Exodus 22:21-27
You shall not wrong or oppress a
resident alien, for you were aliens in the
land
of
Egypt
.
You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they
cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I
will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and
your children orphans. If you lend money to my people, to the poor among
you, you shall not deal with them as a creditor; you shall not exact
interest from them. If you take your neighbor’s cloak in pawn, you
shall restore it before the sun goes down; for it may be your
neighbor’s only clothing to use as cover; in what else shall that
person sleep? And if your neighbor cries out to me, I will listen, for I
am compassionate.
Sermon
OUR
TWO STORIES, AND THE ONE THAT MATTERS
It’s God speaking in the scripture
passage I just read to you. Moses
is the one who is actually delivering these words, but it’s God’s
voice that Moses is speaking with. God
is giving his laws to the people. But
notice that his voice is not the calm, measured, objective voice of
even-handed judgment. Rather
it is a passionate voice, a voice that’s filled with emotion, a voice
that indicates that the speaker, God, is personally involved with his
people. Why?
Why does God seem to take it so personally; if his people are
oppressing the poor; if they turn their backs on people who are aliens
and strangers; if they take advantage of people?
Why did God speak in such a dire way to his own people about what
will happen to them if they become like the oppressors that they had in
Egypt?
It’s because of the relationship that God has with his people;
that relationship is founded on a particular story; a particular event
that took place that both of them were involved in and that brought them
together. The people of
Israel
had been caught in
slavery and bondage and hard, hard servitude in the
land
of
Egypt
.
They had suffered there for many generations.
They were crying out for help in the midst of their misery.
And God heard their cries and sent Moses to lead them out of
Egypt
and into the wilderness,
on their way to the Promised Land. And
it was in that wilderness, right after they’d left their slavery, that
God suddenly gives them these dire warnings about what will happen if
they become enslavers; if they become oppressive; if they turn around
and treat with cruelty the people that are weak and helpless.
God gives them dire warnings, in very personal ways of expressing
himself; and it’s because of that relationship. If
Israel
turns around and becomes
oppressive after having been brought out of slavery by God; that would
be a signal to God that
Israel
is no longer listening to
their own experience;
Israel
is no longer engaged with
its own story;
Israel
no longer cares about
God;
Israel
no longer loves God.
Once the story that holds them together is gone, that
relationship is impaired. God
is speaking then in notes of wounded love, notes almost of jealousy.
It’s not for nothing the scriptures said God is a jealous God.
That means that God is deeply and passionately involved with his
people. Yet
Israel
has forgotten the story,
Israel
has forgotten its love
for
God
,
Israel
has abandoned that
relationship that God deeply cares about.
That’s why we hear this emotion in these words of God.
All other relationships are like that; whether friendship, or a
romantic relationship, or a biological relationship – parent/child,
brother/sister; all relationships that have love, genuinely present in
that relationship are created by and sustained by a common story, a
common experience, something that you’ve been through together, that
has brought you to this point where you are committed to each other in
love. It was that way with
God and
Israel
; it’s that way in our
relationships, all our significant ones.
Last June, shortly before I became your pastor, I went on a trip
to
Oklahoma
.
We converged on our hometown, my brothers and sisters and I.
We spent a week end together, just the five of us and Dad,
reminiscing about our past. We’re
really a motley crew, my brothers and sisters and I.
I’m the only one who still belongs to the conventional
United
Methodist
Church
. I have one
sister who’s sort of an Episcopalian and sort of an opera lover;
she’s combines the two of them together.
I have another sister who’s in
Canada
and is trying to find
herself up there. I’ve got
a brother who’s a hippie and thinks of himself as both a Unitarian/Universalist
and a Neo-Pagan. And then I
have another brother who’s a college professor, who goes to an
Anglican church and the reason is that he gets to wear a kilt there
sometimes. We have this kind
of diversity among ourselves. I may be drawing the lines a little more
sharply than I should, but that’s what my family is like.
And understandably, we have disagreements about fundamental
issues and these tended to move us apart from each other in the course
of our lives.
