The Stories We Choose

 Genesis 2-3, selected verses

Oct. 7, 2018

The other day I got a text from a woman I met only a couple of times, briefly, years ago, but whose journey in ministry I’ve remained connected to through social media. She wrote,

Hi David—I wanted to share a post with you. My friend and former Sojo community-mate, Tomek, just posted pictures of his students with the following message: “Around 14 years ago I was finishing up an internship in Washington DC. A speaker that visited the interns spoke about vocation being where ones passion intersected with the worlds greatest need. I wasn’t sure what I would do post internship so I went to Idealist and typed in ‘soccer + education’. I ended up teaching and coaching in Mongolia. After that distant adventure I began my teaching career in NYC always trying to combine these two ideas. I’m so excited that the girls in my school are starting their soccer journey. They are going to do incredible things on and off the soccer pitch. Now we just need a nicer field... #girlpower #futureuswnt #uswnt” The speaker he’s referencing is you. A couple of hours of your time, forever changed the trajectory of his life, or maybe just made him more keenly aware of where the spirit was leading him. Thought you might like the update. Thanks for the ways you minister to people—myself included.

That was, obviously, a lovely and affirming message to receive, and it got me to thinking about the kinds of messages we send and receive throughout our lives, including the messages that we give the weight of naming “holy scripture.”

What do we tell one another about what matters? What do we tell ourselves?

The stories that we tell shape the culture and society we inhabit. The shape the lives of our children, and the communities in which they grow up.

We may, as George Washington sings it in Hamilton, have no control over who lives, who dies, who tells our story, but we do have control over the stories we tell. That is to say, we get to choose which stories to tell that will then go on to touch lives in ways we cannot imagine and over which we have no control.

All those years ago with the Sojourners interns I was invited to talk with about vocation I could have told them stories about limited choice – about churches that don’t ordain gays and lesbians or women, about ongoing practices of apartheid that severely limit economic options and job opportunities in certain places, about stained-glass ceilings. I don’t imagine they would have invited me back as many times as they did, but I could have told them such stories. After all, those stories are true.

But if you begin pondering the question of what God is calling forth in your life by telling stories of fences and walls and borders and boundaries, well, we cannot get to the places where God is calling if we live fenced lives shaped by stories of limited scope and delimited hope.

If, instead, we tell stories of beauty, of hope, of love, of truth, of passion and of possibility then we are giving a particular shape to culture and community. Our words matter – deeply and profoundly. Words have power – indeed, they are the most powerful tool we have.

In the first creation story in Genesis – the one that comes prior to the one we just read – God speaks a word – let there be light – and all of the ordered creation begins springing into being. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “a word has been spoken which transforms reality. The word of God which shapes creation is an action which alters reality. The claim made is not a historical claim but a theological one about the character of God who is bound to [God’s] world and about the world which is bound to God.”[1]

In other words, the creation story of Genesis, told originally to exiles in Babylon six hundred years or so before the time of Christ, makes not historical – much less scientific – claims about creation but rather makes theological claims about God. Even in the midst of exile, God is faithful still and the people are called still to live in response to that existential reality.

Of course, the way we have told the story of creation to ourselves and to our children has shaped a world distorted from the garden that was God’s intention for human life and experience. In other words, “In God’s garden, as God wills it, there is mutuality and equity,”[2] there is order and vocation, there are the bonds and bounds of community and a calling to live creatively and responsibly in that context.

For only when we live creatively and responsibly within the context of authentic community can we discern calling, can we discover where our gifts intersect with the needs of those living in community.

If we distort the stories – the sacred texts of the community or the personal stories of those living in it – by making of them justification for our own agendas of power and control, then we destroy the garden and threaten the well-being of those living in it.

As Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza notes, patriarchal opposition to efforts to create egalitarian Christian communities often turn to the text we’ve read this morning.[3] Not to put too fine a spin on it, but when we take the Genesis story of the garden and distort it into support for the agenda of patriarchy then we destroy the garden and threaten the well-being of everyone living in it. If we then mock those with the courage to tell their own stories of being wounded in the process we will, in time, destroy the community itself. This is not, I hope you understand, an ancient nor merely theoretical concern.

But another path is possible. If we are worthy of God’s mindfulness, crowned with honor and glory, then certainly we can tell our stories otherwise, and we can tell other stories.

We can, perhaps, on this Sunday when Christian communities around the world gather at table and celebrate World Communion Sunday, tell a story that begins like this:

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. … As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. … This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

As Schussler Fiorenza puts it, “If relationships of equality are characterized by shifting relationships of power and by alternating leadership open to every member of the community, then […] Jesus advocates the exercise of leadership and power through alternating service and love among the disciples who are understood as a community of friends.”[4]

In other words, where their love, their passion, intersects with the needs of the community, with opportunities to serve, the followers of Jesus will discover their vocations and the power to live into them fully and joyfully in response to the gifts God has given them in and through the life of the community.

That calling does not rest on inherited wealth or ill-gotten gains, it does not depend on the schools your parents or grandparents attended, it does not depend on your gender or race or class or any power structure built on any of that. That calling is a gift as old as creation, lived out in countless lives, through innumerable stories hope and faith and love.

