Friday, August 25, 2017

Transformation Stories Reflection and Poem for 27 August 2017


A Reflection for XII Pentecost (Proper 16 A)       All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. 
August 27, 2017        Thomas E. Wilson, Rector


Transformation Stories

There is a story that is told in the Wilson family about how we were once landed gentry in eastern North Carolina until the dark days of “THE WAHWR”, or the “Recent Unpleasantness’, or the “War Between the States”. In that story, the Wilson, the landed gentry of the Old Family Plantation, enlisted in the cause and, before he left for service under the glorious Stars and Bars and Confederate Battle Flag, buried the Wilson family treasure for safe keeping. He was captured by the Yankees and died in the prisoner of war camp in Elmira, New York. The massive treasure was never found, and that is why we only looked like Rednecks. The children grew up out of poverty and, as a young boy, my grandfather, known to us as “Daddy Wilson”, hopped a troop ship to the Caribbean and found work there. After many adventures, he later went to Johns Hopkins, got an Engineering degree and restored the family fortunes, served in France in World War I, worked in projects all over the world, was a man bigger than life, and never went back to Goldsboro where the family treasure is probably buried under the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.

That is a lovely story - except the Wilson, according to the census records, came down from Virginia to Goldsboro as a telegraph operator where he also had a small farm, a boring middle class life, but did die as a prisoner of war in Elmira, New York long before Daddy Wilson was born. I do not think there will ever be discovery of the Wilson family treasure in time for my retirement. Family stories are like that, based in some truth and surrounded with a floral blanket of decorative additions. There are some facts, there are some floral additions, it is highly edited, but the main truth that comes in this story and the reason it was told is that Wilsons are people who (1) fulfill their obligations and duties, (2) don’t have to be trapped in the past, (3) are expected to rise up from adversity and (4) do not go back only forward. That is the truth that each of us children passed on to our children.

Each generation passes on the story to the next and adds its own interpretations. Daddy Wilson passed it on to his son, my father, and to me and my brothers as he would tell the stories of who we were, with the emphasis on duty and ambition. My father died before his children were married and had children, but my brothers and I passed it on to our children. My generation passed on the duty and ambition and to our grandchildren, but we had learned to edit the story to have no reverence for the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol of violence and racism and a shameful past, whose lies the Wilson believed leading to his death and the detriment of his children. In that, we teach them we learn from the past, we are not trapped in it.

The Hebrew Testament lesson for today from the Book of Exodus begins with a story set in the past: “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.”

The Bible is not a history, science, chemistry, geography, psychology, or math text book, so if you are trying to base a definitive study of history, science, chemistry, geography, psychology, or math on the Bible, you will run into trouble. The Bible is single book but a diverse library of myths, folk stories, songs, poems, legends, polemics, editorials, letters, reminisces, novels - both historical and romance, slanted accounts, lists of people, descriptions of architecture, and more. 
 
While we have no independent historical or archeological evidence to back up the story of Joseph or the Exodus, we do have evidence that there was a movement of Western Asiatic people in the time of the Egyptian 2nd Intermediate Period, the time between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, from about 1800 BC to 1500 BC. This Intermediate Period was a time when the Native Egyptian rulers were very disorganized, the Kingdom disintegrated, and many foreigners started to dominate the political and economic life. The Story of Joseph was probably an historical novel set during these times when the Hebrew people remembered being part of this movement of Semitic people into Egypt.

The “King that knew not Joseph” is a character in the story that seems to be set in the time of the New Kingdom, after the native Egyptians were able to reassert control over the Western Asiatic dominated areas and instituted an economic and political system that harshly exploited the outsiders. Some of the Western Asiatic people were able to migrate back to the places from which their ancestors centuries before had come. The Book of Exodus is the tribal family story passed on down through the years and became the basis of the Hebrew understanding of themselves and their God. They understood that while some of the characters may not have been historically factually accurate, the deeper truth is more important than the facts. 
 
Every year, for more than three millennia, the Hebrew people have had a ritual where they tell this story that we will tell over the coming weeks. They start the story by asking: “Why is this night different than any other night?” “Why are we different?” The answer is that we are people of God’s love and care. The truth of the story is that God hears the cries of the oppressed and calls upon us to band together to help the poor and marginalized. They are called to remember that they were once oppressed people, strangers in a strange land, they were once poor but with God’s help, they were able to make it through many hardships and they still have a hope for a future. The telling of the story was important as a warning not to conform to the practices of the larger society based on exploitation, but to become transformed into being the people of the long ago story as they live in the present day, so that it becomes their story. 
 
That is their truth which they have passed on to us because our brother Jesus gathered his friends together to tell the story, and he reinterprets the story for his followers. Each week as we eat the bread for the journey through the wilderness and drink the wine, the symbol of the blood of the sacrifice, the story is repeated for us to pass on to our children’s children so that it becomes our story..
We tell the stories so that we may remember that we are faithful to our heritage passed on to us as part of our transformation to follow God faithfully. Paul in his letter to the Romans told them – and us - to present ourselves as living sacrifices, not conforming ourselves to the outer society, but to be transformed so that story of God’s love lives in every moment of our lives.

Transformation Stories

Tell us the story again, one more time
to remind us of who we are and where
do we come from and of who is the heir
when we breathe deeply before bedtime.
Let our dreams be filled with heroic acts
of years gone, by people of same name
and how they grew from victim to fame
facing demons with walls against backs.
Let the stories weave us with the past
molding us to into more sterner sinews
necessary so our heritage continues
to the present day and beyond the last.
Oh, this is stuff of which we are made,
walking with spirits in whom we prayed.


No comments:

Post a Comment