Story Time - Week Four
October 26, 2025
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Tuning into home
Introduction: Dreaming dreams and seeing visions as we tune into home.
Seeds to sow: What does it mean to ‘tune in’ to God, and what helps you to ‘tune in’?
Read Luke 16: 19-31
Lazarus and some nameless rich guy…?
Q: What words or phrases stand out at you from this reading?
Q: It’s striking in this parable that Lazarus is named and the rich man isn’t. What’s going on there do you think?
This parable can make for uncomfortable reading — it’s an existential jolt — it asks us how we are dealing with the challenges and responsibilities of living in a deeply unequal world. Rather than stepping over Lazarus, often nowadays we just change the channel or close the browser. It’s easier to look away.
Q: How can this story inspire us to challenge injustice in the world today?
Read Luke 18: 9-14
Gratitude with attitude vs. a humble mumble.
Imagine you’re a TV producer and you’ve been asked to film this parable as a short film.
Q: Who would you cast as the pharisee and the tax collector? How notes would you give the director? What would the filming location be?
Q: Then discuss how this parable makes us feel about our own prayers. Perhaps there’s a bit of the pharisee and the publican in all of us!
Read Luke 19: 11–27
Active or passive, invested or abstracted….?
As we discussed in week 2, it is a mistake to think that all parables are straightforward allegories. It is not true that each story depicts characters that correspond 1:1 with God and ourselves. Rather, they are compelling tales about human and divine nature that don’t just give us answers but lead us to ask new questions.
For instance, the master in this story surely makes for an uncomfortable stand-in for God. He is shown to be frightening, demanding, and greedy. Indeed when he is accused of being so he doesn’t deny it!
It’s a story about the cutthroat world of economics that has something to tell us about faith and love. Not because God is a like a terrible overbearing boss — but precisely because he isn’t!
As a stressed employee — with no reason to love your boss — it can make financial sense to invest what you’ve been given, to put it to work. So how much more should we want to invest the love and gifts our loving God has freely given us?
Q: How does this story provoke God’s people out of complacency to invest and engage, to use our gifts and our passions to live out Christ’s grace?
Q: What stories do we have of how God has used our gifts?
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