{"id":170,"date":"2013-12-29T11:27:19","date_gmt":"2013-12-29T16:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/?p=170"},"modified":"2014-12-03T21:31:39","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T02:31:39","slug":"twice-told-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/?p=170","title":{"rendered":"Twice-Told Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"<body><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-170-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Twice.Told_.Tales-WW.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Twice.Told_.Tales-WW.mp3\">http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/Twice.Told_.Tales-WW.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/Twice.Told_.Tales-WW.pdf\">Twice.Told.Tales<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Watching &amp; Waiting<br>\nTwice-Told Tales<\/p>\n<p>Texts on Sunday, December 29, 2013<br>\nExodus 1: 13-22; Matthew 2: 13-21<\/p>\n<p>The Hebrew Bible opens with a story about creation.\u00a0 \u201cIn the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth . . .\u201d\u00a0 A chapter later, we start all over again.\u00a0 \u201cOn the day the Lord God made the earth and the heavens . . . \u201c To my last day, I will cherish the memory of the 13-year old girl in my Sunday school class shouting, \u201cIt\u2019s a different story!\u201d when she saw that Genesis 2, compared with Genesis 1, is a different way of telling about great beginnings.\u00a0 The Bible\u2019s stories of creation are examples of what I have come to call the \u201ctwice-told tale.\u201d\u00a0 There are scores of them in the Bible.<br>\nAbraham travels to a certain king\u2019s estates and notices that the king is noticing his beautiful wife Sarah.\u00a0 Fearing that the king will kill him in order to take Sarah for himself, Abraham lies about their relationship.\u00a0 \u201cShe\u2019s just my sister,\u201d he says, thus putting the whole divine plan at risk. This he does twice, once within a column inch of having received God\u2019s covenant promises, then again a few chapters later.\u00a0 Further on, son Isaac tells this same lie about his wife\u2014a thrice-told tale. (Gen. 26)\u00a0 In Exodus, God reveals the divine name to Moses\u2014YHWH\u2014two different times.\u00a0 Moses goes up the mountain to receive the tablets of the law in Exodus 19, and again in Exodus 32. And Deuteronomy\u2014a Greek word which means the \u201csecond (telling of the) law\u201d\u2014retells the whole Exodus story of Israel\u2019s wilderness wandering from a new perspective.\u00a0 Samuel anoints Saul king, once at\u00a0 the urging of the Spirit of God, and a second time because tribal leaders demand it.\u00a0 Later, it goes the same with David: anointed once by Samuel at the urging of the Spirit, and once on the insistence of the people.\u00a0 All of 1 and 2 Chronicles re-tell the stories of 1 and 2 Kings, yet with astonishing omissions and additions.\u00a0 We could go on.\u00a0 The Bible is full of twice-told tales.\u00a0 Why is the Bible thus?<br>\nDid you ever watch The Miracle on 34th St?\u00a0 Which version?\u00a0 1947?\u00a0 1973?\u00a0 1994?\u00a0 I bet some of you could name a dozen movies made when you were young, then re-made a generation later. Why do they do that?\u00a0 It sells! You give a re-make new attention.\u00a0 Sitting down for an old movie, your expectations are parked in a slot marked \u201cold, familiar story.\u201d\u00a0 For the re-make, even though you know the plot, you open your eyes wide.\u00a0 How are they going to handle Santa?\u00a0 The courtroom scene?\u00a0 The new house?\u00a0 One reason to tell a tale twice is to see our own stars move in old skies and feel afresh the truths left dormant among familiar things.\u00a0 Some of the Bible\u2019s doubles were written like that.\u00a0 But a hope even greater was often at work.<br>\nWhen that 13 year-old girl shouted \u201cdifferent story,\u201d she had seen something that slips by a casual reading.\u00a0 God has different names in the two stories.\u00a0 In Genesis 1, God is called, in Hebrew, Elohim, which we translate God.\u00a0 In Genesis 2, God is called YHWH, often translated \u201cLord.\u201d\u00a0 In many of the Bible doubles we catalogued a moment ago, the names of God differ in just this way.\u00a0 These were told twice not to attract different generations but to attract different tribes who had been telling their stories their own way for generations, using different names for God. When those tribes joined together, they brought their sacred stories with them\u2014for example, their own ways of telling the one about Abraham and his wife. The Bible as we have it was produced by teachers working like tailors to sew hundreds of patches together so discreetly that most people never notice what that 13 year-old girl saw in our Sunday school class.