A Story That Can
Change The World
To
most people, telling stories isn’t much more than an idle pastime. In fact it’s
often regarded as something even less valuable. When I was a kid and there was
some sort of trouble, my Mom would bring me and my brother out and hear our
accounts of what had happened. And when something dubious stood out to her she
would look at us real hard and ask, “Now is that true or are you telling me a
story?”
When
you hear about something so incredible it’s unbelievable, you might say,
“That’s not true, that’s just a story” But the truth is that stories (even ones
that never happened in real life) have the power to change lives, to change the
course of history, even to change the world.
Tim Tyson, in his book Blood
Done Sign My Name, tells about a story told
by Miss Amy Womble, that changed a church forever. Tyson’s father was the
Methodist minister in Oxford, North Carolina in 1964. He was one of those
socially progressive type preachers, always a step ahead of his congregation.
And one fall, without thinking much of it, he invited Dr. Samuel Proctor, one
of the leading African-American preachers of the time, to come and preach at
his church on Race-Relations Sunday. But by the time that Sunday came around,
Reverend Tyson realized that he was in hot water. There wasn’t nearly as much
support for this type of gesture as he thought. The night before Dr. Proctor
was to preach, Rev. Tyson called an emergency meeting, thinking he might smooth
things over with the board before the big day. Some of the board members
demanded that he call and cancel. “This thing is going to tear this church
apart,”[1]
said one man. And in the midst of this, Miss Amy Womble got up to speak.
“Miss Amy” as everyone knew her was
an old school teacher. She had had just about everyone in that room as a first
grade student at some time or another, and everyone honored her, but nobody had
ever really given much care to what she thought about pressing matters of the
day. And she stood up and said, “I hear some of us saying that this thing is
going to tear this church apart.” And she looked at the man who said it as only
teachers can do. “Now I know our pastor, and you know him too, and he’s not
going to tear anything apart. And I don’t suppose Dr. Proctor is going to tear
anything apart either. If there is going to be any tearing done, we’re going to
do the tearing apart ourselves.”[2]
And
then she told her former students a story: “There was a case up near Chapel
Hill recently. Where a teenage boy went around a curve too fast and was killed
in a car crash. So they thought. He was down there by the side of the road and
they were just waiting for the ambulance to come and take him to the funeral
home. There wasn’t any signs of life.”
“But
then an airman from Pope Air Force Base stopped. He was home on furlough, and
he say the boy lying there and he scrambled down the embankment and opened that
boy’s mouth. And he saw the boy’s tongue stuck back in his throat, and he ran
his finger back there and pulled out that tongue, and then gave that boy
mouth-to-mouth rescuscitation. By the time that ambulance got there, that boy
was walking around alive as you or me. And the next week they had a big dinner
up at the fire station out in Orange County for that airman, celebrating how he
had saved that boy’s life.”
“What
I haven’t told you, is that the boy who had the wreck was white, and that
airman who saved him was a black man. But that’s the truth. And I want all you
fathers to tell me something….which one of you fathers would have said to that
airman, ‘Now don’t you run your black fingers down my boy’s white throat? Which
of y’all would have told that airman, ‘Don’t you dare put your black lips on my
boy’s mouth?’”[3]
The
board voted 25-14 to welcome Dr. Proctor to their pulpit. That evening people
kept coming over to Rev. Tyson’s house with tears in their eyes. Miss Amy’s
story had changed their lives.
Now
Nathan walked into a situation not that different from Rev. Tyson’s. He knew
that he was about to do something dangerous. Only for Nathan, it wasn’t his job
or his reputation, but his very life was on the line. David had just killed a
man merely for having a beautiful wife. What would he do to Nathan, who came to
condemn him?
And
so Nathan told a story. He told David the parable we just heard, about the rich
man and the poor man. The poor man with only one ewe lamb, and the rich with
many flocks, who took the poor man’s only lamb because it inconvenienced him to
take one of his own.
It
matched perfectly with David’s actions against Uriah the Hittite, but David, in
his righteous indignation on behalf of the poor man, does not notice. He is
outraged, and leaps up to proclaim judgment on the rich man, not realizing that
in doing so he also judges himself.
