Biography
Arthur Nelson is currently Associate Dean and Professor of Applied Theology at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago. He has been a minister in the Covenant Church for almost 30 years, most recently at Winnetka Covenant Church. Art Nelson has also published numerous articles, poems and prayers which have influenced countless lives. He is also a highly gifted bass-baritone soloist. Active in ecumenical activities and community affairs, he still finds time for his hobbies of running and photography.[Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"God's Story Line and Mine" 
On many a Sunday night, I’m emptying my pockets before going to bed. There on the dresser are some coins, some keys, a wallet and a watch. Nothing unusual except the watch is on a chain and it is old. It reminds me as I look at the date etched on one side that my mother, now ninety, gave it to her lover, who would one day be my dad. There’s even a picture of my mother under the gold cover on the other side. Not just any picture, but one taken at the time of their engagement. And the whole thing swims a memory sequence past my mind God in their hearts, Christ in our home, God in years of sickness and death.

There is also a gold fob hanging on the watch chain and I'm glad when the cold weather comes, and my vested suits make it possible for me to wear the chain and the watch and the fob. The gold disk is a medal presented to my dad by Mayor Thompson of Chicago in 1922 for winning an ice skating championship. And it reminds me of cold winter days, of great skating in the park, the man who flooded the rink, the smell of wet wool in the warming house, and the feeling in my ankles walking three blocks home.

Some of my earliest remembrances of my father are those of sitting in his lap in church in Douglas Park. It was a comfortable feeling. Later I remember being embarrassed sitting next to him in the pew while he occasionally slept. The rigors of long work hours were soothed in this lovely sanctuary. I see some years later still in Union Station in Chicago waiting for my oldest brother to get off the train after war in the South Pacific, and the year of hospitalization from emotional shock. I see Dad as he spots Bob coming off the train, far down the track, and moving quickly with tears running down his face to take him in his arms and hug him. I remember turning away and playing with my gloves. When I grew older I began to be proud of my father, who held me in his lap, who embraced my brother, and who was free to cry in public.

I marvel at the things God preserves in my mind and out of which he has warmed my emotional and spiritual fires. And then, I marvel at what He is doing now for me, to show me how fresh is His grace and how powerful is His love.

I read the story of Nicodemus and I am struck by the fact that here is a poignant vignette, picked out of his story line, a piece that has become food and feast for generations of those who have welcomed the way God’s intentions for the world are revealed through human conversation — human encounter with the Son of God.

When I told you pieces of my story, and when you listened to the one from John chapter 3, in each case you have listened to linear chapters among the many that go into the story of a life.

There are essentially two ways to look at life. Many people feel that existence is a scattering of fragments — a series of brush fires here and there, the ashes of which get blown across the landscapes of our lives in no real discernable pattern at all. For these the book of life is more a like a loose-leaf note book — the pages can be stacked or shuffled and it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference how because life’s events don’t appear to relate to a center or to a single author at all. There is no continuing quality in one day following after another either in terms of the work that we are called to or the people that we are blessed with. But the Judeo-Christian tradition, and particularly Christianity, insist instead that life has the characteristics of a narrative, as opposed to being thrown together loose-leaf.

We of the Biblical persuasion see life as a string of beads, carefully done by a loving God, rather than a handful of confetti thrown aimlessly into the human parade.

In the great long Biblical story of salvation, Nicodemus does not emerge out of the blue, unannounced, to hear coined a new phrase about the nature of the revolutionary love and grace of the Deliverer God. When Jesus says to him, “You must be born again”, the Lord is dealing from scratch with a human being who is bewildered with the assumption that he has to start over, that he has to do something once again to “make it” with his Father. The Lord, in turn, reminds him that the One by whose creative breath every person becomes a living soul also shares His life-changing Spirit with all who will receive. You see, the author will write us into the narrative of the redemption of the world in our own time by the lifting of our sail to catch the wind of His Spirit.

In the great story of the peculiar people, Israel, in that pinnacle narrative of an obscure carpenter of Nazareth, the Savior, and the new Israel which He crafted into being, the Church, there is momentous importance, and the importance lies not just in what all those individual stories say, but the fact that they are all connected stories. Christianity is not based on a pail-full of philosophical fragments, it is not a faith of unrelated proverbs — proof-texts to fit anywhere you wish to place them. Christianity is a narrative. There was a beginning, there is a present and there is the anticipation of a goal to which it is all pointing, the shape of which we have a good clear idea about by virtue of what God has already revealed to us. And if we know that life is to be a string of beads, and that it fits, it is because we trust Him who is the author and the finisher, and watch for His wonder unfolding in our daily log. “For if you disbelieve me when I talk about things on earth,” says the Scripture, “How are you to believe if I should talk of things in Heaven?”

Salvation itself means wholeness, wholeness means having one’s story together — being able to relate it and to relate to it. If we cannot really tell the story of who we have been to this point, of what is happening now, of what we hope may yet come, we are not really whole. If our story is fragmented, if there are parts of it that we wish we could forget or which we have rejected, then we are not really one person, but a series of characters in search of an author to put us together. And that, of course, is exactly what salvation is. The Author of all creation provides the plot that allows us to put the parts of our story together and make it whole. So, the first necessity for salvation is that we live within the plot that God provides.

