The Greatest Story Almost Told

Psalm 90

Prayer of Moses, a man of Elohim:
Adonai, you have been our dwelling place from age to age.
Before the heights were raised up, or you wrought the earth and the world,
from age that was to age to come, you are God.
You turn humans back to dust,
and say, "Return, you children of humanity."
For a thousand years in your eyes are like yesterday when it is past,
or like a watch in the night.
You sweep them away; they pass like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning.
In the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.
For we are consumed by your anger;
by your wrath we are terrified.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your countenance.
For all our days pass away before your overflowing fury,
our time comes to an end like a breathed moan.
The days we are given number seventy years,
or perhaps, if we are strong, eighty years.
Even so they are days of toil and sorrow,
they pass quickly and we fly away.
Who knows the strength of your anger?
Equal to the respect you command is your wrath.
So teach us how to count our days,
and lead us to wisdom.
Return, YHWH. How long?
Have compassion on your servants.
Sate us in the morning with your faithfulness,
and we will shout and rejoice all our days.
Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us,
and as many years as we have seen evil.
Reveal to your servants your works,
and to their children your glory.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and may the work of our hands be established -
O may the work of our hands be established.

Zack Stonecaster knew exactly where he had been when he started to feel like his life was broken. It was a week ago at 6:54 AM on the banks of the Po River near his hometown of Mattaponi Courthouse, Virginia. He was jogging down a soggy path that ran along the river and he stopped because he felt a twinge in his knee. He knew this wasn’t a great place to go running; there were too many holes and obstacles. But he loved being next to the water.

When he felt the twinge he chastised himself mentally for taking the risk. “Now I’ve done it,” he thought to himself. “I’ve twisted my knee and I’ll be out of commission for a week or two at least.” Zack was only twenty-seven years old but he could be very cautious. He always seemed a lot older than he appeared.

But that’s not the moment when Zack started to feel like his life was broken. That moment came when he looked up from his knee and saw the goose. It was a snow goose limping along to the open water. It’s right wing was stretched out in an awkward position. It was close to the migration season and there were lots of snow geese in the area, but this one wouldn’t be going any further. It’s wing was broken. Zack watched in silence as the goose squawked and slid painfully into the water. That’s when it happened. That’s when Zack started to feel like all was not right with his world.

Not that he had a whole lot to concern him. He was still a young man with a big future ahead of him. But lately the big future was weighing heavy on him. After college he had gone off to Northern Virginia to work as a software engineer, thinking that he would love the opportunity, the excitement, the crowds. He thought his future would come more into focus. But it was no more clear to him now what he should do than it was when he was growing up in Mattaponi with his mother. Now he was back - working for a local internet service company and trying to discover what came next.

He hadn’t thought it was a big deal. He enjoyed his friends, his girlfriend. He was a star on the church softball team. But his mother was growing weaker and the doctors couldn’t figure out why. And looking at this wounded snow goose crossing his path by the river he suddenly felt inadequate to the task of being who he was.

He tried to shake the feeling in the days that followed. At church the next Sunday he got engrossed in the ongoing saga of trying to find the church cornerstone. Mattaponi United Methodist Church was celebrating its 150th anniversary in a few weeks and one of the highlights of the celebrations was to be the opening of a time capsule that was placed in the cornerstone of the sanctuary of the church, which was put in place on the occasion of the church’s 75th anniversary in 1930. No one knew what exactly was in the time capsule but the rumors were running wild. Besides photographs, worship bulletins, letters from the attending bishops and so forth, the capsule was rumored to contain a cufflink worn by the great evangelist Billy Sunday, a sword from the oldest living Confederate veteran in the congregation, and some rogues even swore that a shiny flapper outfit from the 20s had been slipped in by one of the teenagers of the time.

Of course, none of that would matter if they couldn’t find the thing and they had been searching for several weeks now. You would think a cornerstone would be an easy thing to find, but none of the corners had stones of any unusual markings and even Leonard Stout, now 88-years-old and one of the few people who had actually been around when the sanctuary was built and the capsule was buried, had no clue where to find it. At the end of Sunday’s service Leonard went up to the church’s pastor, Eleazar Filbert, and said, “Preacher, I think this church must have Christ as its cornerstone because we sure can’t find any other reason the place is standing.”

