Why Do Stories Survive?

Service Readings & Songs:

Luke 10:25-37 The Parable of the Good Samaritan NRSVue

“If I Must Die”, Refaat Alareer

“But then you read”, James Baldwin

The Remember Balloons, Jessie Oliveros

A Prayer for Reconciliation, Padraig O’Tuama

“A cloud can never die”, Thich Nhat Hanh

#118 This Little Light of Mine

#1042 Rivers of Babylon

#108 My Life Flows On in Endless Song

#126 Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Sermon Title: Why Do Stories Survive?

Web Blurb: Some stories comfort us. Others challenge us. Still others carry both wisdom and wounds. A single story can bring hope to one person and anguish to another. In this service, Luke Rouker reflects on curiosity, testimony, and why human communities continue to preserve even the most complicated stories as a way of searching for meaning together.

Sermon text:

Blessings and peace to you on this Sunday morning, dear friends. Before we begin, I should tell y’all a couple things. First, this is my first service, and I am so excited to lead worship with y’all this morning. Second, I’m from the mountains, and where I come from, folks might talk back a little during a sermon. I ain’t asking y’all to debate me while I’m preaching, but I do like to know folks are with me. So if something moves you this morning, feel free to give a little ‘amen,’ a little ‘mmhmm,’ whatever the Spirit moves you to.

I know I’ve brought some heavy readings with me this morning, and we’ve already read some difficult things together. It gets lighter by the end, I promise. Take a deep breath with me, and we’ll walk through it together. Amen?

(Opening)

Now I imagine some of y’all are sitting here wondering, “Luke, why would you bring all these sad stories in here this morning, I just did my makeup!” If anybody has runny mascara I do apologize for that, but I won’t apologize for bringing the stories. This service is emotionally heavy because I wanted us to investigate something deeply human together today, “Why do stories survive?” and perhaps moreover, “Why do some stories survive and not others?” To do that, I wanted to present to you stories I’ve heard on my own journey, from Refaat Alareer, from the Babylonian Exile, and from Jesus (because I do love me some Jesus, y’all).

Some stories are painful, and some are joyful. Some bring us a lesson, and some bring us a mystery. Why do humans keep carrying these strings of words around, sometimes for thousands of years? Why do we have this leather-bound book we call the Bible at all? Let’s take a look at this book, in particular, and see what we can figure out together.

(What is the Bible?)

This very old book in my hand has been used in a lot of ways over the years. It’s been used at weddings, funerals, and church services like this one. On the other hand, it often gets used as a weapon, and as a result some folks do get nervous about it. Further, for some it’s downright painful to read; and for others, it brings them joy. So why am I even bringing it up? Why do I have it today?

This book was written over the course of a thousand years, and I don’t have quite enough time this morning to give y’all a Bible class, but I do want to talk a little bit about how this book came to be. We broadly talk about the Bible in two stages, the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) and the New Testament. Both sections have in common that they were written by people in communities that underwent extreme suffering. The ancient Israelites who wrote and recited and preserved the Hebrew Bible were a people who endured profound suffering as a community. Some were enslaved, some were driven from their homeland into exile in Babylon, some were conquered, others were displaced, and each generation of those people had an encounter with one empire or another who was hell-bent on causing them harm. Much of the same can be said of the first century Jews and early Christians who wrote the New Testament: the Romans knocked down the temple again, they crucified their prophet, and some folks were persecuted for their faith. In both of those time periods, most people lived at or near subsistence level, so even if nobody was attacking them directly at that moment, life was still painful for many.

This book emerged from that pain. The stories bound up in this collection we call the Bible used to be scrolls, written by numerous and various authors, and kept in the temple or in a library or in somebody’s satchel. But they all wrote down the things that happened to them, and they tried to make sense of some of life’s hardest questions on these pages. These stories convey a common identity, cultural memory, ethical guidance, warnings about power, and ultimately hope.

I selected Rivers of Babylon for our meditative hymn today because it is a great example of this type of preservation. It’s based on Psalm 137, in which we hear from Israelites in exile and captivity in Babylon directly, and they have some difficult things to say to us! They are telling the story of being asked by their captors, their conquerors, to sing them songs from the temple. The Babylonians are teasing these captives, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” So, they did it, and they wept. And they wrote that experience down, so that we, the future people would know what happened to them, both before and after their exile. Furthermore, they tell us in this direct, difficult language so that we know how they felt. This Psalm is an example of a displaced people trying to survive both psychologically and historically through song and shared memory in the face of profound suffering.

(What about Refaat?)

Sound familiar? Some of y’all have probably picked up where I’m going by now, but I’ll make it clear now: Refaat Alareer was doing the exact same thing when he wrote a poem about his own impending death in Gaza. He asked us to make a kite, to tell his story, to give hope to kids in the future because he knew he likely wouldn’t be around to do it himself. He was killed in an airstrike in December of 2023, but he has survived through this story, just like the Israelites did. We know their stories, and we can see them, even now, many generations later. Someone must remember what happened to these people. Someone has to be around to carry hope, and to survive. That’s why we tell stories.