But on this week end last June, we spent almost all our time
sitting around the table talking about our childhood; talking about the
name of the animal that lived under my older brother’s bed; talking
about the games that we played, and the trips we went on and the places
we’d visited on those trips, talking about all the silliness that we
engaged in. We even slipped
back in our minds to sing songs from our children’s records, quote
long passages from our comic books that we’d read avidly as children.
We went on and on like this in this week end of reminiscing and
it struck me at the time that we are still bound together in love; in
spite of our differences; in spite of the paths we’re on that led us
to such varied situations in life. Despite
all that we are still bound together in love because we have the story.
As long as the story remains, that love will not be totally gone,
as different as we grow from each other, that story still brings us and
keeps us together. It may
not be enjoyable for a third party to listen to all these kinds of
reminiscences. Spouses
and significant others tend to stay away from these gatherings where my
siblings and I are talking. I
guess a little of that goes a long way; I think you can imagine how that
would work in your situation as well, where these people reminisce about
a past that you weren’t a part of.
But, still, it’s precious to my brothers and sisters and me,
because it’s really all we have. Our
ongoing, everyday relationship is very minimal; but we’ve got that
past, we cling to it, all of us, adamantly.
And I discovered last June how deeply my Neo-Pagan brother seems
to care for the things that we valued together as children.
We’re still brothers with each other, we still love each other,
and the story still keeps us together.
And I’m sure every romantic couple has a story, I’m sure all
brothers and sisters have these kinds of stories that I’ve been
talking about. I’m sure
that parents are reminded of their deep love for their children by the
stories of their children’s birth and growing up.
And I’m sure that children have the same kind of bond with
their parents, universally. It
the story right at the heart of human relationships in every society, at
every time and place throughout the world.
The story makes the relationship.
Of course, I’m not really talking about relationships in this
sermon. I started out
talking about God and
Israel
.
But I’m not really talking about God and
Israel
in this sermon, in the
sense of the Old Testament Israel or the modern nation of
Israel
.
I’m not going to get political; I’m not going to get
theological. What I want to
talk about is the relationship between God and us: the relationship
between God and us individually – you and me; between God and us
collectively as a church – the church throughout the world and this
little church right here and now. That
relationship is based on a story. In
our culture it’s probably easiest for us to get our minds around this
idea if we think about our individual lives, our individual
relationships with God.
I imagine everybody in this room can think about some sort of
event that took place in your lives that made you feel close to God.
It might not seem like a story to you, but if somebody forced you
to write it down on paper or talk about it to somebody else; you’d be
able to come up with a narrative that told about that relationship; how
it was sparked by a Christmas Eve service a long time ago; or an
experience the church had; or a moment when you were out in the
wilderness by yourself; or a moment when you were in community with a
whole large group of people, in a stadium perhaps, hearing a great
speaker speak. You would
have a story to tell, and that story is the story of your relationship
with God.
And it’s the same story as the story of God’s relationship
with
Israel
.
It’s not the same just because it’s a story; but it’s the
exact same story when you really get it down to the bare bones.
It’s the story of somebody caring for you when you had a need,
somebody looking out after you when you were hurting or lost or alone;
when you, maybe on some faint level, but still in a real sense, when you
were feeling like you were not complete or your life was not fully what
it should be. You had this
feeling of something missing, something lacking, you were disoriented,
even to a small degree and your experience with God was one in which God
filled that need; God heard your prayer, God responded to your anguish
and your pain and brought you out of it.
Your story with God, my story with God, the church’s story with
God it’s the same as
Israel
’s story with God –
the story of God having heard our cries and bringing us out of slavery
and into the relationship with him.
That’s the story that is the foundation of this crucial
relationship.
But there’s another story that we also like to tell.
We tell it on several different levels – we tell it as a
nation, we tell it as a community, we even tell it in local churches,
and we tell it as individuals – I’m not here to condemn this story;
I’m here to describe it and put it in it’s proper place in our
thinking. It’s not a story
of how we were victims and God brought us out of our victim-hood into a
relationship; that’s the first story.
This second story is a story of achievement; a story of
accomplishment; a story of the things that we have done that have led to
our being the people that we are today.
And like I said, I’m not here to condemn this story because
it’s not a faulty story, not entirely.
