September 22 is a holy day
within my faith, for it is a day of beginnings and of endings: the beginning of
the Prophet Joseph’s work – and hopefully yours and mine as well – of bringing
the Book of Mormon to all people. And the end of the ‘awful state of blindness’ in which the gentiles had been left by
the loss of so many ‘plain and most precious parts of the
gospel of the Lamb.’
And
if you approach this holiday from the perspective of Sacred Time (a concept
which has, sadly, been almost lost today) you just might experience it as a
time of beginnings and endings in another way as well.
As night fell on the Sept.
21, the 196th anniversary of the angel Moroni’s appearance to the
young Prophet, I read Moroni’s awful tale of the destruction of his people,
when thousands of them were ‘hewn down in
open rebellion against their God, and heaped up as dung upon the face of the
land.’ And then, a week later, having finished the book and turning back to
the beginning, my eyes once more took in those old, familiar words, ‘I, Nephi, having been born of goodly
parents….’
From the perspective of
the Nephites, time moved in cycles: their history as a nation began when their
God led them out of captivity; they would prosper so long as they kept his
commandments, and they would suffer when they forgot who it was that had
delivered them in times past. But in the times of prosperity, pride always
crept in after a little while, and so the people cycled in and out of God’s
favor until, at last, they took their wickedness too far, turned away one too
many chances to repent, and were destroyed from off the face of the Earth. Then
God would bring in another people to possess the land, and the cycle would
continue.
Meanwhile, amid all the
toil and contention and bloodshed, and the sound and fury of rising and falling
civilizations, the Savior stands with open arms to receive anybody who will
forsake Babylon and all its works and choose the things of the Spirit.
That is the story which
the Book of Mormon tells over and over again. To me, as a believer in Mormonism,
it’s one of the most important stories ever told. And yet I don’t expect the summary
I just gave to hold any weight for someone who hasn’t already read the book
like I have, because there are just some things that can’t be reduced to any
terms simpler than themselves. Scripture, and history in general, is one of
those things.
And that finally brings me
around to the central point of this whole post, namely, that God reveals
himself through narrative.
The Bible doesn’t begin
with a list of God’s attributes, or a list of his commandments, or a list of
virtues and vices, or a list of things that people have to believe in order to
be saved. Rather, its first words are simply ‘In the beginning, God created
the heaven and the earth.’
And that’s where you have
to start if you want to understand what’s going on. You can’t simply say that since
the Four Gospels contain the story of the ministry of the Lord himself, they
overshadow the rest of the scriptures. You have to start in the beginning, when
God gave his creatures life, and move from there to the covenant with Abraham,
and the law of Moses, and on through the other events in their proper order, because
Christ the Redeemer can only appear where Christ the Creator and Christ the
Lawgiver have already tread.
At the most basic level,
the scriptures are a history of God’s dealings with men. They’re not sacred
because they’re infallible, nor because they form an ideal and complete picture
of what our faith ought to be. They’re sacred because of their subject matter. God
has chosen to reveal himself through narrative, and the Bible and Book of
Mormon are the narratives that we’ve got.
People who try to reduce Mormonism,
or any form of the Christian religion, to creeds, listings of the tenets of the
faith, or encyclopedic compendia of doctrine will always produce only a pale imitation
of the rich stories in which God is truly revealed.
And that is the reason why
starting another annual reading of the Book of Mormon with those some words, ‘I
Nephi, having been born of goodly parents…’ brought me as much light and
joy last Sunday as it did when I first got my own Book of Mormon at the age of
eight.
There are some people in
the church today who try to introduce investigators to the Book of Mormon
starting with a few quotes cut out of 3 Nephi 11, under the impression that
because that’s where Jesus appears in person at the temple in Bountiful, it
must be the most important part. But when you really understand the importance
of scripture-as-narrative, you can’t think that way. Mormon began the record
with Lehi’s vision for a reason, and back in the days of Joseph Smith, when the
new religion was able to grow from six believers to 25,000 in just fourteen
years, each of those new converts began his or her faith journey with Father
Lehi, the pillar of fire that dwelt on a rock, and the vision of the destruction
of Jerusalem.
Is Christ absent from that
vision? Of course not! The very first chapter states that the things which Lehi
‘read in the book manifested plainly of the coming of a Messiah, and also
the redemption of the world.’ But Christ is revealed gradually, through
narrative, in the thousand year story of a people who tried, at some times more
sincerely than at others, to live by his commandments and walk in his light. The
Lord’s personal appearances are brief, but the whole Nephite record is his
story, and the whole Book of Mormon is his word.
And that holistic
understanding of scripture-as-narrative will, I believe, do a much better job
of bringing souls to Christ than any attempt to reduce our beliefs to a few
vignettes, lists, creeds, or declarations of doctrine, no matter how Christ-centered
they purport to be.
And that’s why, for me,
drawing near to Jesus consists, in large part, of lighting my candle tomorrow
evening, opening up my old Book of Mormon to the second weekly portion, and
immersing myself in the tale of Lehi and Nephi and their wanderings in the
desert.
Because that tale is how
God has chosen to reveal himself to me.
