Living the Great Stories

 Friends, 

I hope you have found our summer series, “Living the Great Stories” to be as interesting and challenging as I have. I’ve been amazed at how these stories are layered with meaning, far beyond the simple narratives themselves. And I’ve appreciated how our other preachers on staff have been able to show the connections between the human experience that gave rise to these stories and the challenges that you and I face in a world that continues to resist God’s love and justice. Judging from your comments, I know that many of you are either discovering these stories for the first time or rediscovering them anew also. What a joy this journey is. 

 

The temptation that I face, when re-visiting stories like these, is to get absorbed into the curious features or memorable surprises of the stories more than to the role that such storytelling plays when God’s people are listening for God’s word in a world filled with noise. Last week, in the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and  … Abednego, Nebuchadnezzar comes across as a narcissistic bozo with his ridiculously Freudian gold statue (90 feet tall and 9 feet wide) and his demand that everyone bow to it. His retinue of followers – the list of which is repeated again and again – come across as sycophantic yea-sayers. The idea that one can make a fire “seven times hotter than usual” is suspect as a measurable possibility, but delightful as a way of showing Nebuchadnezzar’s inane fit of anger, especially when the fire only consumes his strongest warriors as they toss the three Hebrews in. The details are all so delicious and humorously disproportionate – even in the end when Nebuchadnezzar threatens anyone who blasphemes the God of the Hebrews with tearing them limb from limb and destroying their houses forever. 

 

The reality behind this story, however, was no laughing matter. The southern kingdom of Judah was defeated by the Babylonian Empire, with many of the youngest, strongest, and brightest were taken away into Babylon itself, while “the remnant” were left to gather themselves and struggle to survive. A puppet king was put in place, who would later conspire with Egypt to escape Babylon’s grasp, only to have Babylonians re-enter Jerusalem and destroy the temple. The experience of the captives living in a foreign land and the remnant living in Judah are tragic realities. It is in those tragic realities of humiliation and suffering that stories like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego arise. They are humorous stories that pillory the presumptions of the powerful.

 

So, the challenge for us is how to hear these stories and the grim reality behind them as the word of God today. It is the tendency of many white, relatively well-to-do Christians to imagine that the challenges of white relatively well-to-do Christians are comparable to the faithful Hebrews staring down the fire. Realistically, the geopolitics of our day would suggest that white, relatively well-to-do Christians are more like the suburban Babylonians in these stories than the oppressed Hebrews. White, relatively well-to-do Christianity is not treated as a foreign oddity in the US. It has such a place of privilege in our day that even to say “white, relatively well-to-do Christianity” will provoke some people to cry “foul!” 

 

A better approach for us, as a white, relatively well-to-do congregation of Christians, is to hear these stories as stories that are told from the underside of power. Most of the Hebrew Scriptures were written during or about a time when Israel and Judah were living in the shadow of a foreign empire. And the entire New Testament was written under the shadow of the Roman Empire. My hope, as we visit these stories of heroism, tragedy, and even comedy, is not merely to re-visit old nostalgic stories, but to marvel at how God is at work in the world. The God we gather to worship is this God, ever on the side of the oppressed and captives, through stories of heroism, tragedy, and comedy. When we begin to hear these stories as liberation stories, we begin to hear the Word of God in them. 

 

See you in worship, 

Mark of St. Mark