Claim your inheritance!

2 Advent (Year C)

December 9, 2012

When I was a little girl, my grandmother was an amateur genealogist and wrote books about our family.  For a book called Guyton’s Galore, she researched and wrote about how her relatives had fled religious persecution in France and eventually made their way by covered wagon to settle in Oregon.  In Schoolmarms, Grandma used her mother’s journals to write about her experience as a teacher in a small one-room school house.  And she wrote a series of books about the town of Shaniko, where she grew up, and how it turned from a wool capital to a ghost town.  I loved her stories, loved picturing how things were for her and her parents and grandparents, loved visiting the places that were part of the stories she told and wrote about. 

But while I always thought her stories were interesting, and I thought it was neat that she was a writer, I didn’t think of the stories as having anything to do with me.  Then one day I was sort of idly flipping through one of the books and noticed an index in the back.  I looked up Rees, just out of curiosity, and found not just my great-grandparents and my grandparents’ names, but my dad’s name and even mine!  There was a picture of my entire extended family at my grandparents’ 50^th wedding anniversary included in one of the books.  There I was with wearing the dress grandma had made for the occasion, my hair in pigtails. Suddenly the wonderful stories my grandmother had always told weren’t just interesting stories about long ago people – there were my stories.  I wasn’t around when most of the adventures she wrote about took place, but somehow I was still a piece of them, or they were still a piece of me.  I was part of a family that was bigger than the people I knew in the here and now.  Through my veins ran the blood of pioneers and explorers, railroadmen, teachers and postmasters.   And so those stories shaped me.  They gave me confidence, they gave me connections, they gave me a sense of adventure and imagination.

I think that the stories in the Bible can work the same way. 

Many of you have heard us talking or read in the e-news about the Bible Challenge that we’ll start here in time for New Year’s Eve.  A group of us here at St. Aidan’s (18 so far!) will be taking on the challenge of reading the Bible, or some portion of it, over the next year.  I first heard of the idea from Rebecca, our seminarian from a few years ago, who has since gone on to a church in San Diego.  She wrote a Facebook comment about how her church was starting the Bible Challenge and I asked her more about it.  But as often happens, when I went to John and said, “Hey, this looks neat, let’s do this!” he challenged me to think about why  I was suggesting it.  Why would it be a good thing for us to undertake reading the whole Bible at St. Aidan’s when there are so many pieces of it that cause angst and confusion and misunderstanding?  Why was it better than some other spiritual or religious undertaking we might offer? And so I’ve been thinking about the Bible – what it is and can be, what it means, and why it matters.  I started with the idea that the Bible matters because it is our primary material for this Christianity thing.  The more we know about these stories, the more the small glimpses we get on Sunday will make sense.  We’ll be able to see where they fit into the story as a whole, get a better understanding of the stories, of Jesus, of the early church.

But when I stopped there, it didn’t get me very far.

Like right now, during Advent, we can learn a lot from the familiar old stories that we hear each Sunday.  Prophecies about the coming Messiah, “the shoot coming out from the stump of Jesse,” “the righteous branch springing up for David.”  Prophecies of comfort, about the valleys being lifted up and the mountains being made low and God being among them.  Prophecies of peace and justice: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”  We hear Paul’s encouragement to the early church to wait patiently, to prepare themselves, to strengthen their hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.  And we hear a lot about John the Baptist, roughly preparing the way for Jesus.

            We can learn a lot from these words from the ancient communities of faithful people.  We hear their prayers to God, their perceptions of humanity, their religious and ethical practices, their understandings of faithfulness, their hopes and dreams, their experiences of God.

But if we leave it there, if we just hear these old words from a distance, it stays a sort of heady, academic affair.  The words don’t really matter for us and how we live and are in relationship with God today.

The more John pushed me, the more I thought about it, until I realized that the most important reason for me to read the whole Bible and to read it regularly, and prayerfully, and ideally in a setting where I can discuss questions and share insights with other people, is because it is my story too.  The stories in the Bible are the stories of how people understood God and were in relationship with God in their ancient communities.  But they are also the foundational stories of my faith – stories that define and shape my community, my identity, my sense of what it means to be faithful.  These stories are conversational partners through which I can get help discerning what it means for me to be faithful.  And they are also invitations to me to prayerfully get to know our God who acts in the world and who calls us into relationship.

Now that doesn’t mean that we won’t encounter a passage that we’re horrified by or that we think is totally out of sync with our reality.  There are plenty of questionable heroes in the Bible and plenty of spots where the way they write about God doesn’t fit the way we experience God.  But that’s sort of like how at your family dinners you have to deal with your crazy cousin Frank and politely listen to your Aunt Thelma’s stories for the 14^th time and try to restrain yourself as you disagree with Grandpa’s fringe politics.  We deal with them and wrestle with them and argue with them because they are family.

The readings that we hear over the four Sundays of Advent are stories about long-ago people’s experiences, but they are also so much more than that.  They are stories for us now as we prepare ourselves to enter the mystery of Christmas.  We can find ourselves in their struggles, learn from their understandings of faithfulness, be inspired by their encounters of God, pray along with their prayers, find comfort and energy in their prophecies.  And then we can add our prayers and stories and struggles and God encounters to theirs. 

            I recently heard a father talking about how he had first shared with his son that he was adopted.  The boy, Sam, was about 5 years old and his parents thought it was time to give him more information about how he had joined the family.  And so that night at bedtime, instead of the normal routine of reading a book to Sam, his dad told him he was going to tell a story instead.  It was the Story of Sam….

“Once upon a time, there was a family that wasn’t complete.  They wanted a little boy in their family.  And so they searched and searched and found a little boy named Sam.  And the family was so happy and they brought Sam home to be part of their family forever.” 

At the end of the story, the parents expected some kind of reaction – maybe surprise, or questions, or worry.  But Sam seemed completely unimpressed.  He just said, “Ok.  Goodnight.”  And that was it.  But then the next night, when it came time for the bedtime routine, Sam wanted to hear that story again.  And the night after that.  Every night for two months, Sam asked to hear the Story of Sam.  And then one night, Sam said he was going to tell the story that night.  And that night Sam told the Story of Sam, just like he’d been hearing it for the past two months.  The dad said that he felt like even though he and his wife had adopted Sam four years before, that was the moment when Sam adopted them. 

            We are part of the Great Family that dates back to the ancient Israelites who wrote down their prayers and their laws and their stories of encountering God.  We are part of the Great Family that dates back earliest Christians who walked alongside Jesus and wrote down their stories about him.  We are children of God – we have been and we always will be.  These stories run through our veins and are a piece of us.  But reading those old stories, living with them, meditating on them, thinking about what they say to us, all of that is a piece of how we adopt them as our own.

            And so this Advent I invite you to find yourself in the stories we hear as we run up to Christmas.  Seek justice and peace along with the prophets, prepare yourself along with John the Baptist, look for signs of God with us – Emmanuel.  Claim your inheritance as a child of God.  And keep claiming it over and over!  Amen.