We have no control over who lives, who dies, and who tells our stories. But we do get to choose which stories we shall tell. In a time of overwhelmingly ugliness, let us tell stories of beauty. In a time of bondage to ancient systems of violence and domination, let us tell stories of peace and liberation. In a time of lies and deceit, let us tell stories of truth for the truth will set us free. In a time of despair, let us tell stories of defiance for in defiance hope rises up. In a time when the powers and principalities want nothing so much as for us to hate one another and thus turn our hate-blinded and distracted eyes when they abuse their power, rob the commonwealth, and exploit and spitefully use those around them – when they want us to hate one another, let us, instead, tell stories of love. May it be so. Amen.

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[1] Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation: Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982) 26.

[2] Ibid. 51.

[3] Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroads, 1992) 53-4.

[4] Ibid. 324.

New Lenses

Mark 9:30-37

September 23, 2018

I need new glasses. Well, at least new frames. These have an unsightly chip, but I reckon it’s better to have unsightly frames than, uh, unsightly lenses.

Who knows? I may need new lenses, as well. That sort of thing sneaks up on our middle-aged selves. I’ll never forget picking up a Sports Illustrated – which I read every Thursday for decades until they lost their best writers. Anyway, I picked up the magazine one Thursday early in my fifth decade of living – in other words, when I was 40 – and thought immediately, “they’ve changed the font!” Alas, ‘twas not the font that had changed.

That was my introduction to bifocals. Eventually it got to the point where I can proudly proclaim that, yes, even my lenses are progressive.

Jesus is introducing a new lens for his disciples to see the world around them, and everything remains pretty blurry for them.

They are arguing about “greatness,” and Jesus tells them they don’t know what it means. The culture around them – the Roman empire that equates the emperor with God, a deeply patriarchal religious culture with a strictly proscribed hierarchy – has taught them to equate power with the grace of God.

Jesus says, “y’all need to get a new mind for a new time. You do not understand greatness at all.”

Alas, Jesus’ disciples – then, and now – don’t get it. We choose to believe in some strange kind of chosenness: that those who wield social, political, economic power in our society do so because they have been anointed, chosen, blessed by God. They are first because God wants them to be first.

But Jesus says, if you want to see real power look to the margins, look to the least of these, look not to the first but to the last, look to children who had no status in Jesus’ culture and who have no real power in ours, either. And 2,000 years later we still struggle to understand this central claim of the gospel: that the power of God is revealed in powerlessness.

At the very least this central claim ought to inform how we treat those without power in our own systems yet clearly we do not.

For example, we see the poor and suspect there must be some defect in them that they haven’t achieved our level of economic power. This social truth holds at every economic level. No matter where we find ourselves on the income/wealth ladder we believe we got there through our own hard work, skills, and the blessings of almighty God and we look at those on the rungs beneath us with suspicion.

In the gospel reading this morning, for another example, we still don’t particularly value children, at least not if by value them one means spend social capital on them such that they might not be the most likely demographic in the country to live in poverty. Jesus honors children in a culture in which they were completely voiceless. “What happens to these ones,” Jesus says, “matters deeply to God, and it must matter to you, as well, if you are going to be one of my followers.”

Or, for a particularly timely example, we find the stories of women way more difficult to accept than those of men. I’m not going to delve into that other than to say that Jesus believed the stories of women, and when one was accused of adultery he stepped between her and the crowd that wanted to stone her to give her time and space to tell her story in safety.

We hear these stories of Jesus’ particular attention to powerless, often marginalized people and think, “well, that was Jesus; he had vision that we don’t have.”

But here’s the thing: we may not have the particular vision that Jesus had, but he left us with some powerful lenses that can correct our vision. He left us with sacramental lenses: a view of the world through which the hidden sacred can become visible.

Baptism and communion are not ancient empty rituals that we practice merely because they were handed down to us. Baptism and communion are sacramental lenses through which we are invited to see the world in a new way.

In the waters of baptism we are invited to see the unearned grace of God as available to everyone: from the powerless infant being welcomed into community to each of us as adults who stand in need of being refreshed, cleansed, and restored to community. For in these waters we die with Christ to all of those old and destructive ways of seeing the world and are raised to new life and new vision. These waters will clean your glasses, friends! They are sign and seal of the real power of God for the turning of the world.

At this table we are invited to taste the goodness of God and see the world as a single community where all are welcome to sit down at table and be richly fed. At this table we experience a foretaste of the fulfilment of God’s time and of God’s vision for all of creation: a creation restored to shalom – to peace, to healing and wholeness, to true community.

As such – as sacramental lenses – baptism and communion serve also as the ethical lenses through which followers of Jesus see the world and behave in it. Do our personal, social, economic, and political choices and decisions reflect the world God invites us to see through these sacramental lenses? If not, how shall we act differently? How shall we engage differently? How shall we see differently and thus get a new mind for our new time?

This morning, as our prayerful response, I invite you to think about how you might want to see some parts of the world differently, and, as a literally mark of this prayer, we’re invited to inscribe our prayers in a couple of ways. (Coloring and writing on cards or ribbons and then hanging the written cards and ribbons.) As you do so, I’ll ask a few more questions to guide our meditations. So let us pray with our bodies throughout this space.