Sermon:
August 29, 2004
8:30 a.m. Service and Sunday Night Alive

Scripture:
Jeremiah 2:4-13   
Luke 14:1 
Luke 14:7-14

This summer I spent a great deal of time at our family cabin on Lake Louise. This particular place has been an important part of my life, for it was always the constant in a childhood full of lots of moving around. Whether my Dad was appointed to churches in Eastpointe or Warren, or whether my Mom was working in Downers Grove, Illinois or the Conference offices in Flint, the cottage and its stories remained the same. It was always the place where so much snow fell each winter that we had to have Mr. Chafee clear the roof in mid-January. It was the cabin that housed our family’s “growing-up height marker” board where each child and grandchild from the mid-fifties on would stand and mark how tall they were that year. It was, and is, the cottage on whose porch the family gathers around a big rectangular table to eat dinner and tell and retell all those lovingly repetitive family stories, year after year, time and again. 

Maybe your family reenacts this scene, too, at holidays or on other gathering occasions: the meal has been cooked and devoured with delight, the coffee has been brewed and dessert is in front of you, and out come those family tales, both tall and small, unique and rehearsed. And we let them come because we know them so well. They are like photographs thumbed through so often that looking at them really is just a cue for the more vivid picture in our remembering (and sometimes in our imagination!). But we make room for these welcomed guests at the end of our family dinners because they make us who we are together. They are the stories that, having since happened historically, have begun new lives, forming the family in the present and for the future. 

They are funny stories like this. Stanley B. Niles was my great-grandfather. He served as a Methodist pastor in Michigan and as a college administrator in schools across the country. He was a well-read man, one who set up a library and a study in our cottage when he and my great-grandmother lived there in retirement so he could continue his academic pursuits. He was not known for fraternizing with popular forms of entertainment. One day during some renovation work on the ceilings in the cabin, a family member came across a box tucked up in the rafters. Held within this box were a number of Louis L’Amour Western novels. It seems Stanley B. had been secretly reading them for years. 

Or they are amazing stories like this. Due to some family tension on my Dad’s side, a cantankerous in-law one day sent a local thug to teach my grandparents a lesson. But upon arriving at their front window and seeing my dad (then 4 or 5) and his younger sister, my Grandma Barbara and Grandpa Richard all playing together on the living room floor, the man was so moved that he abandoned his mission and left the family in peace.

Where would we be without these stories? And I don’t mean just the facts of their occurrence.  Sure, it was existentially “good” for me that my ancestry wasn’t “offed” thirty years before I was born, but how does the retelling of that story affect me today? Doesn’t it remind me of the powerful witness that having fun together as a family has on the world? Doesn’t my great- grandpa’s clandestine reading selection remind me of both the importance of diligent study and of lighthearted entertainment? 

What would our worlds be like if they weren’t painted in the colors of these stories? Jeremiah reflects that lives devoid of God’s stories are like cisterns dry and cracked. Forgetting the story of God’s replenishing fountain leads us to dig dusty holes that remain just that. So when the Israelites exchange the Exodus story with “empty god-dreams and silly god-schemes” (notice the lower case), as Eugene Peterson paraphrases, they do a detriment to their very selves. 

One summer during my adolescence, I remember actively trying to forget one of the stories of my family. For years we had been known as singers at Lake Louise. Rumor had it that people would listen for our singing of the Wesleyan table grace from our eating porch before they would know to start their own dinners. This particular summer was no different—plus my parents had signed us up again to sing at the Lake Louise chapel service, like we also did each summer. Well, I didn’t want to! I had sung in front of churches quite enough, thank you very much, and they could just go on without me. Why did we always have to sing, anyway? It involved practicing and getting to church earlier than necessary. 

I remember being in a real mood about this. I even refused to get out of bed one Sunday morning when the family was planning to sing. But I also remember the emptiness that this self-asserted freedom from the family’s identity as singers gave me. My parents weren’t about to force me up there to sing, so I brooded around for a week or two trying to create my own little world-bubble of non-“singy-ness.” Now that I look back, that was quite a lonely time of youthful rebellion, a time that felt dry and cracked. I had dug my own cistern and had climbed down into it, only to find that my own idea of who I should be was pretty lame. Maybe I would have been helped by Jeremiah’s warning against forgetting the story of who we are. Besides, distancing myself from singing didn’t even work! Now I have found music to be one of my strengths and one of the very things God calls me to do as a Deacon here at Birmingham and out in the world. Praise God for overcoming immature pouting and grumbling! 

So Jeremiah warns about forgetting the story—God’s story. But while Jeremiah reminds us not to forget or forsake it, it is Luke who reveals the character of it. So it is with our own family stories—remembering them reveals the character of being a Garcia or a Van Derkelen or a Minxiao. For me, it was around the dinner table that I learned a few things about being a Gladstone. 

From my Mom’s stories, I learned about an enduring optimism, and the Easter hope was manifest in her laughter. Recently, with the words of another enduring optimist and 5^th Century mystic writer, Julian of Norwich, I wrote this song that expressed this part of my own family story. The song’s title is “All Shall Be Well.” “All shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.” These were the almost-radical words that Julian wrote as she sat in a little room next to a sanctuary where she spent most of her life. The song also speaks to ways in which Jesus Christ acts as a mother for us, as in the scriptures Jesus calls to Jerusalem and says, “Man, I wish I could gather you up like a mother hen and protect you under my wing.” Here are the words from “All Shall Be Well.” 