It’s a story of pioneers setting up a new home in the
wilderness. It’s the story
of people working their way through college and learning a skill or a
profession and then making a success of their careers.
It’s the story of people learning a craft learning how to
perform that craft until others in the community would value it and
perhaps it would be your way of setting up shop, of making a living, or
perhaps it would just be something that people regarded as yours, it
would be your achievement.
But what all these different stories have in common is that they
are about doing things, about accomplishing things, about succeeding at
something, working hard and succeeding.
That’s the second story that we tell; the story that I tell and
the story that I care deeply about.
I’ve indicated before that I want my scholarly career to be a
part of my life for the rest of my active years, and that isn’t just
standing up in front of a group of students teaching.
It’s also doing research and writing and having something to
contribute to the ongoing discussion among historians about the subject
matter that interests me so intensely.
I want to be part of that dialogue, part of that conversation;
because I feel like I have something that I can contribute.
And so that’s one way that I buy into this story of achievement
and accomplishment, it’s in my future hopes that I will eventually get
that dissertation manuscript published as a book.
I will eventually get more articles done, I haven’t done one in
a long time, but I’ll get more articles out there published in
journals. That’s one way
in which I buy into this story of achievement, this story of doing
things. And if I’ve said
anything that’s false, it’s the second story.
And each of us, I think, has our own version of the second story,
just as we have our own version of the first story.
But which story do we live by, really, ultimately and finally?
Which story matters? It
ought to be the one that’s true, or truer.
And it ought to be the one that’s the foundation of the most
important part of our lives. And
I think on both counts the story that is truer and the story that is the
foundation is that first story.
About once we were lost and alone and weak and helpless and God
was there. That story is
truer because the second story has the tendency to over-emphasize our
accomplishments. The second
story of our achievements, while it is not false, is still a story that
sometimes ignores other factors that ought to be brought in.
I’ve been successful, academically.
My college record is very good, and I’ve achieved the final
degree in my field. I’ve
been successful in that way, but all this is brought about by
circumstances that I didn’t have under my control.
It has to do with the family that raised me, the environment that
I grew up in. It had to do
with my teachers. It had to
do with the books that came across my way.
It had to do with a number of little things that were outside
myself, that were not under my control, that happened in my life.
About which I can only say that someone bigger than I am was
helping me to become the person I am by giving me all these little
influences. They’re not my
accomplishment yet they’re a part of my accomplishment.
When I tell that second story about what I’ve achieved, I
don’t give them enough credit. I
tend to give more credit to the way in which I’m aware of my own
success. And I think
that’s a natural human tendency. We
have a tendency to exaggerate our own role and to be unaware of ways in
which God was credited in that story as well.
And the ways in which circumstances, other people, were credited
in the second story. So the
first story, I think, is truer because it is honest about our
relationship to the essential outcome of the story.
We may not feel like we’ve been victims in the sense that
people who live in undeveloped countries, in places of famine and
perpetual war and all kinds of misery are victims.
And clearly they are victims.
It’s a very obvious and very painful burden that they are
victims in a sense that we are not.
And yet our human neediness, our human lack, is still the
foundation of the first, that God answered our need, and started to make
us into something greater than what we were to begin with.
So that’s the story that I think is truer.
And it’s the story that’s the same in the relationship with
God. Because in your
personal story of need and fulfillment, your personal story of
loneliness and friendship, your personal story of how you had some sort
of lack and God provided what you needed at that crucial moment in your
life; in your story, you are finding your own version of the love story
between God and ourselves. So
that first story, the story that Israel needs to remember or God will
turn away from Israel; because if Israel doesn’t remember the story it
means that Israel no longer loves God and God’s feelings will be hurt,
that first story is also the fundamental story for us.
And we need to remember it and treasure it. Like I said, that
story works on different levels, it works on the level of local churches
and the universal church, it works on the level of relationships within
our human sphere as well as our relationship with God.
But ultimately always is the story of how God supplied our needs,
how God answered our pain, how God spoke to us and helped us when nobody
else could. That story is
truer than the other one, although the other one is not false.
That first story is truer, and that first story is the one that
makes the relationship and keeps it going.
We have two stories, but I hope we can see the one that matters.
Amen.
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