\u00a0 Tales twice told in the sacred treasury often show the traces of a practice of peace made possible in the name of God by joining those who were far off with those who were near.<br>\nMatthew, the gospel writer, had that same hope. Like Paul, Matthew was a Jew.\u00a0 Unlike Paul\u2019s, Matthew\u2019s churches had grown hostile to Jews.\u00a0 Matthew yearned to connect his people with a hope for all the world.\u00a0 His situation was like that of an attorney before the U.S. Supreme Court.\u00a0 There, the justices do not warm to a nifty new idea,\u00a0 as if they were free to make the law mean whatever they want.\u00a0 To the contrary, the attorney must show legal precedents for every claim.\u00a0 Just so for Matthew.\u00a0 His judges\u2014whether learned scribes or unlettered farmers\u2014also sought precedents in the Torah that shed light on the new situation.\u00a0 To this end, rabbis of Matthew\u2019s time re-told their stories a hundred ways to sing the glories of God in a new key.\u00a0 That interpretive tradition was called midrash.<br>\nIn that spirit, Matthew gathered a chorus of oracles from holy scripture to help sing the new song.\u00a0 If the visit of the wise men following a star to the baby Jesus reminds you of an aria from Handel\u2019s Messiah\u2014\u266c \u201cAnd the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising\u201d (Isa.\u00a0 60.3)\u2014then you begin to see how Matthew sewed his story together.\u00a0 If dreaming Joseph going down into Egypt to save the Christ child recalls another dreaming Joseph who was taken down to Egypt (Gen. 39:1), where he was able to save all the children of Israel, your ears are beginning to hear.\u00a0 If Herod\u2019s massacre of the innocents from which Jesus himself was saved sounds like Pharaoh\u2019s massacre of infant boys, out of which Moses was saved (Exo. 1: 23), you are receiving Matthew\u2019s story as he sent it, not as a reporter\u2019s notebook, but as a song to learn and to sing in praise to God for fulfilling in one life the promises made to Israel, that they will be a blessing to all nations of the earth.<br>\nBut having once seen why and how Matthew set down what he did, will it seem that we have been to the Emerald City and watched a mere man working Oz behind a curtain?\u00a0 Once the legend is clear, can you go tell it on the mountain?\u00a0 Can you repeat the sounding joy ever again ?\u00a0 To be plain about it, if a person\u2019s faith was based on facts, that bird will never sing again.\u00a0 But faith based on facts wasn\u2019t faith anyway, so the loss, while confounding, can open on great riches.\u00a0 The things of God cannot be dressed in a suit of facts for you to examine in a dressing room to decide whether you buy it.\u00a0 To break you from your worry whether the tales of God are true, Jesus taught with parables only, the gospels say\u2014never with facts or dissertations.\u00a0 He had no desire to transfer stuff from his head into your head.\u00a0 For Jesus and his disciples, the test of truth is not Did it happen? but Did something happen . . . in you?\u00a0 Or have you settled back in the pew and parked your expectations in the slot marked \u201cold, familiar story?\u201d<br>\nLook.\u00a0 All over the Western world, the church, yes, even the mega-church, is withering away.\u00a0 The numbers of \u201cnones\u201d (with no religious affiliation) grow every year, for in all their life, they have not heard the tale twice told truly, madly, deeply enough to make something happen in them.\u00a0 This is not a technical problem to be adjusted with better marketing or warmer greetings at the door. This is a problem with the church\u2019s mission, for too often the church gives me the old time religion as if it\u2019s good enough for me.\u00a0 It is not.\u00a0 Seventy years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer prophesied it from prison:<br>\nThe old words of churches are incapable of being saving words anymore.\u00a0 The old words fail and fall silent, and our Christian life consists only of prayer and trying to do the right thing. It is not for us to foretell the day, but the day will come when some are called to utter the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed.\u00a0 There will be a new language, perhaps quite unreligious, but liberating and saving, like the language of Jesus, so that people are horrified by it, and yet conquered by its power, the language of a new truth, the language that foretells the peace of God and the coming of the Kingdom. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison)<br>\nTales twice told aim to draw you up out of your armchair onto the stage of history, where you take the part God gives you in a play where God sees hope in the bellies of unwed mothers; where evil empires harbor hopes for the healing of the nations.\u00a0 If you will play in God\u2019s play, you must stop treating your story so literally\u2014not just the Bible story, but your own life and your own story too.\u00a0 Mature yourself, as Rumi\u2019s poem puts it. Stop whining about your victimhood, about how badly \u201cthey\u201d treat, they cheat, they rule.\u00a0 That story is too small, and your life too short for such broken-record bleatings. Read and write your own life and the life of this church as a parable of God.\u00a0 Tell the old story in a new way so someone living in terror can hear it.<br>\nMy family and I just went to see the exhibit of paintings by Marc Chagall at The Jewish Museum.\u00a0 Who that has witnessed his blues and reds ever forgets?\u00a0\u00a0 I went expecting what I knew\u2014though color is always new.\u00a0 What I received was something altogether different.\u00a0 The exhibition is called \u201cLove, War, and Exile.\u201d\u00a0 Very many of its tableaux date from the 1930s and 1940s, as this deeply Jewish man painted a way through the atrocities of the Nazi massacre of the innocents.\u00a0 Ah! Pharaoh, Ah! Herod.\u00a0 There, in frame after frame, Chagall has hung Jesus on the cross, looking with infinite compassion upon the slaughtered innocents.\u00a0 In a storm of death, Chagall painted the old tale twice, and told it more truly than did all the white world of Christendom.<br>\nIn The Cross and the Lynching Tree, our Union Seminary neighbor Prof. James Cone observes that all through the 20th century, white liberal theologians, including Union\u2019s eminent Reinhold Niebuhr, failed to see the link between lynching and crucifixion.\u00a0 \u201cTo reflect on this failure,\u201d he writes, \u201cis to address the defect in the conscience of white Christians and to suggest why African-Americans have needed to trust and cultivate their own theological imaginations,\u201d he writes. (p. 32) \u201cTo trust and to cultivate theological imagination\u201d\u2014that is exactly what the twice-told is for\u2014to find a language your people understand which releases them from the bondage of evil and kindles their power, so that we all see ourselves in honesty and in possibility.<br>\nProfessor Cone ends his book this way:<br>\nWe were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus. No gulf between blacks and whites is too great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God has joined together, no one can tear apart.\u00a0 The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America\u2019s crucifixion of black people.\u00a0 It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land.\u00a0 In this sense, black people are Christ figures, not because they wanted to suffer, but because they had no choice. Just as Jesus had no choice in his journey to Calvary, so black people had no choice about being lynched.. . . Yet God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine.\u00a0 If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation, there is hope \u201cbeyond tragedy.\u201d<br>\nSpeaking hope beyond tragedy is what Matthew was doing with his twice-told tales long ago.\u00a0 It is what you must do now.\u00a0 First, mature yourselves; see to it that something is happening in you to wake you from the armchair of the old and familiar. Then find the language to communicate with the people about their times, and their terrors, in truth.\u00a0 Yes, that story is all ready in the holy scriptures; it has always been.\u00a0 But you can\u2019t just read it plain.\u00a0 The word is waiting for you to be twice-told.<\/p>\n<p>Rev. Stephen H. Phelps\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0The Riverside Church<br>\n\u00a9 2013 Stephen H. Phelps \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0in the City of New York<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Hebrew Bible opens with a story about creation.  \u201cIn the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth . . .\u201d  A chapter later, we start all over again.  \u201cOn the day the Lord God made the earth and the heavens . . . \u201c<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermon-2013"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenhphelps.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}