Zack hung around after church with some of the men who were convinced that the stone was hidden behind the last stall in the women’s restroom next to the basement fellowship hall. Ten of them piled into the bathroom and took apart the paneling only to be disappointed once again. However they did manage to scare the life out of Dovie Perdue who hadn’t gotten word of the expedition and walked in to find T.P. Tolliver holding a crowbar above a pile of prone men. She used the restroom upstairs.

This week the weather has been rather overcast and rainy as it has been here. Zack usually walked to his job at Mattaponi Online, but this week he never knew what sort of raingear he might need so some days he was over prepared and some days he didn’t wear nearly enough.
The weather didn’t help his mood. After work on Thursday he stopped in at the coffee shop in front of Rockefeller Stout’s new grocery store. Rocky had opened it a few years ago when the town chamber of commerce tried to sell Mattaponi as the Big Melon. They figured if New York City could do it with an apple, they could do it with a honeydew. Now every New Year’s Eve they lower a giant melon from a flagpole to mark the turning of the year and there are melon-themed streetlights along Main Street. Rocky’s contribution to the theme was the name of his grocery store - the Melon-choly Market. It was a depressing name and a fairly depressing place to shop since Rocky hated bright lights, but the coffee was good.

Later, as Zack was walking down the street and the clouds were rolling in for another small storm, he passed Leander Lovett, the town street sweeper, who was using his big push broom to move clumps of newly-mown grass off the sidewalk. Leander was always gloomy, even when the weather didn’t look like a Thomas Hardy novel. Sure enough, there he was mumbling to himself as he pushed the broom, “Grass, grass, we are all grass. Morning comes and it flourishes. Evening comes and it withers and dies. Our times comes to an end like a breathed moan.” Zack thought it was the most depressing recitation of scripture he had ever heard.

But he didn’t stop to talk because the rain had begun and this was one of the days he was under prepared. He scuttled along down the street as the raindrops started a cold pelting of his head. He was just resigning himself to the fact that he was going to be soaked when he heard a voice yell to him. “Young Stonecaster! Don’t you have sense to come in out of the rain? Come on up here and sit with us ‘til this storm passes!”

Zack recognized the voice. It was Leonard Stout, sitting on the covered porch of his home with his feisty wife, Reba. They were the liveliest octogenarians Zack knew and he welcomed the opportunity to get out of the rain and onto the porch with them.

Leonard was sitting in a green wrought iron glider that probably dated to the 1950s. Reba was knitting in a rocking chair nearby. They motioned to Zack to pull up a plastic lawn chair and join them.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Stout. It is a little bit of a mess out there.”

“Well, I’d hate to see you catch a cold from this.”

Reba perked up at this. “Catch a cold?! Pshaw! That’s a healthy young man there. He’s not going to catch a cold from a little drizzle like this. Maybe you and I would, but not him.”

“Well, thanks all the same. It’s good to have some shelter when you forget your umbrella.”

Reba went in the house and returned a few minutes later with some coffee mugs. While she was inside, Leonard and Zack talked about the weather and the lost time capsule, the proposal to put more chicken houses in the county, the cost of gas down at the Royal Farms, the state of the schools, and the new expansion of Moira Meekfoot’s combination auto parts store and florist, a unique place known by the name Big Mama’s Roses and Hoses. It took some time to make the coffee, you see.

But Reba could tell when she reemerged that there was more that needed to be said, so she cut right to the heart of things and said, “What’s your problem, Zack?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s your problem? You look really down and you don’t usually look down.”

Where to begin?, Zack thought. Do I start with the snow goose or go right back to the time when my father died? Everything was running together for him anyway. So he said, “You’re pretty perceptive, Mrs. Stout. I am feeling out of sorts and I…”

“Out of sorts? That’s a heck of an understatement! You’re depressed, boy. You are captivated by the all the things that aren’t going right and unable to see how God’s a part of any of it. Your get up and go got up and went. You’ve got no umption in your gumption. You’ve got a full six pack but you don’t have that little plastic thingy that holds it all together. I see what’s going on.”

