Getting the Story Straight
David C. Myers
November 18, 2007
Thanksgiving Sunday
Deuteronomy 26:1 - 11
I Thessalonians 5:12 - 21
Text: ". . . give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." . . . I Thessalonians 5:1
The Thanksgiving Holiday is fast upon us. It is a time filled with good food, reunions with friends and families, and occasions to reflect on what we have, and a time to be thankful. Whether or not we will be thankful, however, depends on how we reflect on the events of our lives; that is, how we perceive ourselves; or, in other words, how we tell our story.
How do we tell the story of our lives? How do we tell the story of who we are and how we got to be that way?
On the face of it telling your story seems simple. You just tell what happened, just tell what you did and what you decided. Just start to do that, however, and you discover it is not as easy as you thought. What do I tell? What is important, really? Why did I do that, anyway?
One reason we come to worship is to get the story straight, to find a framework to assist us in telling our own stories. And on this day that we celebrate Thanksgiving Sunday we find this framework in the 26th chapter of the book of Deuteronomy.
It is the season of the harvest. It is time for Thanksgiving. The worshipper comes to the sanctuary of the Most High God carrying a basket full of the first fruits of the harvest (NOTE: these were not the leftovers, but the first fruits) and lays the basket down before the altar. And then, of all the things that might possibly happen next, the worshipper is given a story to tell - as it says in Deuteronomy: "you shall make this response before the Lord your God." (vs.5) The worshipper begins:
"A wandering Aramean was my ancestor. He went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm . . . and with signs and wonders; and He brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that You, O Lord, have given me." You shall set it down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with Levites and the aliens who reside among you shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house." (verses 5 - 11)
The worshipper tells a story. The story is about wandering and freedom from slavery and the giving of a good land, and how the bounty is to be shared with all. We are familiar with the story. We have heard it from the Bible many times before. It is so familiar that we may lose sight of the fact that this story is told with a specific purpose. We forget there may be other ways that story might be told. Change the point of view, change the heroes, change the storyteller, and you have quite a different story.
For example, the story could be told like this:
"My father was a clever conqueror. Once we were slaves in Egypt, but we were clever and used our wits and escaped from our cruel taskmasters and fought our way across the Sinai Peninsula. Once free, we wondered in the desert for many years. Many died there in the wilderness, but the best and strongest of us grew hard under the hot, unforgiving sun. When we finally came to this place, we found the great cities of the Canaanites. For years we've fought them, but we triumphed because of our cunning and skill in battle. This land is ours because we took it with a sword and claimed it for our own."
That is quite a different way of telling the story. The events are roughly the same, but they have been transformed in the storyteller's perspective. It is a familiar sounding story. We hear it from people; we have even heard countries tell this story. Sometimes we even tell our own stories that way: "I am what I have made;" "I have pulled myself up by my bootstraps;" "I am what I have seized in this clenched fist."
That way of telling the story isn't heard much in houses of worship. The clenched fist, you see, cannot praise and cannot open to make an offering. The clenched fist cannot reach out to greet another, nor can it comfort. It cannot lift up another person from the dust. People who tell their stories with clenched fists do not give thanksgiving, because, after all, if that is their story, then who is there to thank? Thanksgiving implies dependence and need and incompleteness, the very things that are missing in that telling of the story. "I have made"; "I have done"; "I have seized"; these words and attitudes leave no one to thank but myself. The storyteller who tells the story with a clenched fist at best stands isolated and alone.
But, . . . that is one way of telling the story. Let's see . . .
"My father, . . . well, . . . was just always lucky. Even when we were slaves in Egypt, we managed to sneak away, and luck was on our side. We got across the Reed Sea in the dry season, and the chariots that tried to follow got mired in the mud. We wandered for years almost starving and drying up, but even in the worst times good things just seemed to happen, and in the nick of time, we found water. Food just seemed to fall from the skies. When we reached Canaan, well, I guess we just hit the right place at the right time. The Egyptians were waning to the South, the Hittite empire was declining to the north of us, the Assyrians were too weak and too far away and the Philistines hadn't moved in from the coast. All we had to do was take over a few Canaanite villages, and the lands just fell into our hands. We're lucky, that's all."
Those same events are just barely held together by the story. We kind of shrug our shoulders, bewildered by it all. One thing happens, then another; it's hard to account for all the funny, random things that happen to us. We know that way of telling our story too. We've heard it, and sometimes we have even told our own story that way.
"Tell me about yourself."
"Oh, let's see, I moved here from Charlotte in '91 - to get my graduate degree - and I lived in an apartment across the street. I just fell into this wonderful job with a growing company and moved into the townhouse about 5 blocks away. Somehow, I met this most amazing woman, I got married, and we had a daughter - and now we are buying a second house in Rehoboth in a month or two."
We shrug our shoulders, defeated by the effort of telling a story that makes sense of it all. We know what has happened; we know everything except how to the shape it into something whole. We need to be able to tell our story in a way that gives us coherence.
Can the Church help? Does the Christian story give us a story that nourishes us and gives our lives meaning? Do we have a story that can prompt us to a sincere thanksgiving?
Stanley Hauerwas teaches ethics and a good deal more at Duke University's Divinity School, and he suggests that a Christian story is most truthfully told as a story of what we have been given. "The self is a gift," he says, "and we need a story that helps us accept it as a gift." That, of course, is exactly the kind of story the worshipper in Deuteronomy is telling.
When we learn to tell our own stories as the story of a gift received, we discover that we can be truthful about ourselves. As long as we are trapped in telling stories about our power and our wisdom and our success, we are forced to pare away and conceal our weakness, our foolishness, and our failures. Coming to realize that life is received as a gift, we are free to accept all of life and incorporate even the bad times and sad times as part of our story.
•The worshipper of Deuteronomy tells of wandering in the desert. Well, we know something of wandering aimlessly in dry, storyless places when we wondered how we would ever find the strength and nourishment to go on.
•The worshipper tells of days of hard meaningless work, a kind of daily, purposeless, dead-end grind we have all known.
We do not have to avoid speaking of such difficult things in telling our stories. We are free to include all of our experiences because we can trust that the story of what we are given goes on.
As the worshiper's story goes on, "we cried to the Lord . . . the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt . . . with signs and wonders; and He brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
"We cried to the Lord," . . and the story goes on.
You see, our story is ultimately about what God has given us. We have known wilderness and wandering and tiresome meaningless work. We have seen defeat and devastation. But we have also known forgiveness and new hope and a promise of more yet to come. We have tasted the goodness of the Lord, and we know that we can trust in God's goodness - even in the midst or our personal tragedies. Because of this, we know how to tell the story truly and we are able to truly give thanks.
Because we can tell our story as the story of a gift received, we can open up our hands in a gesture on Thanksgiving and share that gift with others. No sooner does the worshipper of Deuteronomy finish telling the story than that worshipper pronounces an oath: "I have removed the sacred portion from my house, and moreover I have given it to the Levite, the sojourner, the orphaned, and the widow." (verse 13)
Because we know the true meaning of our story, we are freed to reach out to others. The clenched fist cannot reach out to the sojourner, the orphaned, in the widow. Shrugged shoulders have nothing to offer the stranger, the wanderer, and the homeless. Only those whose hands are open to receive life as a gift can open their hands to share the gift given.
To all the storyless wanderers who have come to this good place, we have a story to tell.
"A wandering Aramean was my father. . ." "And we cried out to God, and God delivered us and brought us to this good place." Our story is the story of who we are and what God has given us. It is the story of our past, but it is also the story of our future with God. And for that we can be truly thankful and join with Paul as he says to the Corinthians, "give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you."