"Whose Stories Get Told"--July 29, 2019

"Whose Stories Get Told"--July 29, 2019

"And Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.' All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?' He said to them, 'Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, Doctor, cure yourself! And you will say, Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'  And he said, 'Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.' When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way." [Luke 4:20-30]

It matters whose stories we tell.  At least, it matters to Jesus.

And maybe it should matter more to us--if we want to be the kind of people who reflect Christ into the world, at any rate.

Here's what I mean.  I learned a phrase from my wife, who has training in teaching literature and developing curriculum, about the stories we teach to our children as a society.  She taught me that there is a need for some books that can be "windows" and some that can be "mirrors."  In other words, sometimes you read a book because it shows you the experience of someone else, to widen your horizons and stretch your mind... and sometimes you need a story in which you see your own experience, through characters, struggles, and situations that reflect something like your own.  We need both, just at a basic core human level, because we need to know that we are not alone... and yet also that there are others in the world whose lives and stories and perspectives are different from our own.  If you want to raise up a new generation of minds who can be grounded and comfortable in their own skin, while at the same time able to empathize with others who are different, you need both "windows" and "mirrors."  So the stories we tell--or more accurately, the stories we choose and select to put in front of our children from among the infinite ocean of stories, books, plays, novels, and poems out there--they matter.  And they matter especially when it comes to the stories of folks who are rarely heard, are pushed to the margins, or are told they don't matter because they are few in number.

And this, amazingly enough, is something I have come to recognize in the way Jesus himself selects stories from the treasury of his people's history.  This is something I don't think we often recognize about Jesus--we are quick to identify him as Savior, worker of miracles, Son of God, Messiah, and even moral teacher, but he doesn't get much press for being a sort of curriculum developer for the people of God.   Jesus himself sees this as an important role for his mission--after all, he says in Matthew's Gospel, "Every scribe that has been trained for the Kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (Matthew 13:52).  We don't often give Jesus credit for this, but he himself models the important work of lifting up what is most essential--what is at the heart of things--in the sweeping saga of God and God's people. Like any teacher working with a vast body of material from which he could draw, Jesus has to lift up some things as more important, and to let other things take a secondary place.  He does this all the time in the gospels, actually--we just don't often realize that's what he is doing.  But when Jesus teaches that the "most important commandments" are to love God and neighbor, he is developing a curriculum.  And when he quotes from the prophets, saying, "Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice'," he is prioritizing some parts of the whole over others.  Jesus carefully selects the stories, voices, and ideas from his own tradition that are most in tune with the Reign of God.  

So in a very important sense, part of what makes Jesus so compelling is the way he reaches into his own tradition--what Christians often call "the Old Testament" or "the Hebrew Bible"--and lifts up stories in which outsiders, nobodies, forgotten people, and foreigners were given special care by God.  Jesus knows there are countless stories to choose from to illustrate the care and work of God... and yet in this moment in his hometown, he chooses, deliberately, to lift up the stories of people they would have overlooked, forgotten, or ignored.  And Jesus does it knowing full well that this will provoke and threaten his listeners--who in this case are the people he grew up alongside of in his own hometown.  Jesus knows it will cause trouble to tell the stories of God's particular love for foreigners, outsiders, and even enemies (Naaman the Syrian wasn't just a foreigner who sought medical assistance across the border in Israel, but a commander in the enemy army), but he does it anyway, because those stories are the ones his listeners need to hear to have their horizons expanded (windows) and so that the marginalized people around him can see themselves (mirror) in the grand Story of God's love.

Now, you just know that the Respectable Religious folk in Jesus' hometown would have loved it if Jesus had just given a sermon about how great they were.  In fact, that's why they applaud him at first and speak well of him.  Jesus had just given a reading from Isaiah 61 and then gone on to say, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Jesus' hometown listeners were all expecting him to affirm how "great" they all were by telling stories about good religious people like them.  They were expecting Jesus to draw from the well and illustrate his point with a story in which a good Israelite was the hero.  They wanted only stories that would be mirrors for themselves, but nothing to be a window onto the wider world where God is also present and active.  So it upsets these good, pious, Respectable Religious folk when Jesus goes out of his way to choose two stories--and only two--to illustrate his sermon, and for both of them to be the stories of foreigners who found favor with God.  This riles up the pew-sitting listeners in Nazareth, because Jesus has dared to lift up stories--Biblical stories, mind you!--that remind them the uncomfortable but necessary truth that God is not their private possession.

And by taking this radical step of selecting stories that center on people from the margins--in fact, stories in which great faith in God is shown by the actions and choices of people who were deemed ignorable--Jesus forces his hometown neighbors to see a wider picture, and at the same time offers hope to those who were on the margins wondering if God's love was big enough to include them.  Jesus sifts through the many stories of Israel's past and develops a curriculum which offers horizon-expanding "windows" for the people who think God is their exclusive property, and which offers "mirrors" for the least, the lost, and the left-out who gather around Jesus, too, so that they can see their own experience in the great Story of God.  That's part of what Jesus was always doing--like telling a parable where the hero is the border-crossing Samaritan who understands neighborliness better than the Judean Religious Professionals did.  Or calling attention to the widow who offers her last two coins, rather than the bigwigs with the fat checkbooks.  Or telling a Pharisee that the woman anointing his feet with her tears will be remembered and her story told, even when he is just a footnote.  

The bottom line is this: Jesus knows that it matters whose stories get told, whose voices get amplified, and who needs to have a little hot air let out of their over-inflated egos.  And so Jesus lifts up the stories that he does as a way of saying to everybody, "Look here--God has always been specially concerned for the ones that had been written off as too different, too strange, too sinful, or too hostile.  God has always had a thing for the folks on the margins--maybe you had just stopped looking for God there."  And notice here, Jesus isn't calling for the re-writing of any Bible stories.  He doesn't edit Moses out of the Exodus story to recast it--nobody is suggesting that.  Rather, Jesus is selecting, choosing, which stories need to be lifted up for the moment and the people at hand.  So in a room full of self-congratulatory religious folk who are all sure they are God's gift to the world, Jesus deliberately selects stories that remind them they are not the only people God loves.  Jesus doesn't have to change the existing stories of the Old Testament; he just wisely selects the stories that need to be told, perhaps because they are in danger of being forgotten, ignored, or silenced.  And by choosing the stories he does, Jesus calls our attention back to the God of the lowly, the widow, the orphan, and the alien.

So here's the thing: there's a million stories out there in the world, still.  And there are a million voices out there--far more than that, actually.  We now live in an era in which technology allows everybody to share their thoughts (or selfies or lunch photos) immediately without even thinking it through.  The question, then, for you and for me, is how we can help to amplify the voices that are in danger of being drowned out, forgotten, or ignored.  How can we practice the very same skill Jesus did--of sifting and selecting to know which stories need to be lifted up for this moment, both to ground us and to stretch us?  How can we, like Jesus, learn to look for the presence of God in the stories of people who have been told they are not important enough, good enough, worthy enough, for God to care about?  How can we lift up the stories, like Jesus did in his own hometown, of the foreigners like the widow of Zarephath, whose faith became an example, or of the enemies like Naaman, who received help from God even though he was from an enemy nation?  How can we, like Jesus, rediscover and lift up stories from our treasury of Scripture, which will be windows for those who need them, and mirrors for those who need to see their own place in God's story?

It matters, the stories we tell.  It matters, whose voices we allow to be heard amid the roar and yelling around us.

And it matters that we listen when others tell their stories to us, too.

Lord Jesus, teach us how to sift and sort through the stories in the Great Family Storybook of God's People, and how to amplify the voices of those to whom we should be listening right around us, too.