Listening to Our Own Story

"Listening To Our Own Story"--September 6, 2017

"When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God shall choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, 'To day I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.' When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: 'A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.' SO you shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house." [Deuteronomy 26:1-11]

Here is a confession.  It seems that, without fail, every spring time, in the weeks before I file our family's taxes, I hear ads on the radio, or on television, about using this or that tax preparer, and offering the "friendly" helpful reminder that Tax Day is fast approaching.  And as soon as I hear the daunting reminder, "Tax Day is coming--have you done your taxes yet?" I turn off the radio.

And here is my further confession:  I turn off the radio, or the tv, in those moments, because I don't want to think about my own need still to do my taxes. 

I know it is utterly illogical--turning off the radio doesn't make April 15 go away, or push it further into the year.  And silencing the message doesn't change the situation.  For that matter, it's not even that we don't have the money if we would have to pay more in taxes, and it's not even some philosophical objection to paying taxes, either.  I get it--I use roads and bridges and would be served by emergency responders if I were in trouble. I am protected by the army and navy.  My kids go to public school, and I would pay more for their sake if it meant demonstrably better education.  It's not a philosophical or political thing, and it's not even a financial thing.  I just don't like having to face the humbling truth about myself--that I, too, still need to go through the process and file my taxes.  And the worst part of myself wants to procrastinate and avoid having to do it... and then to avoid having to think about doing it, if a message floating out there in the airwaves calls my attention to it.

All of that is to say, I don't like facing the truth about my own situation.

Maybe I'm not alone. 

In fact, I suspect that all of us have moments when we don't like to be reminded of things in our own stories.  No one wants to see their old baby pictures trotted out in front of their prom date in high school.  Nobody wants to be reminded they still have to get their car's registration and inspection done.  No one likes having someone retell the stories of past failures or weaknesses.  And nobody really wants to have their life story retold in public, for fear that some unpleasant memories will be reawakened like ghosts to walk for a moment in our present consciousness.

But we need our stories told.  We need the reminders of who we are and where we have come from. And yes, I need to tell myself, I need the reminder to pay my taxes or else I will want to put it off too late.  Whether it is a big, sweeping life story, or just a short term reminder, we need the voices that tell us about ourselves, even when it includes things we had gotten comfortable with forgetting. 

We need, in other words, Mercy to enable us to listen to our own stories.

It is striking to me that the book of Deuteronomy foresaw the same need in the people of God millennia ago, too.  These words from the 26th chapter of what we call Deuteronomy are framed as a direction to the people of Israel for the days when they will have settled in the Promised Land and can, at last, plant their own fields and build their own homes, after a generation of wilderness wandering and generations more before that of slavery under Pharaoh. 

And because God knows that prosperity has a way of causing amnesia, God instructs the people to listen to their own story before they eat their own harvests.  God tells the people to remember what they had grown comfortable with forgetting--that before they got prosperous, and before they owned their own land and grew their own crops, they were outsiders.  They were strangers.  They were aliens.  God instructs the people not only to hear it said by someone else, but to listen to the story in their own voice, on their own lips, the saga that begins, "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor..."  It is the story we trace in the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus, the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who were... well, aliens.  They left Ur of the Chaldeans at God's calling, so the story goes, and just up and moved into the land of Canaan as nomads, before going down to Egypt in the famine, and then being enslaved when a cruel and fearful Pharaoh cracked down on their growing numbers in the name of the Egyptian national interest.  God wants the people, once they have gotten comfortable and settled, to remember that they were not always comfortable and settled.  They were first wanderers with no official OK to squat on territory in Canaan, and then they were refugees headed to Egypt to escape a famine in Canaan, and then they were slaves in Egypt at the hands of a hard-hearted dictator who was afraid of being overwhelmed by all these foreigner Hebrews.  That's the story of God's people.  That's the story that they were instructed to retell, first when they arrived in the Promised Land and had their first harvest, and then every year after that at harvest time.  It was a way of remembering that all they owned and all they possessed had come as a gift from God--an "inheritance," as Deuteronomy puts it, which is to say, something you have received without your earning and are expected to pass along to the next generation as a good steward.

