Both
of our lessons this morning are great examples of storytelling.
Luke narrates Jesus’s 40 days and 40 nights in the rock desert, between
the time of his baptism in the Jordan River and the start of his ministry in
Galilee.
It’s
this story that lays the foundation for our own observance of Lent, the 40 days
we spend between now and Easter preparing to renew both our baptismal vows and
our vocation as followers of Jesus. Just
as Jesus, while in the wilderness, faced down temptation and became strong in
his obedience to God, so, during these 40 days of Lent, facing down temptation
and becoming strong in obedience are to become our own story as well.
For
Luke’s narrative offers a powerful paradigm for our lives.
We, like Jesus, are to make of life something much more than the pursuit
of physical needs. We, like Jesus,
are to worship and serve God above anything else.
And we, like Jesus, are to reject every temptation to put God to a test.
Our
Second Lesson from Deuteronomy 26 tells another great story.
Moses instructs the people of Israel that when they go to the sanctuary
of God to offer their first sheaves of harvest, they are to recite there the
story of how God acted in grace to lead and deliver their ancestors—the story
of how God led Jacob, that wandering Aramean, whose other name was Israel, the
ancestor of all Israel; and the story of how God delivered Jacob’s descendants
from slavery in Egypt; and the story of how God led those escapees and their
children through the rock desert of Sinai into the promised land of milk and
honey.
Yes,
both of this morning’s lessons exemplify storytelling at its best, and I urge
us to use them as a springboard for launching us into a Lenten discipline
that’s admittedly rather different from the traditional ones of charity,
prayer, and fasting—the discipline of developing our ability to tell stories.
You
see, telling the stories of our own lives and of our parents’ and
grandparents’ lives has the capacity for healing and empowering both ourselves
and others.
Many
of you have commented to me how meaningful it was to have heard the story I told
four Sundays ago at the start of Black History Month—the story of my
experiences in 1965 in Selma, Alabama. What
I want you also to know is how very important my recalling and telling of that
story has been for me personally. For
it has profoundly strengthened and renewed within me my sense of call to
ministries of justice.
And
I, along with several others in this congregation, had another experience of the
power of storytelling just last Monday night. Cheryl Pyrch gathered six of us in the Blue Room to discuss
how children can be more fully included in worship. And to begin, Cheryl asked us to go around the circle sharing
stories about our own childhood experiences of worship. Wow, what a great time that was—hearing others’ stories
of how their childhood faith either was or wasn’t nurtured by church services,
and being invited to get in touch with the roots of my own faith journey.
I called to mind for the first time in decades how when I was a small
child I got to sleep through the sermons, with my head snugly and securely
resting on my mother’s lap, and I also recalled how wonderful it was when I
became somewhat older to see and hear my own father preaching the Word.
Now,
when I arrived at that meeting last Monday, I’d already been thinking
through the scripture lessons for this morning, so I noticed immediately how
very different our storytelling was from the storytelling I’d just encountered
in the Bible. For in the Blue Room last Monday night, I was the only man.
Everyone else was a woman, and women’s stories of faith were being
given strong and steady voice. By
contrast, in the scripture lessons for today, all
of the voices are male and all of the stories being told are men’s stories.
After
the meeting, I began to fantasize. What
if the story in Deuteronomy were not to start off, as it does in Hebrew, by
saying, “A wandering Aramean was my father”?
What if that story were instead to start off by saying, “A wandering
Aramean was my mother”? What if
Israel, instead of focusing on the patriarch Jacob, had recited at its festivals
the story of the matriarchs Leah and Rachel?
As
men told the stories of Leah and Rachel found in the Book of Genesis, they
depicted these Aramean women as mere pawns in the hands of their father Laban as
he sought to get the better of his nephew Jacob.
Jacob
has fled for his life from the tent of his father Isaac, having stolen his older
twin brother Esau’s paternal blessing. Jacob
has run away to the land of his ancestors, the Arameans.
There, at a well, he meets and falls in love with Rachel, his cousin,
whose hand in marriage he asks from her father.
Laban insists that the penniless Jacob work for seven years since he’s
unable to pay a bride price. And at
the end of that period Laban tricks Jacob by placing in the darkened bridal tent
not Rachel but Rachel’s older sister Leah, with whom Jacob unwittingly
consummates marriage.
Jacob
discovers the trick as daylight breaks, and when he accosts Laban
Laban grudgingly agrees to give Rachel to Jacob as a co-wife.
But Laban demands that Jacob work for him seven more years!
The
story of Leah and Rachel, sisters and rival wives, the latter loved by Jacob,
the former unloved—the story of Leah and Rachel unfolds, through the voice of
Israel’s male storyteller, as a tale of Rachel’s barrenness and of Leah’s
fertility, of the jealousy and plotting between the two sisters that eventually
leads to the birth of twelve sons and a daughter—six sons and a daughter to
Leah, four sons to their maidservants, and finally two sons to Rachel—twelve
sons who become the progenitors of Israel’s twelve tribes and a daughter whose
rape leads to warfare.
How
different the stories of Leah and Rachel would have been and how differently
they would have been remembered had these women, these wandering Aramean
mothers, found their own voices—had they composed their own stories, and had
those stories been passed on by sympathetic storytellers!