Stories function as a survival technology. They allow us to outlive our bodies; they allow us to tell someone about the things we heard and saw and did long after we are gone. In the case of the authors we’ve been discussing, they were often preserving the memory for their own descendants. They’re saying, “Please, see what I have already experienced and learned,” and they’re implicitly pleading with us, “Please, don’t let this happen to anybody else.” I would argue that all of these authors, and perhaps all authors, wrote these things specifically so that we couldn’t forget that it happened. So that we would know who got hurt, who hurt them, how the community felt when it happened, and how the community survived it.

(What About Other Stories?)

Other stories have this same power; it’s not confined to books written in Palestine and Israel. We do this with national stories, we do this with folk tales and fables, we have songs, we have movies, we have so many stories that teach us something about a person who came before us. Humans do this, I would argue, because it is effective. Stories can carry a lot of meaning in fewer words than a dissertation or a sermon can. We remember the characters, we empathize with their pain, we imagine ourselves in their shoes. And once we have seen someone’s pain up close, it’s incredibly difficult to look away or forget them. We remember their courage, we remember their love, we remember the sacrifices they made. Even if we would have behaved differently, or written it differently, or whatever issue we may have with the story: we still see them in their stories. And what’s more, we have a responsibility to those people to hear their stories and understand them.

(What does that have to do with the Good Samaritan?)

Jesus understood the power of stories better than anyone I’ve seen or read. That’s part of why he taught in parables, because he knew that they had great power to convey meaning across time, even under the watchful eye of empire. This story in particular is told by Jesus to answer a question that we might ask to this day, “Who is my neighbor?” or more on theme, “Whose stories do I have to listen to?”

And Jesus is very clear on this point: everybody! Or at least everybody who might suffer or help us when we suffer (which is everybody)! He tells this story of a man beset by robbers, left to die on the side of the road. And you likely know the story well, his kinsmen, his fellow Judeans, what do they do? They ignore him! They’re much too busy with their own lives, or they’re afraid they’ll become ritually impure, whatever the reason. They don’t care about this man’s story. But the Samaritan does. The Samaritan is moved by what? Compassion. Jesus is letting us know that the person who sees us, who hears our story, who finally takes the action to help us, may very well be somebody we wouldn’t have been willing to share our story with or listen to. The Samaritan is the wrong person in the eyes of Jesus’s listeners, and he tells them the story anyway. He confronts them with a story that tells them something about their own behavior, their own ethics, and forces the listener to consider, “Who is my neighbor not only when I’m the one considering helping, but also when I’m the one in the ditch?(!)”

In this story, Jesus widens the circle. He asks us to hear other people’s stories, and to do what we can to help when we hear them. He explicitly calls on his listener to “Go and do likewise.” Go and help that person you think you might not want to. Go and treat that person you don’t like as your neighbor. The lesson is not only “Samaritans aren’t as bad as you think they are,” but also, “you need to be in relationship with the people you meet because you might need them and they might need you,” whether you like them or not.

As we’ve talked about a lot this morning, one really good way to build relationships with our neighbors is to share stories. If you both know one another’s stories, you learn the same lessons from them. Then, you can be in conversation with that other person and really hear and see them as a person, and you both have a better chance of survival together. That’s what stories are for, to teach the lessons people wished they knew before they wrote the story. That way, the next person doesn’t have to figure it out all by themselves.

(What do we do with this insight?)

In that spirit, I’d like to invite you to a short activity; give me 2-3 minutes. I want us to turn to our neighbors (or if you’re uncomfortable with that, text a friend, or if you prefer to just contemplate that’s okay too) and share a short story with them. It could be something you did today or this week, something important to you, a childhood memory, or even a story someone else told you that stayed with you. Try not to let it drag on too long, and I’ll ring our temple bell when the time is up.

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(Closing)

So now that we’ve heard these stories: the happy ones, the sad ones, the ones that are about survival, the ones that are about life and death. I want us to consider this week, as we go out into the world: What stories do you want to be sure are preserved? What stories have you previously discounted that you might want to listen to or read again? What stories help us survive? All of us, all of our neighbors. What stories help our children survive? What stories help humanity survive?

As you go forth, I invite you to tell a story that matters, read one, write one, sing one. Any form is fine. But the point is: go forth and be storytellers and listeners. Preserve the things that are important, just as the folks we’ve heard from today have. And maybe, if you get a chance, treat someone as a neighbor who might not do the same for you. And if the weather’s nice, maybe fly a white kite with a long tail.

Thank you for allowing me to share these stories with you today. Blessings, grace, and peace to you all, thank you.