Refrain:  
All shall be well
All shall be well
All manner of things shall be well
Mother Jesus. 

Kind Mother
In whom I am reborn
Nearer me than I myself
Rid of our sharpest scourge. 

Deep Wisdom
From whose sweet open side
Flows forth strong love of Motherhood
and intellect in kind.

Great Hen
Who neath her wing and breast
Gathers us from scattering
To humbler simple rest.

Close Knower
Of all your children’s needs
Make real Great Pow’r, Great Love
Bury our sick deeds.

From my Dad’s stories, I learned the great benefit of finding meaning in stories regardless of their factuality. You see, we are the two founding members of a group known as the HPA (The Hyperbolic Preachers of America) and we tend to use stories in a way that brightens up the actual drudgery of their details in order to bring out the abiding truth contained therein. Perhaps this is just a fancy way of saying “we exaggerate,” but it is an important part of our family story.  It allows stories like the following to have great meaning and provide welcomed enjoyment:  

You see, Lake Louise is a very relaxing place to be. One day back in the mid-fifties, the cottagers council got together and an older gentleman said: “You know, these speed boats and skiers are too loud. Too loud, these speed boats and skiers.” And you could just see the wheels start turning amongst that group of fairly peaceable older people. You could tell they were hatching a plan. And all of a sudden, they had written one up and voted on it and seconded it, and took minutes on it. And if there’s anything that’s for sure, it’s something that’s in the minutes.

Soon, over the top of Mt. Pisca came flying old, refurbished, forest-fire-fighting airplanes carrying payloads full of salt water from the nearest sea inlet, probably Hudson Bay. And they started dumping salt water into this fresh water lake in northern Michigan, changing its chemical make-up. And that was just part one of the plan. 

Part two of the plan was to import exotic species like jelly fish and stingrays, and the crowning achievement, a great white shark. That would certainly deter all those skiers from skiing and all those noisy campers from swimming.

Well, it went on for a little while, but as soon as a Baptist camper went missing, the impetus and the excitement for this Great Salinization Project fell by the wayside. Soon the spring-fed waters of Lake Louise changed the chemical make-up back to a spring-fed, fresh-water lake. And nothing was heard of the embarrassing plan ever again.

Some find the details of that story a little hard to believe. Others find great truth in that story in different kinds of ways. This ability to look at a story for the deeper truth has helped immensely in my experience with our Bible and with the stories of our faith.  

From my sister Mary’s stories, I learned sheer laughter. Perhaps our sibling status means that we received a matching set of humor genes, because I never laugh more than when I am hanging out with Mary. One of our regular party games now comes from the story of a long, monotonous car ride during which, out of utter boredom, we created the following game that helped us giggle through the unending miles of that trip.  

It’s either called The Brain Game or Fill In the Brain. It works like this. One person will say the title of a movie and will replace one key word with the word “brain.” Don’t ask me why “brain.” I think it was just a funny word at the time. So let’s try it. 

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Brain. 
       “Doom.” Very good.  

Okay, how about Gone With the Brain.
       “Wind.” Very good. 

Okay, how about Brain.
       No, no. Sorry it was Casablanca. 

The Brain Game. Sheer laughter. I learned it from my family stories. The character of being a Gladstone, learned through all those people, through those stories that they tell. 

It should be no surprise that Jesus also tells a tale revealing the character of participating in the Kingdom of God around a dinner table! Perhaps the meal had been prepared and consumed, coffee was brewed, dessert was served and it was time for stories to be told. 

“My family,” Jesus says, “is one where dinner guests don’t maneuver to sit in the honored seat—rather this is a family who reserves the honored seat for someone else who may arrive. My family is one where dinner hosts don’t just invite friends, family, or well-connected people that might return the favor—rather this is a family who throws dinner parties for those who could never ‘pay us back’.” I imagine those that Jesus was eating with were quite embarrassed at this moment remembering their behavior at the beginning of this meal. 

(Perhaps we United Methodists have taken this story a little too literally? How often have we been at churches where the cushions on the seats of honor up front are dusty from under use and the cushions in the back are worn and lumpy from so many humble bottoms racing to secure them every Sunday!) 

Jesus tells us this dinner-time story to remind us that being a Christian is about humility and hospitality. So the character of the Christian family is, as my Dad once preached, “like an ever-expanding table.” We are called to rehearse the Good News with one another by telling it, enacting it, sharing it. We are called to invite strangers to become guests and to hear and rehearse the story with us so that the story might expand and continue. This is evangelism.  It’s not such a daunting word when I think of it this way, as sharing the family stories along with the hospitality of the meal table. 

Who knows, you may be surprised when you try it. As Jesus says, the beautiful part of our Christian story rests in the notion that giving away honor holds the possibility of true honor before our Host that is God who is Love. 

Jeremiah warns about forgetting this story. 

Jesus shows how making room at the table allows this story to continue.  

Amen.