A Sermon preached by Stuart Taylor

St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church

Feb. 25, 2007

This is not the year 2007; no, this is 1000 BC. And you are not a bunch of Presbyterians - you are Israelites. And this is not the sanctuary of St. Mark’s. This is the temple in Jerusalem where prayers are made, offerings are brought and where Yahweh becomes accessible to the people. And we have come here to celebrate the harvest festival, the feast of the in-gathering. Throughout Jerusalem the people observe this festival by living in tents or booths made of straw to remind us of how our ancestors wandered in the wilderness. As a farming people we gather in the temple to offer the first fruits of our harvest. As these First fruits are given to the priest who places them before the altar, we recite as one an ancient script that defines who we are as a people: " a wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. Jacob was that wandering Aramean, a desert nomad without a home or the security of a state. To be an Israelite was to be the beneficiary of the long history of God’s gracious providence and care which took a handful of nomads and slaves and built a prosperous nation. Israel’s confession of faith is a kind of creed that declares the story of God’s gracious dealings with the nation. With praise and thanksgiving Israel tells the story and rejoices in the immense gift of divine choosing, calling and preservation. As Israelites, the heart and soul of our worship to recite this ancient story as our own. The heart of worship is to receive a script that empowers us to live out a particular way of life. A wandering Aramean was my ancestor. What is this strange script that God has given to God’s people and 3000 years later, what can it mean for us?

Its not just the actors in a play that have a script but all of us. Everybody has a script. The question is what script have you chosen to define your life? That script may be one of the great meta-narratives created by Karl Marx or Adam Smith. Or it may be a more personal script formed by our family with such mantra’s like "Daddy always said…"

All of us are "scripted" by a process of nurture, formation, and socialization in our media drenched society. I was ruminating on this in the car the other day when I noticed a particular script right in front of me in the form of a bumper sticker. You may have seen it: "Annoy a liberal, work hard, succeed, be happy". Now even though I don’t automatically think of myself as a liberal, I must confess that bumper sticker is entirely successful in annoying me. But look at the script, that is laid out there, a strong work ethic, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, succeeding and enjoying ourselves with guilt free happiness and pleasure. That is a particular script for life with the obvious sub-text that liberals are lazy failures too neurotic to enjoy life. . And then of course it wasn’t long before we saw the how to annoy the conservative bumper sticker, "think for yourself, do good and be happy". And of course just beneath the surface is the warring antagonism between the two scripts that rightly or wrongly denigrate each other.

But what most liberals and conservatives fail to see is how all of us have bought into a larger dominant script of our culture and society. What is that script?

The OT theologian Walter Bruggemann has written a very important article in which he makes the case that whether we are liberal or conservative, there is a dominant script in our society that defines who we are because it permeates every dimension of our common life. This dominant script has various actors speaking different but related parts. There is the therapeutic, the technological, the consumerist and the militarist. Let’s look briefly at each of these voices in the script. The first great voice of the dominant script is technological. This technological script refers to the assumption that everything can be fixed and made right through human ingenuity. But we can see how that script has led us astray. We have invented the car and the factory and we revel in these accomplishments and our planet through global warming is suffering perhaps even slowly dying from the consequences of our ingenuity and technological prowess. Another great assumption of the dominant script is the therapeutic. Have you seen that New Yorker cartoon? A guy is in bed reading a book and on the cover of the book is the title: How to get up and get dressed. Walk around bookman’s in the self-help section and you will be amazed at all the titles on every conceivable subject of how to fix this or that. There is probably a self-help book for people who feel overwhelmed by self-help books. Now I am not denigrating that. I was there looking for a particular book myself. But the therapeutic script of our culture is this widely held belief that there is a treatment to counteract every ache and pain and discomfort and trouble so that life can be lived without inconvienence. Another great assumption of the dominant script is consumerism. We live in a market culture that believes that the whole world and all its resources are available to us without regard to our neighbor. And as we are inundated with marketing images for beer or deodorant or automobiles, why worry about homelessness and war. In the Atlantic monthly this month there was a little article that depicted that inexorable process in any capitalist society of how wants become needs, how luxury becomes necessity. This little article made the point that the list of consumer goods that Americans claim that they can’t live without just keeps getting longer. Some of the newly necessary products according to a recent poll were not even on the radar a decade ago. Like high speed Internet access. But other items that made a leap forward to indispensability have been around for years like dishwashers, microwaves, clothes dryer, and cable television. Pretty soon a flat screen TV and I pod will be as basic necessities. This consumerist script with its illusion of safety, prosperity and happiness is the bubble we live in that teaches us that more is better and that if you want it, you need it. Another voice of the dominant script is militaristic. And militarism that pervades our society exists to protect and maintain this global system and to deliver and guarantee our right to consume. In our global economy, Battleships, oil and McDonalds go hand in hand.

It is difficult to imagine life in our society outside the reach of this script. This script is inculcated through the liturgy of television and the constant bombardment of market culture. This script pervades our lives, promising security and immunity from every threat. And everything, everything depends on the recognition that this script has failed. If we are confessing anything when we pray together it is the failure of this dominant script to provide the meaning of our lives or to give us the power to live rightly in this world. Our health and wholeness depends on our disengaging from this script and turning to another. It is the ministry of the church to detach us from this script. And here is Bruggeman’s point. The task of "de-scripting and disengagement from this failed script is undertaken through the steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we testify will indeed make us safe, will make us prosper, will make us joyful." This alternative script is rooted in the Bible and enacted through the tradition and ministry of the church. But nowhere is this script as succinctly put as it is here. " A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty and outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

The dominant script teaches that each of us is a self- contained unit free to make of our life whatever we want to make of it. My story is simply the story of my making up my life. The Biblical counter script is this: My story did not begin with my birth and my story will not end with my death. My story began eons ago with a desert nomads wandering through the desert and their living encounter with this strange passionate God who called Abraham and Sarah to a sacred journey into the future; my story began with a God who promised to our ancestors, "I shall make of you a great people and through you all the world will be blessed." Our story began with this God who hears the cries of slaves and who spoke to Moses through a burning bush. Our story began with the revelation of a God of compassion who always hears the cries of the oppressed and suffering, a god who is moved to deliver us from that which enslaves us. My story did not begin with my birth and my story will not end with my death. My story includes all of the history of God’s dealings with God’s people, the trials and tribulations, the times of purposeful journey and the times of wandering lost and bewildered. I stand with all of those faithful people of past generations in singing praise to the God who acts in history to liberate, save and heal in spite of our failures and betrayal of that story. My story did not begin with my birth and will not end until all of creation is reunited with the Creator in the ultimate triumph of God’s transforming love. Each new generation has an opportunity to receive this story and to make it our own. Each new generation has the opportunity and the gracious invitation to apply this strange script to the challenges of living in today’s world. The claim made by this alternative script of the Bible is astounding: "there is a truth at work in the world that makes us safe, that makes us free, that makes us joyous in a way that the comfort and ease of the consumer society can not even imagine." Yes there are contradictions in this script; it is jagged storyline, but this alternative script reveals an alternative world, the strange new world of the Bible. There are only three questions that we have to answer while we are on this earth. Where did I come from? What am I called to do while I am here? And where am I going? And the answer to that question is not a fill in the blank of whatever we come up with. For faithful people the answer to these questions is found in the story of the God who chooses to be in covenant relationship with us. A God who calls us; who chooses us; a God who is says to us: "you are my people", a God who sets us on a journey and who promises to see us safely home. This story is more ancient than human history. This story is as young and fresh as this very moment. This is my story. This is your story. This is our story.