One of the delightful benefits of retirement is the leisure to read and muse in areas of interest that have been neglected since college days. I regularly purchase various courses from The Teaching Company to fill in the night hours when insomnia blesses me with an alert and inquisitive mind. The following article is based on a course entitled “Classics of American Literature” taught by Dr. Arnold Weinstein. Many of the insights of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are his observations, but I have included some of my own, so don't fault him for anything theological that you read below, and beware, for I live by the motto: “Never let the truth interfere with a good story.”

All of us will remember a different church from what we knew some 20 years ago, not only in the ELCA, but also in all other churches seeking to be true and relevant in a new day. We know now, or at least we know up to now, what we have become, and these charming stories tell us, in part, how we got to where we are today, for these are oft repeated scenarios.

Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are well known parables, in a sense, written by Washington Irving, our first great American storyteller. You may recall in Sleepy Hollow that Ichabod Crane is the teacher, the scholar, the writer, the representative intellectual of the town, who wants to marry Katrina and defeat his rival Brom Bones. Like us 20, 30, 40 years ago, he had high hopes, but all is dashed for him by the end of the story.

Brom Bones is the man. His dashing charisma, his bold exploits, his being a rough rider makes us read of his exploits with delight, even as the headless horseman captures our imagination and attacks poor Ichabod. Supposedly the headless horseman is a spirit from the past, a Hessian soldier whose head was blown off in an engagement in another land. Toward the end of the story, however, a pumpkin is found near the abandoned hat of Ichabod Crane, after Brom Bones, impersonating the headless horseman, challenged Ichabod for a final time, winning Katrina, and becoming the town celebrity. Ichabod, with all his learning, disappears from the scene.

These images are all powerful symbols, and I leave it to you to determine who's who, and what's what, in whatever “new church” you belong. Suffice it to say, that my own imagination easily wonders about the real role of teaching theologians, confessions, and other erudite treasures, and how quickly they become uninteresting and secondary to the dynamism of a can-do, will-do anything, adventurer.

In the Rip Van Winkle story we have another “sleepy” situation. It's not the whole town named after “sleep” in this parable, just one man, Rip. He sleeps for twenty years, only to awaken to a new world, which is hard to recognize or fit into. A telling fact of the passage of time is that 20 years is normally considered to be the time of one generation, and coincidentally, the  Revolutionary War had occurred while Rip slept. When he wanders back down into town, with a long beard and a rusty gun, he can't believe what he's seeing. Streets are different, the village inn has been replaced by The Union Hotel. There is no one at his old home which is empty and forlorn, and when he calls out for his children and wife, there is nothing but silence. On a pole in town he sees a red, white, and blue flag that he does not recognize. Rip was never a happily married man, for it's said that his shrewish wife had a tongue that grew sharper and sharper. Mercifully, he soon learns that she has died.

As a crowd gathers he asks if anyone knows “Rip Van Winkle,” and sure enough they do, but it is not him they know, but a much younger man they point to. Rip looks at his counterpart, his son, and the likeness is clear... a lazy man, badly dressed, but he does not yet understand. Someone then asked who he was and he is confounded: “God knows, I'm not myself—I'm somebody else—that's me yonder—no—that's somebody else got into my shoes—I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, they've changed my gun, and every thing's changed, and I'm changed, and I can't tell what's my name or who I am!” Doubting his own identity, an older lady comes forward, looks closely at him, and declares that indeed he is the missing older Rip Van Winkle.

The restoration that Rip experiences is about as much as could be expected. He was always pretty lazy, but now he can be lazy without being criticized, for his age has given him an excuse, and his story has made him a town character. He is cared for by his daughter's family, complete with a grandson also named after himself. He gets to be a patriarch of the harmless variety, telling his story to everyone who would listen. Having drunk and danced with the gods in the Catskill Mountains, his story is interesting, but he missed the Revolution.

The whole twenty years had been like a single night. We also might ask: “Who are we after a generation, or a lifetime, has passed like the twinkling of an eye?” and  “Are revolutions always for the better?” Sleeping through the years and the revolutions that come, whether in a Sleepy Hollow town, a sleepy church, a sleepy country, or even on a mountain top crag having sported with the gods, makes it impossible to answer the ultimate questions, “Who am I and what happened here?”

It may be more than some readers are willing to consider, but for me the themes of these two stories saturate the story of our churches in many ways. In almost every denomination there is a weakness, a feeble telling of the story, without a conversion or a single demand, without knowing who or whose we are, except to know a good story when we hear it.

The story, at the end, has a greater power than any victors or victories, and will outlast countless revolutions. The story has a grip and it conveys a wisdom far beyond a cursory cause, an agenda or even a moral.

Richard F. Bansemer is the former Bishop of the Virginia Synod of the ELCA.