Once that great story has been told, then God will accept the offerings of grain and grapes and oil.  Without the story being told first, the people will fool themselves into thinking that their harvests are purely their accomplishment, and that God owes them a favor now in return for all these great offerings.  Without the story being told first, the people will forget where they came from, and who they are.  They will forget that they did not always live in the land.  They will forget that there were others there first who claimed the land before they did.  They will forget that they lived as resident aliens, with no legitimacy, no official permissions, no paperwork, and no rights to live in Canaan, long before they came to prosperity and comfort.  Without the story, the offerings are crude attempts to buy off a deal-making deity.  But when they listen to their own story, they will understand again: they are giving back to the God who freely gave them, not just the year's wheat harvest, but the gift of belonging and a home to live in that was not always their own.

Now catch one other delightful detail of this passage: once the story has been told, once the Israelites learn to listen to their own history, the thing to do with the offerings and gifts they have brought... is to celebrate with them--and to include the very people who have nothing of their own.  The Levites as a class of people within Israel did not have lands of their own, but depended on others to provide for them.  And then note especially what God says after that: the people are to share "with the aliens who reside among you" so that all can be a part of the celebration.  They will all throw a big party and eat the feast of their first grain and grapes and gardens, and as they eat it, they will remember again how God brought them through to that present moment.  They are to include the outsiders and aliens in the party as one more way of listening to their own story--when they see the faces of these others who have sought refuge and come to their lands to make a life, they are supposed to remember that they were in the same position once before, and they know what it is like both to have been persecuted by hard-hearted despots in that moment and to have been protected by a merciful God in that time, too.

But note in all of this that God knows the people will need to be instructed to hear their story told and told again.  God has to remind them, not because the people are opposed in principle to giving offerings back to God to feed the Levites, and not because they do not have enough to feed themselves, but because, like me at tax time, they do not want to have to hear the reminder and see the implications for their own lives.  Just like I don't want to hear the reminder that I need to get my own house in order and do my taxes, the people of Israel don't want to have to hear their own past, or that they are obliged to treat the aliens in their midst with the same love that a cruel Pharaoh did not show to them when they were in Egypt.  As the people of God listen to their own stories again, they are called to embody the same Mercy that God first showed them.

And now, dear sisters and brothers, we come to these words as well.  They are a part of our Scriptures as well, and the early church made the conscious decision to include these stories that are the saga of Israel as part of our canon as well, when there were other voices at the time suggesting that Christianity jettison all that earthy Hebrew stuff.  The followers of Jesus made the conscious choice, even though we do not live in the land of Palestine, and even though you and I may or may not be farming for our own subsistence, to hear these stories as part of our spiritual DNA.  Or rather, we have been adopted into that story, and now it is MY history as surely as I tell my son that my father is his grandfather, too, now, or that my mother is his grandmother.  We are adopted into this story, and now it speaks to us.  It is our family history as well.  And that means we are not giving the option of comfortably forgetting.  We, too, cannot look at our paychecks without first saying, "This is a gift from God that God's goodness has allowed.. and God first brought our spiritual ancestors through a time of being immigrants and aliens, outsiders and slaves... and now, we are here by grace."  We, too, are called to listen to our story and then look around at those who are strangers in our midst and to celebrate God's grace with them.  We, too, are called to hear the story so that we do not become what the Israelites left behind--cruel hard-hearted Pharaohs ourselves.  We will slide back into that Pharaoh's-Egypt mindset unless we dare to hear the story retold and listen to our own voices claiming it as ours.  We will forget where our lives and livelihoods come from, and will foolishly think that our prosperity is our own achievement, rather than a gift we did not earn.  We will forget, too, then, what it is to be delivered by the God of Mercy.

It is never easy to have to hear the stories about ourselves that humble us.  It is never easy to have to hear a reminder about ourselves that pushes us to act differently in the world.  But God never promised easy--only that the task of listening to our own stories is worth it... because it is in that listening that we find the presence of God and the fingerprints of grace.

Lord God, give us ears to listen to our own story, and give us mouths courageous enough to retell our story truthfully, so that we may live and celebrate in your mercy day by day.

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