The second requirement of wholeness is accepting responsibility for our own stories. In one of his essays, Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men and women lead lives of quiet desperation.” Whether he was speaking of his time or of all time, we don’t know. His words surely are appropriate to life in our time. The marks of quiet desperation are everywhere. We cover up, of course. Through music and clothes and parties and games we camouflage the moods, the restlessness and the longing. We are not supposed to let on, we are to pretend that all is well. It would be weak of us to admit the loneliness of our quiet solitude. Hand it to Nicodemus, he came out of his shell, he knew it wasn’t making sense.

Even the church sometimes becomes a shelter for our desperation. We dress up, we speak the formal prayers, we participate in the ancient rites, and yet tears of joy or sadness are seldom seen among us. The terrifying experiences of the week are rarely voiced with openness. The dashed hopes and the broken vows are not always expressed. Instead we substitute stoicism, puritanism or victorianism — we hide our hurts — it’s simpler that way.

It shows, too, in the pace of our living. It has been said, in days of old, that if a man or a woman missed a stage coach, they sat down and waited for the next one. Today, they cuss if they miss the next slot in the revolving door. We drive our cars as fast as we dare so that we can get home quickly, where we are bored. And people say so. We busy ourselves with a host of activities that seem good and fun, but mean nothing — they don’t fit.

John Osborne, the English playwright, gives these lines to a character in the play, Look Back in Anger, “Most humans want to escape the pain of being alive and most of all, of love.” Is that true? True of you? And me? Are we afraid of the pain of being alive — afraid of love? Has T.S. Eliot given us a chorus to chant as a replacement to the Benedictus?
                 We are the hollow people,
                 We are the stuffed people,
                 Leaning together,
                 Headpiece filled with straw.
                 Alas.
 
Well, if our answer to these questions is yes, we are quietly desperate. We are lonely and longing. We are weary of the racing. We are tired of prescriptions that don’t heal. We are escaping the pain of being alive and, most of all, of love. We are empty within. If that is the picture of our years, kind of like a pail-full of stones that don’t meet and match and make any sense, then we are those to whom Christ most wants to come, at midnight, or daylight, or anytime at all, and go to the Bible and find that that is the thread of the whole salvation story.

This brings us to the fact that our personal story is part of a larger history. We have stories of nation and race and gender which surround and direct our personal narrative. We buy into the stories of our family history, our genealogy, our lodge, our church, our town. We plug in many places.

In Kansas City, a few years ago, a dog wandered on to the baseball field, trotted around the infield and sat down on third base. The whole crowd of people began to yell and whistle at him. “Bite the Umpire”, “Run for Home”, “Get off the field”. But the dog didn’t move. Finally, he had to be carried off the field and a sports writer-commentator said later that the dog didn’t move because of the great confusion of voices, he didn’t hear anyone dominant enough to obey.

There are many voices, systems, priorities, “isms” shouting at us to accept them as our own. Is there one voice from the crowd dominant enough to move you? The New Testament story claims that Jesus Christ is that singular, marvelous, compelling voice. The very Word of God, God’s communication to us, the Voice of the Eternal, molded into the finite verb of the human person, a language that every earth-bound person can understand. That new story is God’s gift to us who have been caught in the midst of old tales that have already been told too often and too poorly. The new story which is told in Christ comes in a still, small voice. It’s not the speech of thunder, rather it’s the mighty exclamation of the falling leaf or the snowflake. For the obscurity of the way God usually chooses to speak is for a very good reason. If God shouted directly into our ears, we would have no choice but to live within that story. Faith would be force instead. Coerced affection is rape, not love. God never takes away from us the freedom to have holes and smudges in our narratives. That’s why we must take responsibility for the writing of our stories and not be surprised at the mix of results that we get along the way.

God’s storyline from Eden to Egypt, to Canaan, to Jerusalem, by way of Moses and David and St. Paul and two people named Martin Luther and several generations of millions of people in the same line in which our names and destinies are written. Put your name there, for the storyline has the clear intention of redemption. Wholeness. God wants the whole story of His grace written into the whole story of your life.

For God so loved the world that He sent His personal rescuer to our world to search us out in our lost direction. He literally died — showing us the way back. He placed His Son, Christ Jesus, in our human situation, watched Him isolated away from the world, all alone on Death Hill, rescued Him from the yawning loneliness of a one room sepulcher on a day we call Easter.

If a great cosmic God can be that personal and that serious about the salvation of the universe, can’t you see that He is serious about you and me?

That’s the message I’ve always gotten when I let my memories at the end of the day be washed over by the assurance that my stories are part of His story. That’s what Jesus had in mind for Nicodemus. Unless and until we are surprised by grace and have let down our barriers to the Spirit’s wind, life may just continue to seem like a looseleaf collection, and we’ll lack excitement when he tells us about the things of Heaven.