Loading...Knowing our history and our stories is so important!
Why do we do the things we do?
Where do we come from?
What do we value and deem to be important?
Who is included?
Years ago, a gal I met at a retreat center who was a co-worker and a bold and “colorful” character asked me, “So, what’s your story?” I looked at her quizzically and said, “I don’t HAVE a story!” thinking I’d lived a boring life, especially compared to her.
But she said, “Yes, you do! Everyone has a story!”
I’ve been pondering and chewing on that declaration ever since.
We make sense of ourselves and what happens to, around, and because of us through stories. The great story-tellers in the oral traditions were masters as weaving detail, repetition, and surprise into the stories. Culturally, our stories today are carried by movies, TV shows, books, and even songs. We don’t have nearly as many story tellers as we used to, but we do have stories to tell!
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Jesus was a master storyteller. He most often used parables.
In his sermon in the Nazareth synagogue which makes up a large chunk of our Gospel text today,
Jesus makes reference to a couple of great stores of two of Israel’s greatest prophets – Elijah and Elisha. These are stories that the people would have known even with the brief reference Jesus gives them.
But do we? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. The story of the widow of Zarapheth can be found in 1 Kings 17:8-16 and the story of Naaman and his healing from leprosy is in 2 Kings 5.
Aside from being stories from the Hebrew Scriptures and part of Israel’s history and self-understanding, what do these stories have in common?
They are about prophets, outsiders, and miracles.
So, why would Jesus have chosen these stories to reference
right after reading from another great prophet, Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind,
and to let the oppressed go free”
and then proclaim, “Today this is fulfilled in your hearing”?
Why indeed?
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The power of the story is that they have greater impact than facts and figures,
than speeches, exhortations, and logic and rhetoric.
Stories have tremendous emotional impact.
And the congregation listening to Jesus felt that impact. Deeply.
They went from 12th man “fans of Jesus!” to “toss him over the cliff!”
Why?
Because Jesus, the Word of God Incarnate
said to these faithful Jews –
or, people who thought of themselves as faithful and good –
God heals everyone
God includes even the outsider
God gives the gift of life to the enemy of the people
God loves all the beloved world –
there is no such thing as “us” and “them”
there is no one who is beyond the pale of God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness.
For those of us who have firm ideas about what’s good and bad, or what sorts of language and behaviors are improper, wrong, rude, mean, or even unforgivable,
this is shocking news.
For some of us listening to these stories from Jesus, the Word,
that message that all are included, even the enemy, the foreign power, or the impoverished outsider
riles us up and makes us upset.
After all, those who will not work should not eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10) and
“God helps those who help themselves.” (Ben Franklin)
We might even want to join the synagogue crowd and threaten to throw the rabble rouser off a cliff, so disturbing and blasphemous are these words!
And there are some of us here who “tsk, tsk!” to all those in the synagogue congregation:
don’t they get it?
don’t they understand God’s grace?
maybe they should not be welcome.....
But, as writer Anne Lamott warns us:
If the god you worship and believe hates the same people you do (and has the same enemies), then you don’t really believe in God. You’ve made god up.
The Widow of Zarephath, Naaman the Aramean general, the crowd at the synagogue, the people waiting for asylum at the border who were part of the caravan, politicians (bless their hearts), people of the complete opposite perspective than you on whatever the issue may be...
all are included in God’s grace
all are given God’s love
all are forgiven by God.
This is a hard truth of the Gospel to swallow some days.
You may want to throw Jesus off a cliff, or crucify him, or even deny (or ignore) him,
but Jesus just keeps on going his way –
loving, welcoming, challenging, and transforming.
He keeps on telling us stories with the truth of God’s Way at the heart of them,
stories which wend their way into our minds and hearts to provoke us to recognize God’s radical and surprising way of loving us.
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Flannery O’Connor wrote a short story called “Revelation”
In the story, a woman named Ruby Turpin was a “good Christian” and she found many reasons why the people around her just DID NOT measure up to God’s standards. And, she was very sure of her assessment and judgment of said people!
So, imagine her surprise when she had a vision one day of all the people wending their way to heaven! She was shocked to see all “those” people – in front of her, even!
But, I think the truly grace-filled moment, as the reader or listener, is realizing that, indeed, Ruby herself is in line. Even though she’s been the bigoted, unjust, mean, and judgmental voice of the whole story, she too is included in God’s love. She too is welcome to the Table. She too is at the Feast.
Jesus doesn’t scold the crowd who got mad at his preaching and were filled with such rage that they were ready to kill! No, he passed through the midst of them and went on his way, the Way to Jerusalem. They way of healing, teaching, including, welcoming, challenging, and loving.
The Way onto which each of us are invited and included.
Amen
