One of the things we watched in one
of our early sessions preparing for the upcoming ELCA Youth Gathering in
Houston was called “The Danger of a Single Story,” a TED talk by Chimamanda
Ngozi. In her talk, Ngozi spoke of growing up in Nigeria where she had only
British books to read so that when she began to write fiction as a child she
would write about the kinds of things British people talked about—tea, the
weather, and the like. This story became her one story; never mind that that
story wasn’t even compatible with her own story.
We all do this when we learn things
for the first time. We mimic. Whether you are writing, doing art, making music,
or cooking the process is much the same; you watch and try to replicate those
who know how to do it. We all start with that single story—the first example of
what a thing is. This is true in every aspect of how we live our lives, and for
those of you who have, or have had, children you know this. Their little brains
just grab on to the one example—the first example—of a thing. But this is true
of us well into adulthood as well. In fact, it’s more persistent with adults,
because while we are just as susceptible to the single story as children our
brains are also much more set in their ways, so we are less able to detach from
that story, as children are.
An example: On our way to daycare
last week Natalie was upset with me because I was speaking Spanish to her. She
was wearing her nice, new Spanish dress her aunt and uncle gave her so I took
it as a cue to teach her a little Spanish, but she didn’t like that much. She
told me, “I don’t like Spanish, because I don’t speak it.” I’ve heard adults
use similar logic. So I told her, “Natalie, you can learn how to speak Spanish
just like you know how to speak English!” To which she replied, “What is
English?” There, in front of my eyes, her one story became many. By the time I
picked her up for dance class later in the day she was asking me how to say all
sorts of things in Spanish—things I had to Google because, frankly, I was
pretty rusty. By next week I’ll be asking her how to say things.
If you only know one story about English, or about race, or
about women, or about Jews or Palestinians, or about Liberals or
Conservatives—if you only have one story, you only have a starting point—and it
can be a terrible danger to live this way. It’s the easiest way to dehumanize
one another; to consider others beneath us. You can only do this if you have a
single story, because real people are much more complicated than all this.
At Pentecost, there are people from
a load of different places, as it says in our reading today, “Parthians, Medes,
Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia
and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors
from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs.” We might lump the Jews
together in one story, but then we read about the many cultures and languages
they had (and have). Then, to our surprise there are Arabs there as well—this
is before Islam, so we’re talking ethnicity rather than religion—and there were
others as well. How many different life stories were there accounted among
those in attendance at Pentecost? How many different languages—let alone heritages
and customs.
This is the fertile ground where the
Holy Spirit makes itself known; right in the middle of the multitude of stories;
because this is the holy space where people are their most human. Where we so
often fall prey to the single story the Holy Spirit offers a universal story. It
cuts through the languages and the heritages and the history and offers one,
uniform promise. The only story that matters is not the story of our history,
not the convenient beliefs that make us feel good, but the promise of the
resurrection—Jesus dying for sinners like us, who choose so often to follow one
story.
The great news of Jesus’ story is
that it frees us to follow the other stories where we may, and to do so free
from fear. Yes, there are people who would hurt us out there, people who would
kill us, even; there are dangerous places, but the Holy Spirit does not qualify
the humanity in all of us. We are human, even at our worst—even the people we
treat as subhuman, as “bad” or as “animals.” Yes, there is sin and death; there
is killing and terror; but because resurrection is true the greater danger is
not posed by death itself but by how we fail to treat others as children of
God. We are freed to live without fear of death because Jesus Christ went there
first. Having discovered this freedom, we cannot allow the single story of fear
to trump the universal story of the resurrection.
Each of us has within us the
capability to look past the single story, and to question our assumptions.
Every one of us can look deeper for the humanity in people whose stories we do
not understand. We can blame the media all we want, but ultimately this is
something within our control. We cannot allow ourselves to decide our one story
is sufficient; not when we have a God who died for it all.
This is never truer than for our
high school students, many of whom are heading off into the wider world of
college where all of their single stories will be questioned. This will happen,
I can guarantee it, because it happened to me. I grew up in a school that was
less than fifty percent white, a school whose students were born in 75
different countries; I had an International Baccalaureate education that
was—and is—the gold standard for well-rounded curricula; I had friends who were
Christians and Jews and Muslims and atheists; I did mission work in Mexico and took
a class on the Theory of Knowledge; I was well-adjusted and, if I can say so,
smart enough to know plenty of things. Then I walked into my freshman Religion
course at Augustana College with Dr. Murray Haar where he told us that our job
as students was “to think that we might be wrong,” and I began to have my
certainty wiped out at the knees. I realized I didn’t know a dang thing.
Academia if often vilified in
Christian circles because of the idea that college is questioning the faith of
our young people, but my experience was quite the opposite. Rather than
questioning my faith, college asked me what story would be compelling enough to
stand on—what universal story is there? And the only story that worked, as far
as I could see, was the resurrection.
I had a hundred stories of my own—I knew things, remember?—but all of that was so little. None of us
know all that much in the scheme of things. This the problem of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, which Adam and Eve, and you and me, taste from on a
daily basis: Our knowledge is limited, imperfect, and covered by sin. So, how
can any of us assume we know anything from an article on the internet, or a
quick Google search, when even weeks of immersion in a culture is just
scratching the surface? In this world of quick knowledge that passes as wisdom
we need to know all the more the ground where we are standing. Is it
resurrection or something less solid?
Our single stories belittle the work
of the Holy Spirit, who came to people who are a million different shades of
human, but God’s big story—death into resurrection—given to us by Jesus on the
cross and revealed by the empty tomb, is the only thing that will save us.
Pentecost is about a miracle of understanding, which cannot
occur apart from God’s will coming to life within us. We need the Holy Spirit
to intercede where we cannot; we need God to save us, and that is the story
upon which our existence rests. Then, knowing that Christ is our solid rock, we
are free to look for new stories—to seek after humanity in what we imagine to
be depraved. This is holy work, good work, tough work. It’s hard because we
have to admit we may be wrong; it’s tough because it involves humility; it’s
challenging because there will never be a moment where we have it all figured
out; but it’s worth it, because along the way we will discover God in someone
who looks and sounds different than me—who has a different story. We need those
stories because we are human, we are limited, but we are saved apart from our
sin, apart from our single stories by the big story that Christ is speaking to
us, whether in Greek, English, or even Spanish—if we just open our ears.
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