One of my seminary teachers once said that if you can’t think of anything original to preach, you should tell Bible stories—they have enough power to turn people’s hearts toward God. This may not work with every text, but it certainly works with the drama and wisdom of the story of Naboth and the story of the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears.
The Bible is full of strange things—oil cruets and flour containers that never become empty and young bodies that are restored to life at a word from Jesus. Are we supposed to believe that these things happened? Maybe the ancient peoples did, but we moderns suffer under the curse of Bultmann’s lightbulb: we know why the light switches on. We are cursed by rationalities that prevent us from seeing the Bible as one overarching story in which our own lives play a key role.
Calvin Trillin’s lighthearted and best-selling tribute to his late wife, Alice, has made husbands like me nervous. By “like me” I mean the ordinary, absentminded kind—husbands who have little more than a 50-50 chance of guessing correctly when their wives ask, “Do you notice anything different about me?” In essays that Trillin wrote as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Alice made regular appearances. Throughout their 36-year marriage, Trillin catalogued her sense of humor, her sense of style and her childlike sense of wonder.