Thursday, February 22, 2018

Bedtime Stories:



A Reflection for II Lent                                                          All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N C
 February 25, 2018                                                                 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16                             Romans 4:13-25      Mark 8:31-38                          Psalm 22:22-30

Question: How were the stories about your heritage told?
Bedtime Stories
When I was a child, my Father would tuck us into bed and sing songs and tell stories as a way to calm us down and help us to go to sleep. Sometimes the songs were not all that helpful as my Father had a lifelong fascination with trains and he would sing The Wreck of Ol’ 97:  Oh that brave engineer that run ol’ 97, Is lyin in old Danville dead. Cos he was going down a grade making 90 miles an hour, The whistle broke into a scream. He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, Scalded to death by the steam.”

Going to sleep with images of scalding to death was not always guaranteed to put us to rest, but the images of Steve, “that brave engineer getting his orders in Monroe Virginia, way behind time, and had to get ol’ 97 to Spenser on time” as the hero who gave his life to follow a code of being faithful was the point of the song. The song was a way of passing on his values to the next generation. 

The stories he told were also of passing on the values of the “who” we were, in the line of the people who had come before us. He told stories of how his father had gone to far-away nations to build projects helping peoples of those lands, of his leaving school early to stow away on a troop ship to Puerto Rico to string telegraph wires, and about he went back and put himself through Johns Hopkins for an engineering degree. When he would talk of his father, whom he idolized, his face would beam with pride of being the son of such a man. My Father wanted to live his life so that his children would have no cause for shame in being a Wilson. 

The legends were passed on from back in history with reminders that we were descended from Robert the Bruce of Scotland, who suffered defeat after defeat against the invading English, until he finally triumphed. How we were really genetically related to Robert the Bruce was left in the mists of legend, but the facts were not the point; the deeper truth was what was important. The stories always seemed to hold on to a theme that being a Wilson meant that life had meaning; it could be rough but no one promised it being easy. 

He would tell stories of when he met my mother and how he treated her with respect and awe as he had been taught to do by his mother and sister and how we should always treat women with respect. He told us stories of working hard and keeping his word. He told us stories of when we were born and how thankful he was to have us to pass on what it meant to be a Wilson in this new world that we were experiencing. We always wanted to have him tell stories of his wartime experiences, but he pointed out that only those who were safe stateside and politicians talked about the glories of war. For him, he was only fulfilling his obligation to the country he loved, and he expected us to follow his example.

Stories and songs about lives lived are the way we pass on our values. Today we started off the service with a listing of the law of the Ten Commandments. The problem is that legal documents have a habit of containing lots of regulations to explain, terms to parse, and loopholes to find. We are fond of laws we do not so much break but rather bend. For instance, the sign says “50 miles an hour speed limit”, but on the Outer Banks, woe to the cars on 158 or 64 who only do 50 when there are no police around because we expect a certain amount of grace above the speed limits and we are annoyed when that grace is overlooked. Stories and songs go deeper into our identity than laws so that we can live into being true to ourselves. The Bible is not a law book but a collection of stories and songs about our ancestors who passed on these stories and songs in the hopes that we would be reminded of the purpose of life.

The Genesis story ties in the purpose of life with names. Abram, which means “Father who is exalted” and Abraham is “Father who is really exalted”. The names tell you that we are entering into mythic territory where the purpose of the story is not about reciting facts but telling the deeper truth of what it means to pass on heritage. 

The Song of the Psalm for today is a song of remembering how God is always with each of us even when we forget from time to time. God remembers the poor; as we should. God keeps the divine promises, as we should keep the vows we make.

Paul writes the letter to the Romans to remind the people of the church in Rome to be faithful so he tells them the story of Abraham who remained faithful over the decades, following God without getting the payoff.

In the Gospel portion for today, Mark has Jesus telling his disciples that following him will not be easy; faithful life is tough for it is about getting rid of our own selfish agendas. This story was kept because the reality of life for Jesus and his followers was to enter into the brokenness of the world by giving self away. The point of a deeper life of meaning is not about an existence of getting but a life of giving.

When I read the Bible or hear stories that people tell or watch movies, I am interested in what the deeper truth is that formed the story to begin with. Why was this story told and in this way? There are a lot of ways to waste time, and meaningless chatter sucks the energy out of living the much-too-short lives we have.

Every day before I go to sleep, I go through remembrances of the stories that I have heard and seen that day which inform my prayers of thanksgiving or intercession. The world is full of bedtime stories all being told. This last week a friend in this church sent me the story of a man sharing how he was the legal owner of an assault rifle who made a decision to destroy that weapon so at least this gun could never be used to kill a child by accident of design. This last week, parents in Florida had to tell the surviving students bedtime stories to pass on wisdom for the days to come. There are refugee parents in Bangladesh tucking their hungry children under the covers and telling them stories of home and hope. Closer to home, there are grown children telling their older parents bedtime stories to remind them of who they were when they told stories. There are spouses who share bedtime stories to remind themselves that each of them is not alone, and if they do end up alone, they remember the stories. There are homeless friends here on the Outer Banks who tell themselves the stories they wished they could hear again or share with others. 

There are stories that use so many different languages and many that are said without words. I think of an abandoned dog on the Indiana Turnpike that my father brought home sixty-five years ago when we were children and named him Rex. I wonder what kind of stories he told himself before and after he lived with us, for we did tell him stories and he looked as if he was understanding them. Decades later, at my daughter’s bedside, I would tell her about Rex and the love he shared and gave. 

Right now there is a pod of dolphins off this beach telling a story of what it means to have life as they share the poems of the currents of their lives. Right now there is probably a three-toed sloth hanging upside down in a tree in the Amazon River Basin who is remembering the song of the planet. Right now there is a three-celled bacterial organism on the surface of an asteroid, close to the third moon of the fifteenth planet of a dwarf star's solar system in a cluster so many billions of miles away that the light has yet to show up in our sky who is hearing the song of the universe. 

There is really only one core story, one song, one poet, and we are telling or hearing variations of that loving story told by the one we call names like Our Father, the Womb from which we came, the Word spoken, or whatever name we use, reminding us of who we are.

What story do you hear? What story is your life telling? 

Bedtime Stories
Now in bed, before we pray, tell us a story
of men who say “honestly” before they lie.
then warn “Don’t do that before you die!”,
But tell us the story with plenty of glory
of times when our ancestors did up stood
against tyrants of many breeds and types
with or without uniform, insignia stripes,
that we should do this whenere we could.
Tell us the story of your father’s derring-do.
Tell us a story of when you fell at the dance
in love with our mother at that first glance,
or when we’re born, you shed a tear or two.
Blankets comes up after all the blessing prayer,
to grow into new stories for our kids to share.

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