In which I preach about stories

For my church's midweek Lent services this year, the pastor has asked members of the congregation to do the preaching on a series of assigned themes and passages. It's been a wonderful opportunity to hear voices that I don't usually get to hear, especially loud and clear and up front. Yesterday was my turn. I was very loud and up front--hopefully I was also clear. 

"Open Our Ears"

Texts: Isaiah 50:4-5, Psalm 40:1-8, Matthew 13:10-17

By the time we get to today’s Gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples have had a busy day—he starts off by getting in trouble with the religious leaders for breaking the Sabbath, follows that up with some healings, tells a bunch of parables, offends his family who have come to see him by announcing that anyone who does the will of God is his family, and then tells another story—the Parable of the Sower. He’s thoroughly confused everyone around him. And finally his exhausted and exasperated disciples ask, “WHY do you always only teach in stories?” And Jesus answers them.

It’s easy to criticize the bewildered crowds for not understanding his stories. We see ourselves as the disciples, the ones who Jesus says have “been given insight into God’s kingdom.” We like to imagine that we “know how it works” and when we hear Jesus say that “Not everybody has this gift,… it hasn’t been given to them” we maybe feel sorry for everyone else, and maybe even a little smug, imagining ourselves as the ones with the “ready hearts” who have all kinds of insight. Or maybe that’s just me. Which is why, incidentally, I’m using the Message’s translation—it’s so very different from all the other translations I’ve used my whole life that the stories get my attention again and I actually listen to them. Which is important!

But anyway, as I was reading the other passages for this evening, I found it harder and harder to blame the people for having trouble listening to Jesus. You never know what could happen when God opens your ears. For the psalmist, God opening ears brings delight. In the Message, in fact, it says,

^“So I answered, “I’m coming.
    I read in your letter what you wrote about me,
And I’m coming to the party
    you’re throwing for me.”

That’s when God’s Word entered my life,
    became part of my very being.”

It sounds great. BUT—when I was reading Isaiah, I accidentally read the next verse when I was first preparing for this, and then I couldn’t get it out of my head. Here’s what happens to the speaker in Isaiah, in the verse right after the passage we read in which God opens his ears and he listens:

The Master, God, opened my ears,
    and I didn’t go back to sleep,
    didn’t pull the covers back over my head.
I followed orders,
    stood there and took it while they beat me,
    held steady while they pulled out my beard,
Didn’t dodge their insults,
    faced them as they spit in my face.

Jesus’s audience was probably aware that listening to God—really listening—waking up, getting out of bed instead of pulling the covers up over your head to hide from the truth, and facing whatever is out there—can be risky—sometimes painful, and even dangerous.

And this is why God is described in all these passages as the one who opens ears—because it’s very unlikely that we’re going to do it on our own. “Being religious” and “acting pious,” like the Psalm says, seems like a safer alternative. But the psalmist already said, “Doing something for you, bringing something to you—that’s not what you’re after. that’s not what you’re asking for.” More than anything else, God wants us to listen—to hard things, to joyful things.

And God has an amazing tool to help us to listen—stories. In the Message version of this passage, Jesus explains that he tells stories because, “Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight.” When I sent this version of the text to a friend, she replied, “Wow, that sounds a lot less condescending that I remember!” And it explains why not only did Jesus tell stories, but often afterwards he would explain those stories to his disciplines, who then wrote down the stories and their explanations for us, later. The stories, and the explanations, are a gift to us from a God who loves us and wants us to understand.

When God met us, we didn’t get a book of theology. We got a Person who told stories, and who lived a story for people to wrestle with and retell to each other. A painful, awkward, confusing story full of things we don’t understand and things that sometimes make us uncomfortable. All we have to know Jesus are the stories he told and the stories other people told about him, and the ponderings of other humans trying to make sense of those stories.

Even now, the only way to hear Jesus, and through Jesus, God, is to listen for the voice speaking within stories, giving us clues about how God is moving in the world today, and how God wants us to move in the world.  This is true for the big stories on the news AND the little stories we tell each other, that seem so minor but can mean so much. When we listen to stories, we can hear the subtle ways the Kingdom of God is growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk—for example, as Pastor and I were able to do when we visited RefugeeOne’s offices late last fall to deliver the coats from the coat drive and hear the people who work there tell stories of how their own families had once been refugees and now they were able to turn around and give that help to others. Or when I was at the food pantry booth during Hometown Holidays and met a man who’d been helped by the food pantry in the past and now was giving back, both to the food pantry and to other vulnerable lives he encountered. Small stories about struggling families who have been loved with full pantries and warm homes don’t seem like much, but God is speaking love all through them.  

But, it can also be hard to listen to some stories—the families who don’t get fed, the refugee families who never make it to a haven someplace like Chicago, the many people who are marginalized or abused by those in positions of power—and it’s easy to dismiss them, tell ourselves we know what’s really going on, and close our ears to the pain of the storyteller.

And again, this is true for the small stories and small, secret hurts, too. I used to follow a lot of parenting pages on facebook, but I quit most of them because so often when a mom told her story about how she fed or birthed or disciplined her child, an army of moms would appear and tell her she was wrong wrong wrong and asking if she’d tried this or that (and she almost always had!) and it was obvious that very few people listened to her and heard how tired and anxious she had been, how difficult it was to get through the day trying to mother the way these moms wanted her to. No one loved her the way she needed to be loved or understood the struggles in her story. Instead almost everyone tried to rewrite it into the story they thought it ought to be—a story a little more like their own story.

But when someone is telling their story, the most important thing in that moment is to let God open your ears to hear the story rather than rushing to cover it up with, “Well, they must have done something wrong” or “They’ve got to be exaggerating,” or whatever.

And the good news is that God does open our ears so that we can understand those stories and respond to them with love! Jesus has done it over and over—for the disciples, sometimes that even meant taking them aside after telling the story and explaining it for them.

So if God is still speaking to us today and teaching us how to live and to love others, then the first place to look for those messages is in stories. If we want to carry out God’s love to the people around us, we have to listen to their stories too. God speaks to us through their stories, and that’s when God and God’s word enters our lives and we hear the things God wants us to hear. It’s through their stories that we’ll be able to know them and love them and bring God’s love to them. We don’t write other peoples’ stories—we listen to them. Listening—really listening instead of prejudging the storyteller or glossing over the ugly parts with our own assumptions—is loving. And when we do we may even hear God speaking through the story, telling us how much he loves the storyteller, and us, helping us love them better too. And that’s when God’s word enters our life, and their life, and we can delight in God and each other.