Of Storytelling and Belief – Sermon for Proper 20, RCL Year B

“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”

That was the headline on the website of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, the national public broadcaster in the Republic of Ireland, on September 11. What the candidate in the U.S. presidential debate the night before had said in full was:

In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.^[1]

As I’m sure you know, in the twelve days since the debate, the people of Springfield, Ohio, have been through hell. They’ve been put under a media microscope; white supremacists have marched through the town; there are have been more than 30 bomb threats against schools and public buildings.

Of course, because the story has received so much coverage, it has been among those things foremost in my mind that past ten days, but it also came to mind when I read these words in today’s epistle lesson from the Letter of James:

If you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be arrogant and lie about the truth. This is not wisdom that comes down from above but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.^[2]

“Do not … lie about the truth … for … there will … be disorder and wickedness.”

The candidate’s story is just that, a “lie about the truth.” It’s true that there is a large Haitian immigrant community in Springfield. It’s true that a woman in Springfield was unable to find her cat and accused her Haitian neighbor of taking it. It’s true that a woman in Ohio killed and ate a cat (that happened in Canton not in Springfield, but … hey, you know … close enough). The “lie about the truth” is as much in what isn’t told as what is; there is a great deal of lying by omission in this story. There is a lot that is left out, has to be left out, for the story to make any sense at all, however twisted. Let’s start with the fact that Haitians don’t eat dogs and cats, but also that Canton is 170 miles from Springfield, that the woman accused of eating a cat is mentally ill, that the woman who lost her cat found the animal (in her own basement) and that she later apologized to her neighbor.^[3] But, so what? Never let reality stand in the way of a good story, right?

Let’s leave the presidential race behind for a moment and move on to our first lesson, a part of the apocryphal book called The Wisdom of Solomon. When you heard that story this morning and listened to “the ungodly” complain about “the righteous man” who “calls himself a child of the Lord” and plot to “test him with insult and torture” and “condemn him to a shameful death,”^[4] you might have thought this has something to do with the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. But, guess what? Our lectionary editors are as guilty of misleading omission as that presidential candidate! They have left out ten verses which clarify what is going on in this book.

The Wisdom of Solomon is part of the Apocrypha and is thought to have been written during the First Century before Christ by a Greek-speaking Jew living in Alexandria, Egypt. His or her purpose seems to be to persuade Jewish youth to eschew the Hellenistic culture and philosophy that surrounded them, especially the atheistic outlook and materialist prescriptions of the Epicureans and the Stoics. In the omitted verses, “the ungodly” lament,

[W]e were born by mere chance….
Our name will be forgotten in time,
and no one will remember our works;
our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud
and be scattered like mist….^[5]

So, they reason,

[L]et us enjoy the good things that exist
and make use of the creation to the full…
Let us oppress the righteous poor man;
let us not spare the widow
or regard the gray hairs of the aged.
But let our might be our law of right,
for what is weak proves itself to be useless.^[6]

The unrighteous speak with elegance and poetic flare, but this cannot mask the nihilism, violence, and oppressiveness of their philosophy.^[7]

The “righteous man” against whom the ungodly plot is not the Messiah, nor any religious individual in particular. It is any person who recognizes humanity’s connection to the sacred, who “affirms the dignity of the universe itself,” and values human life because of its “relationship to the divine creative act.”^[8] It is the whole community of such persons.

If our lectionary editors had not chosen to omit these verses, we would immediately see that this text is not some sort of prediction of the suffering of Christ, but rather it is a contrast of an atheistic philosophy and a religious one, a contrast that makes the same point James makes in his letter: that there is one way of life that ends in nihilism, violence, and evil, in “disorder and wickedness,” and another that leads to peacefulness, gentleness, and mercy, to what the author of Wisdom calls “the wages of holiness”^[9] and James labels “good fruits.”^[10]

In the past few weeks, I have been preparing a curriculum for use at Trinity Cathedral that examines the Anglican service of Holy Communion from the viewpoint of narrative philosophy. The idea behind the course design is that every Sunday we sit in our seats in the naves of our churches as wine and bread and baskets of money are brought to the altar. We, as a community, join with those who are bringing these elements of Communion and offerings of alms to the table, but what does each of us individually bring? The answer is found in one one of our oldest Anglican Eucharistic prayers: “We offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice,”^[11] but that answer just raises more questions! Among them, what is a “self”?

Both contemporary philosophy and modern psychology suggest that our sense of identity, our self, is largely constructed through the stories we tell ourselves and others about our lives. Irish philosopher John Danaher asserts, “Our consciousnesses are constantly writing multiple draft stories about who we are. The self is the draft that emerges from the melee.”^[12] We bring these narratives to the altar; we connect our stories to God’s story, our selves to God’s self, our lives to God’s life.

