Monday, September 8, 2008

Telling the Story

What is your story? I know I have asked something like this before... but really... what brings you here today? Think about it a second...

(Pause)

You see everyone has a story. Our church has a story – it was founded 59 years ago and this year we will be remembering some of that. Our town has a story, founded by Amish folks coming up from Pennsylvania. And our faith has a story.

What we really have to wrap our heads around is that the bible is not a text book, it is not a history book, it is a story book.

If I believed that the reason we read today’s text from Exodus was a history lesson – it would not matter to me at all. What do I care what happened in Egypt and Palestine some 4000 years ago? It is ancient history at that...

So many people leave the church, so many people close off parts of their faith, because they say to themselves... I do not know why that would matter to me...

But as a story... it has a lot more power – because we are meant to hear the story and understand something about ourselves. The same way we get wrapped up in a good book, or a movie... the same way we hear about something and it changes us...

So let me stop and ask a simple question: Why is a seemingly obscure tale about a seemingly obscure tribe so significant? Why, 3,000 years later, do we go on retelling this, of all stories?

It is because the story of the Exodus teaches us the most important truths we need to know in order to think and live as Christians. First, it teaches us the deepest truth we can know about who and what God is. God's most fundamental self-definition is not Creator of the World or Sustainer of All Flesh (though God certainly is both and infinitely more), but rather the "Lord your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt to be your God" (Numbers 15:41).

In other words, God is the One who sides with the widow and the orphan, the vulnerable, the enslaved and the oppressed.

Because we are created in the image of God, human beings are called upon to become like God--in Deuteronomy's words, "to walk in God's ways." The deepest truth about God thus becomes our most profound religious aspiration: Each of us must seek to become a person who cares for the weak, who frees the wrongfully imprisoned, who raises up the cast down.

We are commanded to keep the experience of being a stranger in a land not our own constantly in mind, and to be driven to ethical passion as a result. We have a positive duty to love the stranger, because we too were once strangers.

I know, it sounds a little heavy handed, I am actually pulling out texts from Deuteronomy and numbers and Leviticus and stringing them together to tell you what the Bible says about the Exodus. If you want to think of it in a simpler way: This story shows us that God saves.

It is THE story of god saving people, who might not even really deserve it. It sets the stage to remind us of all those myriad of times when we have been miraculously led in the right direction, or brought out of depression, or made the right choice...

If we can see that the idea of God saving is an important part of our faith – it frees us to see it at work in the world around us in new ways.

Now the second thing is that the Exodus story also offers us a powerful counter-testimony to the cynicism and despair that threaten to engulf and demoralize us. Imagine a people, enslaved and dehumanized for generation after generation, all hope of freedom and dignity beaten out of them. After hundreds of years, it seems manifestly clear that nothing will ever change.

But then everything changes.

God's freeing the slaves serves as a paradigm and a program for all of Jewish, Christian and, indeed, for all of human history. The world will not be redeemed until every slave has been freed and all oppression has been rooted out. But the slaves will be freed, and the world will be redeemed.

Egypts come in all sizes. We are, each of us, familiar with enslavements and oppressions of various kinds; from racism and sexism, to bosses that hate us and people that treat us badly. And we are tempted, more often than many of us would care to admit, to abandon all hope of change, to dismiss all talk of transformation of self and world as so much Pollyanna nonsense.

To combat our despair, we tell a simple story--the story of a people who seemed destined for eternal slavery, eternal degradation and yet emerged into freedom and a shared dream with God. A people who were slaves now suddenly become co-creators of the future – and live in hope of a world that makes equality and love the most important value.

***

So, back to you... and your story... Most of us here today probably have never known slavery... at least in its most direct form – but like I said, this is a story about us... It is the Amazing Grace story of “I once was lost, but now am found.”

We need to recapture a little bit of the passion that brings us to faith.

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