Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 25, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

When I was born, the doctors told my parents I would not live through the first night. The Christmas my twin brother and I were four I got up before he did, went out into the living room, saw all the loot under the tree, went back to our room, and announced that Santa Claus didn’t come. When I was eleven and living with my family in Berlin Germany our German landlady tried to put the red armband from her late husband’s very real Nazi Party uniform on me, and I wouldn’t let her do it. When I was in high school I stopped going to Eugene First Congregational Church because I decided that all of those good people were hypocrites. After high school I took a year off from school and lived in Germany again for a year, and that extra year before college is why when I started college I was all of a sudden a good student after having been a mediocre one in high school. My father is the smartest person I have ever known, and my mother was a women’s liberation pioneer. We never talked about anything important at home because Mom didn’t approve of expressing emotion.

And you’re probably wondering why I’m throwing out this random collection of things about my distant past. Let me assure you that it’s not because I think they, or I, am all that fascinating. I’m doing it to illustrate a point. These old stories, and a great many more, are my personal foundational stories. They are some of my old stories that shape who I am, that shape my identity as a human being. They ground me in my identity as Tom Sorenson. Without them I would not be the Tom Sorenson that I am. I would be someone else, someone with different foundational stories. Are all of these stories objectively, factually true? Probably not, or at least I’m prepared to admit the possibility that some of them aren’t. Some of them I remember very clearly, like the Nazi uniform incident. Others I know only from hearing them told, like the doctors thought I wouldn’t live through the first night, and one Christmas I went and told my brother that Santa Claus didn’t come. I can’t prove that all of these stories are true; and although they all relate to me, I don’t remember all of them myself. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter if these stories are objectively, factually true. What’s important about them is not whether they are true, it’s that I understand them as part of my story, as part of who I am, as part of my identity as Tom Sorenson.

We all have stories like that. We all have our personal foundational stories that create our identity. As we recall and retell those stories—sometimes to the point of boring our family and friends nearly to death—we ground ourselves in our own identity as the people we are. Without those stories we would not be who we are. We would be someone else. Are all of those stories factually, objectively true? Probably not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they mold our identity and that when we rehearse them we ground ourselves anew in that identity.

It’s the same with religions. Religions are grounded in foundational stories, and every religion knows how important it is for it to remember and rehearse those foundational stories. We see this awareness in our reading this morning from Deuteronomy. Most of Deuteronomy is written as though Moses wrote it before the Hebrew people entered into Canaan, the land they believed their God Yahweh had given them to inhabit. We know that Moses didn’t write Deuteronomy and that it was written several hundred years after the time of Moses, but never mind. In the passage this morning Moses is instructing the people on how they should give thanks to Yahweh when they begin to harvest the fruits of the land that Yahweh is giving them. They are to bring some of the first fruits of the land to the tabernacle where the ark of the covenant rests and offer them to God. Then they are to recite a story. It begins: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” The reference is to Abraham, and the recitation the people are to make goes on to recall the history of the Hebrew people through their enslavement in Egypt, their liberation in the Exodus, and their settling in their new land. They are to give thanks to Yahweh for His great blessings bestowed upon them in these events; and they and everyone in the land is to celebrate them.

The story that the people are here told to recite is Israel’s foundational story. It is the story that gives the Jews their identity as Jews. Since before the time of Jesus they have celebrated the Exodus part of this story every year during the holy feast of the Passover, when they teach the story to their children to preserve it and pass it on to future generations. They are zealous to preserve the story and pass it on precisely because it is their foundational story. If they ever lost this story, they would lose their identity as Jews. In rehearsing it year after year they reinforce that identity. They ground themselves anew in that identity. This story creates the foundation for who they are as a people and as a faith. A whole lot more has happened to them since the time of those events, and those stories are important too; but this one is the foundation of all the rest. That’s why it is so important to them, and to us.

We Christians have our foundational story too. It’s a different story of course. If we were to try to encapsulate that story the way Deuteronomy encapsulates the Jews’ foundational story it might go something like this: “A wandering Galilean was my ancestor. He taught about the Kingdom of God, about justice and about peace. He healed the people and gave them hope. The Romans arrested, tried, and executed him on a cross because they feared him. They buried him in a tomb sealed by a rock, but God raised him from death on the third day in a terrifying display of power. He appeared to his Disciples and made them Apostles of His Gospel. Then He returned to God the Father in heaven whence he had come. He is seated at the right hand of the Father and reigns in glory.” That, in a nutshell, is the Christian foundational story. It is the story that gives us our identity as Christians. Without that story we would not be Christians. We would be something else, or better, “we” wouldn’t be at all, because it is that story that gathers and holds us together as an identifiable community.

And just as the Jews rehearse their foundational story during the Passover, so we rehearse our foundational story during Holy Week, between Palm Sunday and Easter. In the stories of the last week of Jesus’ life we hear him teaching and see him healing. We see him loved, and we see him betrayed. We see him killed, and we see him rise again on the third day. In our worship services during those eight days, from Palm Sunday to Easter, we rehearse our foundational story. We tell the story, and we hear the story. That week more than any other time during the church year grounds us in our identity as Christians as we relive our foundational story. That week is so important in the life of Christianity that we have a whole season in which we prepare for it, especially for Good Friday and Easter. That season of preparation is, of course, Lent, the season that we have now entered once again.

I don’t know if I’ve told this story here or not, but if I have I’m still going to tell it again. Once there was a family that had a young daughter. Like so many families with young children they returned to the church because they wanted their daughter to be raised in the faith. They told her about Jesus and how he loves her. Their first Sunday back in church was Palm/Passion Sunday, and the preacher was reading the Gospel narrative of the Crucifixion. As he got to the heart of the story a loud young voice shouted from the back of the sanctuary: “You mean he dies?!” A year later the preacher was reading the same text, and as he got to the heart of the story the same loud young voice shouted from the back of the sanctuary: “You mean he dies again?!”

Like that little girl you may be wondering why we rehearse this story every year, year after year. We do it precisely because it is our foundational story. We do it because it is the story that gives us identity and makes us a community. When we rehearse that story year after year we are grounded anew in our identity as Christians, and that identity is renewed and strengthened. We do it because without that story we would not be who we are, we would be someone else. Remembering our foundational story is crucial to our identity. It makes us who we are.

Now I need to interpose one caveat. We all have our personal foundational stories, but sometimes some of those stories are destructive rather than life giving. If our foundational stories include, for example, stories of abuse or abandonment, those stories can stunt our emotional and spiritual growth and create serious psychological problems for us. Those are stories that we must remember, but we must remember them not to cling to the unhealthy identity they create but so that we can overcome them, to that we can let them go, and move beyond them into wholeness of life. It’s the same with religions. For example, our Christian foundational story of Holy Week contains some of the ugliest anti-Judaism in all of Scripture. That part of the Christian foundational story has stunted the faith’s spiritual growth and had tragic consequences for God’s Jewish children. That part of our foundational story we must remember, but we must remember it not to cling to the unhealthy identity that it creates but so the we can overcome it, let it go, and move beyond it into wholeness of spiritual life.

So as we go through Lent this year, let us prepare to rehearse our foundational story as Christians. Let this time of waiting and anticipation create in us an eagerness to hear the story again. Let it be a time of clearing away the worldly preoccupations that keep us from truly hearing the story and making it our own. Let us let go of the unhealthy parts, especially the anti-Judaism; but let us cling to the healthy parts with all our hearts. They give us our identity as Christians. They are our solid foundation. They connect us to God. Amen.