Last night, one of my friends asked me what I would be speaking about tonight. When I told her I was talking about story, she said, “Who gave you such a horribly broad and boring topic?” And then, I told her I picked it myself.

It was awkward.

So, tonight I want to talk a little about story.

Maybe it's because I am an English major, maybe it's because I have a growing love for narrative theology, or maybe it's simply because my parents read to me countless books as a child. Whatever it is, I have a growing love for story; there's just something about it with which we, as people, resonate.

Maybe it's the movement of story. Story is never static: it takes us places, it's headed somewhere. This may be difficult to see when in the middle of 3 pages of descriptive Victorian novel prose, but even then there's movement, movement in the details. Story has a certain momentum.

Or maybe what we love about stories is not knowing what comes next: not knowing who will enter as leading characters, not knowing what peril is lurking on the next page, not knowing what path the protagonist will take. There's excitement, there's thrill, there's fear. Graduating, we of all people can resonate with not knowing what comes next. Maybe that's what it is about story.

Or maybe what we love about stories are its characters. As we get older, we begin to gravitate toward the more complex characters of story, the ones who have a healthy dose of both good and evil running through them. These are the characters we both love and hate because in the end we see ourselves in them. Who of us doesn't have a streak of Huck Finn, a hint Mary Magdalene, or a little Raskolnikov running through us? Maybe we love story because we see ourselves as the characters on its pages.

Whatever it is about story, whether it's the stories of our grandparents or stories taking us to a far off place, the fact is simple: we love stories because in the end stories are really about us. In preparing for tonight, for this celebration of our time and studies here at Calvin, I found it helpful to look at my time here in terms of story.

Coming in as a freshman, I knew little about what was ahead of me: there was excitement as was there fear. So many people, so many new ideas, so many opportunities. Looking back, I now realize that the things I have been involved in, the people I have met, the topics I have studied all have woven together, bringing me to where I am today—kind of like a story.

Through working at the service-learning center, living in Hungary for a semester, taking my philosophy of gender class, and laughing with my RA staff, I have learned and I have grown. Through living in Project Neighborhood, studying grammar and linguistics, talking through vocation with different mentors and faculty, and serving on the sexual assault prevention team, I have been challenged and I have developed. Through participating in the institutes for healing racism, studying Victorian literature and patristic theology, tutoring at Henry Paideia Academy , and asking tough, theological questions like where God is amidst so much suffering, I have been shaken and I have been formed.

My classes, mentors, jobs, friends, living experiences, and professors have all come together as pieces of my story here at Calvin. For me it has been a story of change and challenge, of hardship and hope, of laughter and lament, a story in which I have learned more about myself, more about God, and more about God's plan for God's world.

And this brings me to another reason why I have become so drawn to story: story is the medium God uses to reveal God's self to us. It is the story of Yahweh working in and through the people and history of Israel , a story in which God makes covenant with Abraham and Sarah, delivers Israel from Egypt , gives the law to Moses, and speaks through the judges and the prophets.

And the story continues; the pace quickens. Christ breaks onto the scene as God incarnate, working and living in the world, radically loving the marginalized and preaching good news of the Kingdom.

And then, the story hits a climax in those both awful and wonderful events of Christ's decisive death and resurrection; all other events of the story hearken back to these, for they show victory over the suffering, death, and sin that so mark this world and point toward a world in contradiction this one, a world in which peace, life, justice, and righteousness have the final say.

And the story is not over. Christ sends the Spirit who transforms the church into Christ's body here on earth, and the church becomes the harbinger of the future Kingdom, proclaiming that the story is not over, that it is moving somewhere.

Brothers and sisters, faculty and students, friends and family, this story is good news and God invites into the story; God invites us to join the likes of Moses, Ruth, Amos, Deborah, Mary, and John the Baptist. But not just them, we join others too like Julian of Norwich, Martin Luther King, Jr., Emily Dickinson, St. Patrick, Johanne Sebastian Bach, Mother Theresa, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Together, with these people and so many more, we are invited into God's story, into the momentum that is already coursing toward the Kingdom.

It is a grand story and, what's more, it is a story marked by lament and hope.

We lament the brokenness of the world and the brokenness within ourselves. Our thirst for wealth leaves others in poverty, our want of things lays waste God's Creation, our pride and indifference leads to bloody, unjust wars, and our ignorance of those different from us breeds prejudice, racism, and bigotry. There are in this world those who are hurt and bloodied; there are in this world unjust and evil societal structures that seem all too hard to overturn.

We must see this brokenness, and we must speak of it truthfully. Ours is a story of lament.

But in God's story Good Friday breaks way to Easter, and so, for us, there is hope. We see glimpses of this hope all around us. Justice is being preached, freedom experienced, and truth realized. Gardens are planted, communities are thriving, reconciliation is happening, and peace is being sought.

We are here to celebrate our story, to celebrate our time here at Calvin, to celebrate our God-given gifts of intellect, ingenuity, and perseverance. We thank our professors for pushing and challenging us; we thank our mentors for encouraging us to ask tough questions; we thank our friends and family for walking with us along our way. And soon we will stand here with our medallions and our certificates, celebrating our academic achievements and time here at Calvin, not quite sure what's next for us in our story, in this thing called life.

And, as we celebrate this academic success and as we prepare for whatever does come next, we remember God's story. We remember our invitation to enter into it We remember to lament and to hope. It is my prayer that as we leave this place, we may use the gifts that have been honed here to live into God's story and to live into it well.

Whether in the academy, studying literary criticism or mitochondrial membranes, whether on the capital, campaigning for better environmental policies or education reform, whether on the stage, telling story through theatre or expressing the ineffable through music, or whether in our churches, seeking the welfare of our neighbors and the welfare of our city, wherever our stories bring us, may they be filled with both lament and hope, as we work them into the movement of God's greater story.

As a child, I loved fairy tales. Looking back, I may not be completely down with the gender constructions of, say, the Little Mermaid, and if we're talking about flat characters, I mean come on. But despite all of this, there is something about fairy tales, something about good conquering evil, something about that happily-ever-after. We want so badly for things to end well, because so often when we're honest with ourselves, our lives and our world seem so hopeless.

BUT, if we take God's story seriously, if we truly grasp the gravitas of Christ's resurrection, then we can boldly claim that God's story will end, finally, with a happily-ever-after, a happily-ever-after in which swords will be beat to plowshares, in which the wolf will lie down with the lamb, in which God's people will no longer have wedges driven between them, in which creation will at last be reunited with its maker and God will be all in all. God's story has movement, and it's a movement toward that ‘happily-ever-after.'

Fellow students, faculty, friends and family, as we celebrate our achievements, may we acknowledge God's story. May we use the gifts god has given us to study, engage, and work in God's world, may we use our gifts to lament and to hope, and may we use our gifts to enter into the movement of God's story toward the kingdom, toward that happily-ever-after, toward the conclusion of this story and the beginning of one even greater.

Thank you.