The First Creed

The First Creed--June 29, 2018

"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 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 are, 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.' 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, 5-11]

There are these stories we tell ourselves, stories that remind us who we are.  And they are essential for life.

Sometimes, the stories we tell ourselves are grounded in family history: "We come from four generations of farmers who worked this same land and provided for their families," or maybe, "Your great-great-grandfather came to this country from the old country with nothing but the determination to work hard for a better life for his family," or perhaps, "There have been doctors in every generation of our family going back for the last hundred years," or something.  Sometimes the stories are about our own individual dreams: "You left your old hometown so that you could pursue your goal of being a breakout star in country music!" or "You will be the first in your family's history to go to college--you can do it!"  Sometimes the stories are less heroic but just recount the details of our lives that left the biggest marks on us: "You are the child of divorced parents, who struggled with drinking and drugs and is now trying to turn things around," or "You are the one who always makes bad life choices, and look where your choices have led you now..." or "You are stuck in a dead-end job, in a dying town, in a crumbling industry."  The stories we tell ourselves aren't always hopeful.

But they do have a way of defining how we see the world.

The kid who grows up hearing the story of hard work and grit that allow a great-great grandparent to start a small business and make a better life for his family in a new country is going to be more likely to try and live that same story, and to value tenacity and hard work in their own life.

The kid who keeps telling herself that she will be the first in her family to go to college is more likely to choose a path in high school that will get her there.

The kid who is told he was a mistake, unwanted by parents and burdening the family, is more likely to believe it and treat his life like it is of no use or worth or meaning.

The stories we tell matter.

And that in large part is why it is important to pay attention to the stories that the people of God have been telling themselves for thousands of years.  The stories become codified almost, like there is a right way to tell them, with just the right phrasing, and a particular direction to the movement.  And these stories come to define how we see the world--they become the lenses through which we see the rest of reality, bringing some parts into sharp focus and pushing others into a blurry background, or rendering them invisible by colors and shading like trying to see blue while you're wearing rose-colored glasses.  

At some point, the people of God settle on an official way to tell the story, and often we call those official versions creeds.  The early church had a handful of retellings of the Christian story, beginning with God the creator and moving to the story of Jesus, the cross, and the empty tomb, and then moving to the Spirit and the promise of life beyond death.  Many Christian groups, my own included, recite these words week by week almost to the point where we forget that they are indeed stories, and that they are a particular kind of story: these are the stories we tell ourselves to remind us who we are... and to help us to see the world clearly.  

There is no option of having no story in this life--whether you recite an ancient creed word for word or make up your own narrative for your life, we are all creatures who see the world through the stories we tell ourselves.  But it does make a difference what story you tell, because each story will highlight some aspects of reality, and just as much will diminish other parts of reality as less important.  The ancient Christian re-telling we call the Nicene Creed spends a lot of its time insisting that God--and none other and no less than God--took on human flesh in Jesus... but it spends no time at all talking about whether it is a sin to gamble or what our policy on graduated income tax should be.  That by itself says something about what the ancient church thought was worth spending its breath talking about... and what was less certain, less clear, or less important.  The stories we tell ourselves matter, because in many ways, they are what help make us the particular people of God we are.

And that, dear friends, is why it is worth it, on a day like today, to reach back long before Jesus and long before any official creeds or councils talked about the Trinity, to what is arguably the first creed the Bible contains.  Or at least, it is one of the first creed-like stories that the people of God told themselves to be grounded in who--and Whose--they were.  It is the story that the Torah commands to be retold every time you brought an offering from your harvest to God.  And it was a story that bound the people of God who called themselves Israel before there was a Temple, before there was a written Bible, and before Jesus was even a glimmer in his mother's eye.

The story I have in mind is this passage from Deuteronomy 26, which at this point I will hope you have read again.  It begins, "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor..." and from there it tells the story of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and his family, and how they were aliens, first living as squatters without papers in Canaan, and then as they sought asylum in Egypt during a famine, and then how God brought them from slavery in Egypt during the time of a terrible, self-absorbed, fearful, and petulant tyrant Pharaoh, and then brought them into a land that was at last safe from the grip of Pharaoh's armies, a land in which their children could live secure and free.  It is a story about how God was with them at every turn, whether in the decision to leave an old homeland, or the risky journey to seek a better life in Egypt, or the dangerous trek of the exodus and wilderness years.  And it is a story that reminded the people who told it to themselves several important things: one, we know what it is to be the outsider and the alien, at the mercy of someone else's welcome and kindness; two, we have always found that God went with us on the journey, wherever we went; and three, we don't want to become like the cruel oppressors of Pharaoh's Egypt, who treated us harshly when we were the ones living under his authority and threats.