No
sooner has David issued his condemnation than Nathan turns it around, and
declares that he is the man who has
taken another’s only, cherished belonging, and that the judgment he issued on
the rich man should fall on his own head.
A
quick side note about this story. The crime here, the way the story is told,
and the way Nathan’s parable is crafted, is not adultery. As king, David could
and did take any woman he wanted, as long as she was not someone else’s wife.
The crime—according to our biblical author—was theft. [This is why Bathsheba is
almost always referred to as the wife of Uriah (even in Matthew!), to emphasize
that David has taken what was not his]. This is where we differ from biblical
authors, who, constrained by time and place, saw women only as possessions. We
have made great strides towards a world in which our sisters, daughters, and
mothers are equal partners in seeking the kingdom of God. But as we notice that
Bathsheba was not much more than property then, we should also notice that even
today, some women and men are still being treated as property, bought and sold,
even here in America. We’ve made great advances in understanding since the
Bible was written, but we have a long way to go.
Back to the story: David, suddenly
confronted with his own self-condemnation, confesses. “I have sinned against
the Lord.” Given that he was king, he did not need to say these words. God only
knows how many people in our world are confronted with their own sin and choose
other words:
Let’s not dwell on the past…
It wasn’t my fault…
It was a victimless crime…
I don’t recall…
Even though it was late, David was still willing to face his
situation. He was still willing to cast himself down and ask for mercy. Our God
is a God who extends mercy even to such a person as David. There is no sin
which is so great that we can’t get down on our knees and beg forgiveness, and
it will be granted to us through Christ who died for us.
Nathan’s
story enacts a change in David. Before it, he was King David, who controlled
his fate, took what he wanted and apologized to no one. Afterward, he is once
again the David that we once knew, throwing himself down in God’s mercy, a man
after God’s own heart. Nathan could
have got up on his high horse and issued a condemnation of David, rather than
telling him that story. That’s the kind of thing most of us Christians like to
do: make sweeping proclamations about the sinfulness of others. It’s great if
you want to feel superior to others for having the right answers, but not so
good if you want to change someone’s behavior. Instead, Nathan invites David to
understand the other side of his actions, and in doing so, he causes David to
change his behavior.
David’s not the only one
who doesn’t realize the effects of his action on others. There’s a growing body
of literature that tells us that many criminals have less empathy than people
outside of prison. They often critically lack the ability to understand the
effect that their actions have had on someone else. Now an organization called
the Sycamore Tree Project has started to do something about it. It (and other
restorative justice programs like it), brings violent criminals together with
victims of unrelated violent crimes. And the victims tell their stories.
They tell their experiences of the
crime and of the effects that it has had on their life. Prisoners are rarely
ever exposed to their victims’s stories in the trial process, and it can be
quite a shock for them to hear of the crippling emotional and psychological
effects of the crime. For the first time, they understand how it feels to be a
victim of a crime. Prison insiders are surprised at how much change they see in
inmates who have gone through these programs. The state of Iowa saw a decrease
in reoffending rates of 15 and 17 percent in two similar programs run in the
state. The crime victims who volunteer their time are changing peoples’
lives…just by telling their own stories!
As Christians we believe in the
power of story to change people’s lives. In particular we believe in the story
of Christ, who came down among us and told stories to guide us to an
understanding of God’s kingdom, who lived among us and died for us, that we
might have eternal life. We believe that this story has the power to change
lives, for it has changed ours. It has called us into new realizations of what
it means to be a part of God’s community. It has called us to realize our own
sinfulness and throw ourselves down upon the mercy of God. It has lifted us up
in the knowledge that we are redeemed in Christ.
Now like Miss Amy, like Nathan, and
like the crime victims in the Sycamore Tree Project, each of us has a story to
tell. It may be a story of how God came into your life. It may be a story of
how a mentor or a teacher changed you, and how you can change others. It may be
a story about how you were hurt, told so that others might understand that pain
and work to prevent it.
What is your story? How has your life been changed by the
Gospel message? And how can you
tell your story so that it changes someone’s life, or even the life of an
entire community, for the better?
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