As I’ve worked on this curriculum, I keep coming back to the Catholic maxim “Lex orandi, lex credendi” and its extended version “Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi”^[13]: The law of praying is the law of believing is the law of living. This is often paraphrased as “Praying shapes believing, and believing shapes how we live.” I’ve come to think that the principal applies more broadly, beyond the realm of prayer, that perhaps we should amend the maxim to “Lex narandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi”: the law of storytelling is the law of believing is the law of living, that how we tell stories shapes our beliefs and thus how we live our lives. And this would mean, in turn, that the omissions, the lies, the inaccuracies, and the distortions we put into our stories shape our lives just as much as, perhaps more than, the facts and the truths we include, and these errors are what lead to the destructive despair experienced by the ungodly identified in Wisdom and produce the “disorder and wickedness of every kind” identified by James.

Today’s Gospel lesson is a familiar one, the story of Jesus placing a young child in the midst of the Twelve as an example of leadership; we find it in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. In Mark’s telling of this conversation, Jesus urges these future leaders of the church to welcome a little child because in doing so they welcome Jesus himself, “and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”^[14] In Matthew’s expanded version of this story, the disciples are urged not only to welcome the child, but to “change and become like children” themselves, for “whoever becomes humble like [a] child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”^[15]

Have you ever had a young child tell you about something important in their life? If you have then you know very well the artlessness, the guileless naiveté, the innocent openness with which they do so, often to the embarrassment of their parents. The 1950s day time TV talk-show host Art Linkletter built an entire career around asking children to tell their stories. First a segment on his talk show, then a show of its own, and then a series of books, Kids Say the Darndest Things was a television staple in many homes in the 50s and 60s. Even today the books and videos are still for sale. As one contemporary reviewer of these products said, the children are “candid and honest” or as another put it, “Kids see the world with a ruthless no-nonsense clarity and a total lack of tact about how they express it.”^[16]

Perhaps this is part of what Jesus was trying to tell the disciples: to be candid and honest, perhaps even a little ruthless and tactless, in the stories we tell ourselves and one another; to tell our stories with no-nonsense clarity. Remember when Nathanael was introduced to Jesus? He asked, rather tactlessly, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”^[17] and Jesus praised him as “an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”^[18] Today’s Gospel lesson encourages all of us to that some guilelessness, to tell our stories with the openness, innocence, and clarity of children.

I have no uncertainty about the motivation of that presidential candidate and his story about Springfield, Ohio. Similarly, I have no misgivings about the intentions of the lectionary editors in leaving verses out of the reading from the Book of Wisdom. In the former case, I have very negative suspicions; in the latter, I give them the benefit of the doubt. But in either case the outcome is similar: the story is distorted and the hearers’ understanding corrupted. “Lex narandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi.” Our storytelling shapes believing, ours and those of others, and our beliefs determine how we live our lives. May we tell our stories as clearly, as completely, and as truthfully as possible.

Let us pray:

O God, you have taught us that you hate lying lips but delight in those who are faithful, that integrity is more acceptable to you than sacrifice: Help us to speak and act truthfully in all situations; Guide us and our leaders, especially in this political season, to be honest even when it is difficult, to tell our stories with clarity and integrity, and to recognize that how we tell our stories shapes what we and others believe, and that what we believe governs how we live. We pray in the name of the One who taught us to become as guileless and innocent as children, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

====================

This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 22, 2024, to the people of Harcourt Parish Episcopal Church, Gambier, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest presider and preacher.

The illustration is The Story Teller by Amrita Sher-Gil, oil on canvas, 1937.

====================

Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text.

^[1] “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” – US presidential debate in quotes, Raidió Teilifís Éireann, 11 September 2024, accessed 20 September 2024

^[2] James 3:14-16 (NRSV)

^[3] Ohio woman arrested after eating cat: Canton police release bodycam footage from incident, WKYC Website, 11 September 2024, accessed 20 September 2024

^[4] Wisdom of Solomon 2:13,19-20 (NRSV)

^[5] Wisdom of Solomon 2:2,4 (NRSV)

^[6] Wisdom of Solomon 2:6,10-11 (NRSV)

^[7] Michael Kolarcik, SJ, Commentary on the Book of Wisdom, The New Interpreters Bible, Vol. V (Abingdon Press, Nashville:1997), page 459

^[8] Ibid., page 466

^[9] Wisdom of Solomon 2:22 (NRSV)

^[10] James 3:16-17 (NRSV)

^[11] Holy Communion, Rite One, Eucharistic Prayer 1, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 336

^[12] John Danaher, The Self as Narrative: Is it good to tell stories about ourselves?, Philosophical Disquisitions, 14 April 2021, accessed 10 September 2024

^[13] See Ranjit Mathews, Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi, ECF Vital Practices, 11 February 2021, accessed 15 September 2024

^[14] Mark 9:37 (NRSV)

^[15] Matthew 18:3-4 (NRSV)

^[16] Customer Reviews, The Best of Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Darndest Things, Vol 1., Amazon.com, accessed 21 September 2024

^[17] John 1:46 (NRSV)

^[18] John 1:47 (KJV)