The Story We Tell

From an early age, we love stories. We love to tell stories, to hear stories. Little kids go up to their beloved adults, demanding: “Tell me a story.” They refuse to go to sleep until the book that has been read 1,000 times is read the 1,0001^st time. We gravitate toward stories of success, of a hero that experiences a struggle and ultimately overcomes it in the end. We like the “once upon a time” to end with “and they lived happily ever after.” We like heroes that look a little like us, whether it’s the heroines or heroes of the dystopian future movies, or the awkward kid that grows up to be smart, successful, with a beautiful wife and four perfectly behaved children. We watch movies, transporting ourselves, if only for a moment, to a different place and a different time. We believe in stories. We put our faith in stories.

            It is really easy to forget about the middle part of stories: the journey, the challenge, the fear, the anxiety, the moment in which it looks like the heroine is going to lose her nerve, in which the hero’s one fatal flaw might actually prove fatal. We remember the beginning, the call, the initial moment in which the hero or heroine sets off on the journey; we remember the end, the sigh of relief, the shout of joy, the “I told you so.” Think about the stories you tell about yourself; most of the time, the stories we tell follow a similar trajectory. When we are in the so-called middle of the story, we are often alone, fearful, unsure we are actually going to survive what lies ahead of us. These are the times many of us, despite the gift of community and people in our lives with whom we can share our burdens, retreat.

            “I had no idea you struggled with depression,” or “I didn’t know you were having such a tough time,” or “I wish you would have told me,” your friends say. Most of us, when faced with a difficult situation, will try to hide it. We try to run from it. Once we have survived it, we try to forget it.

            Sometimes we’re the friend, offering the platitudes that “I would have been there,” when we know all too well that we saw our friends struggling and told ourselves things that distance ourselves from the struggle: “If they need me, they’ll ask,” or “It’s not my place,” or judge them: “If they would have just done it this way, it wouldn’t be so bad,” or “Didn’t he see this coming? She’s always been that way” or “If they had just disciplined their kids when they were young.”

            The stories we tell shape who we are; they can tell us a lot about the shape of our faith, of what we believe in, of who we believe in. In Deuteronomy, the Israelites were to the point in the story that everyone loves: the Promised Land is in sight. It’s happening. They were about to realize promises uttered to Abraham so many generations ago. Their parents and grandparents, now dead, were buried in the sands of Sinai, and it was they – the descendants – who were finally going to realize the promise.

            But back up a minute. That wandering Aramean was Abraham. The promises were uttered to him way back in Genesis. Between Genesis and here, a lot has happened. The beginning of Exodus, the story of the Israelites leaving Egypt, begins with a genealogy and then continues: “⁸ Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. ⁹ He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. ¹⁰ Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” ¹¹ Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. ¹² But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. ¹³ The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, ¹⁴ and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.” Then the midwives were instructed to kill all the male children (they didn’t). Then baby Moses was sent down the Nile, was raised in Pharaoh’s household, killed an Egyptian, fled when the Hebrews called him out on it, and was called to go back to Egypt by God, who appeared to him in a burning bush. Then he went back and sparred with Pharaoh, who kept saying he’d let the people go but didn’t. then there were the 10 plagues (blood, frogs, lice, flies, diseased livestock, boils, hail and fire, locusts, darkness, and death of the firstborn), and the Israelites fled with Pharaoh and his army in tow, crossing the Red Sea on dry land. Then they wandered in the desert, complaining about the food nearly as soon as they left, and making idols for themselves while Moses was on the mountain communicating with God, and God threatens to leave them behind and start over. Abraham was long forgotten, his wandering footsteps a distant memory for those who could barely remember Joseph (who was Abraham’s great-grandson). Storytelling is an act of remembering; it is an act of faith. As the Israelites went into the land promised so long ago that the promises seemed a farce, a lie that God told Abram a long long time ago and far far away, beckoning him away from all that he knew, into the unknown, into uncertainty, into faith.

            The Israelites were not to tell a story of how they had overcome all odds. They were not to tell a story about how, through their grit and gumption, they came out better in the end. They were not to tell a story about how it all worked out and everyone lived happily ever after. When they bring their offerings, they tell the story of struggle, of hardship, and of how it was not they – but God – who brought them through. Their story went a little more like this: Abraham was called to follow God, and he was faithful. Then our ancestors went into the desert and they were hungry and scared and tried to leave God behind because God wasn’t saving them well enough or fast enough for their liking. They were not particularly good or particularly lovable, but still they were made righteous and still they were loved.

            And we can tell ourselves that this was all long ago and far away, refusing to tell this story. But how many times have you felt God tugging at you, beckoning you forward, following in a moment of faith, only to realize how scary it really is to trust someone other than yourself? How often have you turned to yourself and your own devices to make yourself holy, good, and acceptable? How often have you said the confession, not really letting it sink in “We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed,” because saying it every week for an entire lifetime makes this story that we tell through our liturgy seem like something that is rote, memorized because “that’s what you do.”

            There is so much more to it than this. This is the story we tell: it is a story of how humans continually try to make themselves gods, assuming they are in control, refusing to leave behind all that that they knew, allowing that wandering Aramean Abraham to be a distant memory. But God beckons you forward into this journey, away from what you know, away from the moorings that tell you to play it safe, away from the platitudes. No, dear friends, God calls us into the struggle. God calls us into the middle of the story, and God calls us to tell the middle of the story. It is in the middle of the story that we discover who we are and who God is; it is this unrelenting God who pursues you. It is this God who cannot leave you behind that brings you in. It is this God that beckons you to tell the story: of struggle and hardship, and of how it is God – not you – that overcomes. This is the story we tell. This is faith, perched out on a limb, swaying with the faintest breeze, telling a story that isn’t so much about how you all become heroes and heroines against all odds, but a story that is true: it is a story about how God continually overcomes the darkness of your despair, and brings you to the morning of hope, who has mercy on us according to God’s steadfast love, who blots out our sin according to God’s abundant mercy; who washes us from our iniquity and cleanses us from our sin, who gives us a story to tell: a story of a people who are loved and who are saved saved, against all odds.