Zack didn’t know what to say to this. “Well, that about sums it up, Mrs. Stout.”

“Please call me, Reba. I need to tell you a story, Zack. Did I ever tell you about my Cousin Brutus?”

Leonard interrupted, “Reba, you don’t have a Cousin Brutus.”

“Well, his real name was Bartholomew, but his stage name was Brutus. Brutus Bricklebank Bettlemeister.”

Zack jumped in. “That was his stage name?!”

“Yeah, well, he never was too good with the promotional side of his career.”

“So he was an actor?”

“An actor! Zack, he was far more than an actor. Brutus was a movie star!”

Zack could see out of the corner of his eye that Leonard had his head down and was trying to hide a huge smirk on his face. He was used to Reba’s tall tales after all these years of marriage and he knew this was going to be a whopper.

“Brutus was always something of an adventurer and when the silent movies first started playing down at the old opera house on Main Street he got it into his head that he was going to be a movie star. He didn’t any experience…didn’t have a clue what he was getting into, but did that stop him? No, it most certainly did not. One night at the dinner table with his folks and his three sisters he said, real casual like, ‘I think I’ll head on out to Los Angeles tomorrow,’ just like he was going to run down to Richmond or something.

“At first my Grandpa Jake didn’t hear him right and he said, ‘That sounds good, Bartholomew.’ But Grandma Penelope, she picked up on what he said right away and she stopped in midstream with a forkful of turnip greens hanging there and said, ‘You’re going where?’

“You can imagine there was some arguing after that…some pleading, some crying, some out and out threats but in the end they let him go because they could see he was determined and there weren’t really any good reasons for him not to go, him being 35 years old and all.”

“He was 35 years old?”

“Did I forget to mention that? Yeah, he was 35 and was working on the farm with my grandpa. At any rate, that’s what he did. Picked up the next day and headed for California.

“When he got there he fell in love with the place and he fit in just like he had been there all his life. He told people his name was Brutus and they called him Brutus. Just like that he could start all over again and that’s what he loved about California. Everybody was from somewhere else and it was so easy to just start all over, to forget that you had been a farmhand on a marshy piece of land in the backwaters of Virginia. Suddenly you could be Brutus Bricklebank Bettlemeister. A glamorous movie star. Life could begin all over again.

“Well, eventually Brutus was asked to star in a film being directed by Cecil B. Wartburg on the life of Christ.”

Leonard interrupted, “Don’t you mean Cecil B. DeMille?”

“No, I don’t think so. Now don’t interrupt. Mr. Wartburg wanted Brutus to star as Jesus and all the greatest stars of the day were in it. Rudy Valentino was Peter. Gloria Swanson played Mary Magdelene. Harold Lloyd was Herod and Fatty Arbuckle was John the Baptist. They even got Charlie Chaplain in on it, even though he was an atheist.”

Leonard was shaking his head and trying not to laugh.

“Anyway, they went into production in an orange grove east of L.A.”

“An orange grove?” Zack was curious. “They filmed a movie about the holy land in an orange grove?”

“Well, it was a little awkward. They just pretended they were olive trees and they had a card in the movie near the beginning which said how olives were much bigger back in Jesus’ day. At any rate, it was a powerful movie and all the cast, Brutus included, was really moved by it. Brutus said it changed his life to play Jesus. But the production company ran out of money before they could finish the film so it ended with the crucifixion. They finally released the movie a year later with the title, The Greatest Story Almost Told, but it didn’t do too well at the box office. The ending was just too abrupt.

“Brutus got real disillusioned and one day he left behind all his Hollywood buddies and came back to Mattaponi. He always talked about finishing that movie. He said, ‘It just ain’t right to leave Jesus hanging on the cross like that. There’s more to that story.’ But he got married and took over the farm and was right happy up until he died of a heart attack at a very young age. He was here when they buried the time capsule. He put a copy of that film in there.”

“Reba,” Leonard said. “You better hope they don’t find that time capsule and show your story up to be a lie.”