Well, if you tell yourself that kind of story, and you teach that recounting of history to your children, too, it will do something to the way you see the world.  That's exactly what this story was meant to do--to shape the way the people of Israel, and all their descendants, saw the world and lived in it.  They were supposed to learn empathy for the alien, because--as God took great effort to remind them--they, too, had been aliens.  They were supposed to learn to trust God, because as the story went, God had been there for them at every turn.  And they were supposed to learn that everything they had was really a gift from the same God who had preserved them through their days as refugees and slaves and who had given them a land of their own eventually.

And so, because of that storytelling, as you catch here in Deuteronomy, even in the ritual act of retelling this liturgical story about the "wandering Aramean," the people of God were supposed to then act in ways that flowed from the story itself.  They were to offer back to God a portion of their harvest, and they were to share the harvest joyfully with the aliens who lived with them in their towns and villages, however they had gotten there, because God had provided for them when they were the aliens in Canaan and in Egypt. See--the story you are taught to tell about yourself makes a direct impact on the way you see the world and on how you act within that world.

Think for a moment, how things would have been different if the ancient Israelites told themselves, "All this is mine, mine, mine, because I earned it, and nobody else cut me any breaks.  It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and every one has to look out for themselves."  Think of how that kind of storytelling distorts and misshapes a heart... a community... a people.  Or if the story you told yourself was, "It's a random world, and some people get to eat and others don't, and there's really no obligation anybody has to help anybody else out."  Or if the Israelites had believed the lies of Pharaoh's story, which basically went, "Egypt is great because Pharaoh is great and powerful, and you had better do what the great and powerful Pharaoh says, or else he will kill you with his armies or wield the power of the gods on you"?  Imagine, if all you had ever known was Pharaoh's dominant story of empire--you'd feel you had no choice but to be a cog in his machine and work yourself to death while thanking Pharaoh for the chance.

Please make no mistake--the stories we tell as the people of God make a difference.  And it makes a difference, not just thousands of years ago, but in this very moment.  For the people who dare to call themselves the people of God right now, there are competing stories.  Some of them say, "If you have in this life, it is because you are favored of God, and if you don't, well tough luck. So hold on tight to whatever stuff you can get your grubby little mitts on in this life, because everyone else is out to get you."  And some of them say, "We over here are more favored by God because we are over here... and those people over there are simply unlucky not to have what we have.  Tough break.  But get your paws off my stuff and go away."  Some of the stories that are told among us nowadays are hopeless: "It's all meaningless and the only thing you can do is numb yourself to the pain of everything--so find a drug or a screen or a distraction of your own choosing, and just bury your head in the sand."  Some of them are downright wicked: "Us and our group are more important than anybody else, and in this life we have to look out for ourselves first--to hell with every one else."

But the people of God are dared in the ancient words of this story, this first creed if you will, to recall who and Whose we are, and to let that change how we see the world and act in it.  If we take these words from Deuteronomy seriously, we will remember our family story has always been one of being sojourners living away from our true home.  If we take these words seriously, we will remember that God has been faithful and there for us all our lives long, and will continue to be with us into the future. If we take this storytelling seriously, we will see our faces in the ones who live among us now like Jacob and his children, strangers in a strange land... and we will share our bread and lives with them.  And if instead we believe the lie that me-and-my-group are more important than anybody else around me, we will have become the worst thing of all--a new version of Pharaoh's Egypt... the one thing the people of God were to avoid.  

It matters a great deal which stories we tell ourselves.  The story we tell ourselves shapes the people we become.  And the living God has it in mind to shape us into people who reflect God's own goodness, generosity, and compassion.

What story will you and I live by in this day?

Lord God, we are your people.  Re-story us, so that we will see the world rightly, through the eyes of your mercy.