Rutgers
Church is a community of women and men together, a community committed to
overcoming the patriarchy of the past and
present and to growing in equality as we grow in Christ-like faith.
This Lent our community has a unique opportunity to grow in equality and
Christ-like faith by cultivating the discipline of recalling and telling our
stories, stories of women, stories of men, stories that can heal and empower
both ourselves and others. For this
year, on the Wednesday evenings of Lent, one of our own members, Mary Beth
Coudal, will be offering a course called, “The Story of Your Life: Writing
Your Spiritual Autobiography.”
What
are your own stories of faith from childhood and adulthood?
In what ways have the stories of the women and men of the Bible—like
those of Jesus in the wilderness and of wandering Arameans—found their way
into the story of your own life? Who
have your heroes and spiritual mentors been?
How have they helped you keep faith during the dark nights of your soul?
What are the resources of worship that lift your spirit?
Are they the prayers, the music, the scripture lessons, the sermons, the
sacraments? Come here these Wednesday evenings in Lent, and find help for
recalling and telling your stories.
Have
you been arm wrestling with the devil in the wilderness of your job?
Have you been struggling to maintain faith in the face of illness and
depression? Have you had an Easter
experience of resurrection and new life? What
do you feel when congregation, choir, organ, and trumpet burst forth into
“Jesus Christ Is Risen Today”? Come
here these Wednesday evenings in Lent, and find help for recalling and telling
your stories.
Let
this Lent be the season for calling to mind your stories of faith—yes, to be
sure, your accounts of courage and success, but also your tales of failure and
of the grace that comes with forgiveness. Let
this be a season to reflect on the stories of sorrow and thanksgiving in your
own life, and let it be a time to find the courage to write down those stories
and to share them, so that you and others may be helped and fortified and led
into new dimensions of insight and discipleship, and so that you may come to
tell your stories to friends and recite them to the next generation.
And
if you are unable to find in your own stories courage for wrestling with the
devil on the pinnacle of the temple, then come and hear the stories of others,
and find courage in them.
At
a time when it is still the stories of men that dominate the newsstands and
bookstores, the theatres and pulpits, I believe it is especially important for
women to be emboldened to recall and to share in their own voice both their
personal stories and the stories of the women who have gone before—creating
the stories of Leah and Rachel, to go with those of Jacob; the stories of Mary
Magdalene, to go with those of Peter; the stories of Prisca and Persis, Junia
and Julia, Tryphaena and Tryphosa, Phoebe
and Euodia, and Nympha and Syntyche, to go with those of Paul and Barnabas, and
Timothy and Silas; telling the stories of Hildegard of Bingen, as well as those
of Francis of Assisi, the stories of Maggie Kuhn and Thelma Adair, as well as
those of Billy Graham and David Read.
For
over the centuries since Jesus, the church has, for the most part, yielded to
the devil’s temptation to re-enforce patriarchal power rather than create
egalitarian community. As a result,
since the first Easter, women’s roles in the church have been diminished, and
women’s stories, forgotten.
But,
as the Reverend Laura Loving has reminded us, we may be able to see women’s
stories even when we cannot hear them. For:
“There
were stories woven by women into the tapestries that warmed the walls of
castles, convents, monasteries, and mansions.
There were stories laced in songs … from hymns of faith to lullabies at
bedside. There were stories
stitched into abolitionist manifestos in early American quilts during the Civil
War. There were stories that were
buried in tiny quilts along the pioneer trail, and equally heartbreaking stories
of broken promises and discarded treaties as indigenous women were displaced by
westward expansion.
“There
were stories of triumph as women stepped to the altar and broke the bread of
Eucharist for the first time, and stories of compassion as women ministered to
the sick and the sorrowful.
“Yes,
we have lurched along in the wilderness with a mixed record on justice and …
honoring the voices of the other. We
have wrestled with angels and danced with the devil and we have won and we have
lost. But we are still here, and
God is with us, leading us with the torch of story through the wilderness.
We are here, and God has called us to be midwives to the birth of the
future, full of the Holy Spirit, cognizant of our past, breathing life, chanting
[and] singing [and telling stories of women, of women’s gifts, and of
women’s work].” (The three paragraphs above are
quoted from the Reverend Laura Loving, in The Abingdon
Women’s Preaching Annual, Series 2, Year C [Abingdon,
2000], p. 63.)
“A
Wandering Aramean Was My Mother”—storytelling, and yes, even story
creating!This Lent, let’s allow storytelling and story creating to focus our
journey and bring healing and empowerment.
This Lent, let’s let our stories bubble up to the surface and make
their appearance in newsletter articles, in luncheon conversations, in business
decisions, and, of course, (why not!) in the bedtime stories we tell our
children. Storytelling and story
creating! Bringing the good news.
It’s the way our Lent has begun, and with the help of Mary Beth, it can
be the way our Lent continues. Thanks
be to God!
Let
us pray:
O God, give
us the gift of memory—memory of our own lives and of the lives of others
who’ve gone before us, especially the women.
And help us to weave our memories into stories of faith that can heal and
empower others as well as ourselves. This
we pray in the name of Jesus, our Storyteller.
Amen.
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