Monday, September 3, 2012

A Story that Can Change the World

This is my sermon on 2 Samuel 12:1-15. It's my last on Samuel, I think, which is both a relief (the next parts of the David narrative get really hairy - Ammnon and Tamar, Absalom, etc.) and a loss (I've really enjoyed studying the David cycle over the past two months, and I just got a new book to help). It's about stories and how they can change our world, the parables we encounter in every day life, and the way telling our own stories can make a difference. It references Blood Done Sign My Name, by Tim Tyson, which is one of my favorite books. It's chocked full of good stories and makes you think differently about what the Civil Rights Movement was really like for people growing up in the South. 
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?


[1] Tyson, Tim. “Blood Done Sign My Name” New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004. p. 77.
[2] Ibid, 77
[3] Ibid, 77.

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