the implanted story

Shalom Mennonite Church

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - Easter 3

Texts 1 Peter 1:17-23 and Luke 24:13-35

Eric Massanari

“the implanted story”

In the folklore of my immediate family

there is a story told

about the day my mother sent my sister

off to school with a check in her hand.

The check was to cover the cost of hot lunches,

and Analisa was given clear instructions

to give the check to the secretary

as soon as she arrived at the school.

It was an eight block walk

to Herbert Hoover Elementary

from our home - six if you cut through

the backyards we had been told to avoid.

Somewhere between home and school

the check was lost.

The school called home to inform my mother,

who no doubt was fully prepared to scold my little sister,

who no doubt was nervously anticipating a scolding

at the end of the school day.

That afternoon when my sister got home

she said to my mother:

Mom, you know how it is when you’re holding something in your hand for a long time, and then you're doing something else, and then your brain says to your hand, ‘Why are you in that position?’ and then your hand says, ‘I don’t know,’ so it opens and you drop what’s in your hand but you don’t realize it? Well, that’s what happened.

Any anger or frustration my mom was feeling

quickly dissipated with my sister’s insight

into the workings of the human brain,

and we have all laughed about it ever since.

I love that story in part because it is a reminder

that how we tell a story, how we recount events

in our lives, makes a very big difference.

Some of the stories we tell are truthful

in the sense that they are closer to what

may have actually transpired at some moment in time.

Some of the stories we tell are truthful

in the sense that they reflect more about

our inner impressions and feelings about an experience.

Some of the stories we tell are obscured

by our desire to protect ourselves,

or perhaps smooth over details that

might leave us feeling exposed, vulnerable

or looking a bit too fallible.

Sometimes we tell our stories in a manner

meant to rationalize, defend, or even hurt.

How we tell a story can make a very big difference.

The telling of a story is often an act of interpretation.

This was revealed earlier this week

in the context of a much more serious matter

than the loss of school lunch money.

If you watched President Obama’s address

to the nation on Monday night,

in which he announced the killing of Osama bin Laden,

then you saw and heard the telling of a story.

The entire 9 minute address was

a recounting of events and intentions

that have spanned nearly a decade.

The president went back to September 11, 2001

and the terrible events of that day

and then connected it through years,

battles, struggles, griefs and losses,

to this present moment.

To summarize his story:

A bad man did terrible, murderous things.

A great nation was left wounded and grieving.

We could not stand idly by when under attack.

So we have waged a great and noble battle,

and we have been engaged in

a long and arduous search for those responsible

to bring them to justice.

And today, justice has been served.

God bless the United States of America.

Factually speaking, one could say that

this story was true. The President was

indeed speaking about things that have transpired.

And yet, one could have included many other facts

and a much longer history

to tell this story in a much different way.

One could go back further than Sept. 11, 2001

to tell the story of how the United States

funded and armed militant factions in Afghanistan

in their battle against the Soviet Union.

One could speak in greater detail about

what has happened in the last ten years

and how our own nation has been complicit

in terrible atrocities against human beings

in the midst of our war-making and our search

for Osama bin Laden.

And one could acknowledge

what has been true throughout human history

that violence seems to move in a cycle,

acts of violence appear to generate further acts of violence

and a “war against terrorism” like the one we are waging

has a rather insidious way of generating more terrorists,

like Osama bin Laden.

As I listened to our president tell his story,

it struck me that he was going to great length

to explain why this particular killing was good.

Something in us, some holy seed within us

knows that such violence - whether we deem it

morally good or morally reprehensible -

goes against our nature as children of the Living God.

To take another human life, to do violence

to another human being, we must override

a fundamental story written within our very souls -

a story of interconnection and life begetting life -

in order to play out a very different story,

a story of power and control,

and a myth of redemptive violence.

In his recent book on the phenomenon of suicide bombing

and our reaction to it in the West, author Talal Asad writes:

“However much we try to distinguish between morally good and morally evils ways of killing, our attempts are beset with contradictions, and these contradictions remain a fragile part of our modern subjectivity.”
—Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing

We must tell the story of good battling evil

in a certain way in order to justify our violence.

As Christians we follow one who lived out

a different story than this.

A tale of good confronting evil

but in such a way to render evil utterly powerless.

I notice in the story from Luke’s gospel

that there is a lot of storytelling going on.

When the two disciples meet the stranger on the road

they are surprised he knows nothing of the events

that have transpired in Jerusalem.

He knows nothing of Jesus of Nazareth.

So, they proceed to share their story with him,

the story of Jesus‘ arrest, suffering, death,

and the strange rumors of his resurrection.

Then the stranger does something surprising,

he takes their story and goes even further with it,

weaving it together with threads

that go all the way back to Moses and the prophets,

connecting Jesus to a much more ancient tale

of God and humanity.

And then the stranger’s storytelling

continues one more chapter, however,

he uses no words for the final part of his tale.

He takes bread from the dinner table and breaks it.

And in that simple act

a whole tale of truth is told

and the disciples recognize the Christ for who he is.

When Christ disappears

and the disciples reflect on what has just happened

They say to one another,

“Were not our hearts burning within us?”

When we encounter the deepest truths in life,

the truest and most life-giving stories that can be told,

something burns within us

because something in us knows that these are true.

When people encountered Jesus

something burned within them,

a holy truth,

a “an imperishable seed” of love

as the writer of 1 Peter describes it.

Some of the ancient Celtic Christians

spoke of Christ as our memory,

“as the one who leads us to our deepest identity,

as the one who remembers the song [the story]

of our beginnings” as children of God. (Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts, p. 12)

One way we might think of Christ

is as a master storyteller,

or, perhaps to put it a bit differently

the teller of the master story of life:

The story that all is made in God,

and all is made of God.

The story of all life deeply woven together,

and all life proclaimed good and precious in God’s sight.

The story that evil can be overcome with goodness,

and suffering can be met with love rather than fear or hatred.

The story that you and I were meant

to live with the very same fullness of love

Christ expressed in the world.

This is the implanted story-seed within us.

It is a story we only dimly hear

and remotely remember,

and it sometimes appears to be lost

amidst the violence we do to

ourselves, to one another, and to the earth.

It is our work as disciples of Christ to remember,

to retell, and to enflesh our master story of life and love.

The Way we are called to follow

invites us to pay attention to those moments

when our own hearts burn within us,

and to break the bread of life with one another

in such a way that the transforming love of God

is made manifest in our world here and now.

Amen