Preachers love the Day of Pentecost. There is so much to work with. The images are so vivid, more vivid in our imaginations than they could be in reality, I’m guessing.

One of my favorite plays is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which is rightly called a “tragicomedy”. When I read it, I hear these voices, playful and ignorant. Hopeful and compassionate. It is a beautiful and troubling story of the human condition.

When I saw a production of it in a black-box theater in Boston more than a decade ago, I was thrilled and strangely disappointed. They really did a fantastic job, bringing the vision and the contours alive. And preceding it with two of Beckett’s shorts was like heaven–perhaps too much heaven, in retrospect.

It is impossible for someone else to put in this world what is in my head. That vision is not only captivating, but powerful and moving in a way that only I can render. The physical actors on a stage with their movements make it too real with not enough magic or otherworldly.

That’s what I think of on the Day of Pentecost: those tongues of fire, appearing in their midst, then coming upon their heads. I don’t think a real image could do the same for me as reading about it; imagining it.

This causes me to wonder about the nature of the gospel, of the story that we tell, that we are called to proclaim. Is it the same? Is its truth far more than its actuality?  I do already believe that. So the more probing turn is this: is its power diminished by a need for actuality? Does the gospel lose power the more it becomes about fact? 

This certainly seems the fear conservative evangelicals have launched against the Jesus Seminar. Just as the same tarnishing of the gospel have come along with literalism and inerrancy. Both are (at their worst moments) pursuits of transforming a story into fact; making synonyms of truth and fact. Making what is story into history.

Extracting GOD’s “deeds of power” from the story, and more importantly, from the telling of it, deprives it the very character of Jesus. Withdrawing the very character of GOD from the story. Drawing out history from the story is like fracking the gospel. Extraction from the good earth using chemicals and dynamite. Or blasting the tops of pristine mountains to gain access to what is inside it. We destroy to gain access to the substance of it.

What if we return to the story and treat it like story? Story that makes all the difference. Story that reveals the very work of GOD in our midst. What if we return to telling the story, not to memorize or proof text, but in our communal act of sharing? Sharing and revealing and praising and lifting up ourselves to the Great Liberator.

What if our waiting, constant waiting, for a man’s return is a story best understood in our heads and hearts and gatherings? What if it can’t be staged or locked in a book? Memorized and confined. A prisoner yearning to be free. What if the proper place and understanding of the gospel is in that context and we spend each day waiting with our best friend. Waiting by a tree. The times are happy and sad. We lose hope and find it again. Maybe GOD’s in that.