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.