“Oh, it’s not a lie. That’s the truth.”

Zack nodded his head and thought about the story. He looked rather puzzled and finally he said, “Now, Reba, why did you tell me that tale?”

“Because, young Zack, unfinished stories are very uncomfortable things. You can begin to think that every tale and every life ultimately comes to a bitter end. It’s even there in the Bible. You remember that Psalm where the singer says, “The days we are given number seventy years, eighty years if we are strong and even so they are days of toil and sorrow, they pass quickly and we fly away’? That sounds like a tragedy. Your face today looks like a tragedy. But I tell you what…it’s only the beginning.

“That’s why it makes all the sense in the world to me that Mr. Cecil B. Wartburg got a bunch of comedians to star in his picture show about Jesus. God don’t let tragedies stand. God don’t put up with stories that don’t end well. That’s why the movie had to have a resurrection scene. We may not be able to see the ending God intends for us, but we can sure see where we’re headed. For Christians, we’re hitching up with Jesus and his story ends with an empty tomb and a big shindig in heaven.

“So when I see you all gloomy and anxious at your age and not able to see that you’re a fine example of a child of a God who ought to expect the best because the best is yet to come…well, I think you’re the kind of person who needs to hear about Cousin Brutus. All our minutes are in God’s hands and we’re still waiting for the best ones.”

Zack smiled. He realized he hadn’t touched his coffee since Reba started her tale. He took a few long sips and looked out at the sky, which was clearing a bit. A few minutes later he took his leave. “Thanks for the coffee and the shelter. And thanks for the story, Reba. I think it’s just what I needed.”

As he walked away he could hear Leonard chiding his wife, “Reba, where in the world do you get these crazy tales. The Greatest Story Almost Told?! What was in your coffee?”

The next Sunday T.P. Tolliver dragged himself along in the tiny crawlspace beneath the sanctuary looking for the cornerstone. He emerged, filthy dirty and damp but with a huge smile on his face and a largish metal box. He had found the time capsule.

At the anniversary celebration two weeks later they opened up the box at the service. There was great anticipation. Everyone was just sure the church was going to be scandalized when the district superintendent pulled out a flapper dress. But there was no dress and no sword either. There were some wonderful old photographs and witnesses written by members of the church in 1930 to what God was doing in their lives as the Great Depression was taking hold and so many were losing hope. In the midst of all the despair, the people of the Mattaponi Methodist Church were certain that their lives were in God’s hands. They built a new sanctuary in the face of all that uncertainty, confident that God would establish the work of their hands and make the church a living sign that God is on our side even if time doesn’t seem to be.

But the one thing no one could figure out was why three large reels of movie film were included in the box. The metal reels had survived the passage of time well, but the celluloid film disintegrated almost immediately. There was no chance the film would ever be shown.

Well, I say no one could figure it out, but of course there were at least three people there that day who knew exactly what that film was about. It was an incomplete movie made by a group of people who left their old lives behind to try and create new stories in a new land. They didn’t always succeed and their stories were never quite as good and as complete as they hoped they would be -- especially this one which ended without the most important scene of the movie.
But somehow Zack Stonecaster knew that their work had not been a failure and had not been fruitless, even though the labor of their hands now lay in dust and pieces in an old metal box. Like all of us, those actors lived lives that were always less than perfect but whose gifts were taken up nonetheless in God’s time. The movie might forever remain incomplete on this side of heaven, but somewhere, on the other side, the finishing touches were made, the editing complete, and the story is told in all its glorious Technicolor fullness.

When we reflect on our time in light of its merits before God we are inevitably struck by the brokenness of our lives, the transience, the impermanence of things. Despair threatens to consume us as it has this world in which we live. But in Christ we know that God is redeeming our time. In Christ we know that God is picking up all the broken pieces of our lives and all the scattered moments. God is taking up all the tragic storylines and the way things end so badly and giving them an astonishing comedic twist. In heaven it’s all about comedy.

In God’s time no separation is not followed by a reunion. In God’s time no cross is left without a resurrection. No foolish wanderer is not crowned with God’s favor. And birds with broken wings? They can soar like eagles. Thanks be to God.