve God, rejoicing in the Spirit…” as the great Anglican benediction goes.
What stands at the center of “what you think the normal story is?” What part of that story must be renewed, rejected, or lived more fully for the love of God and the life of the world?
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