Our culture is facing a reckoning with how we tell our story. Who has been left out? What has been sanitized? Do those who have gotten all the credit really deserve all the credit? Are there people who have been pushed into the shadows without whom our story and its heretofore major characters would not exist?
There is more than one way to tell a story. I learned this through studying Scripture. Some might think that is a bad thing. If there are multiple versions of the same story, who do we believe? We often want the *one* story that is definitive. Rarely, however, is there such a thing. Indeed, oftentimes having multiple version of the same story can lead to greater understandings of the truth.
Scripture often tells the same story multiple different ways, and for different reasons. I was quite stunned long ago to learn that 1 & 2 Chronicles tell almost the same story as 1 & 2 Kings. Indeed, 1 & 2 Chronicles were clearly written to whitewash the darker aspects of the narrative in 1 & 2 Kings.
Interestingly, our lectionary includes 1 & 2 Kings, but not many readings from 1 & 2 Chronicles because truth and grace are found in the full story, not a sanitized version of it. If we do not see the full human story, we cannot understand sin and redemption.
Similarly, the four accounts of the Gospel (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) are necessary to give us the full picture of who Jesus is as the incarnate one of God who redeems the world. No one version of that story captures the full truth. Together, the four versions give us what we need for understanding salvation.
I think about this as I read about statues coming down (by official decisions or by crowd action), building and military installations being renamed, and even my favorite attraction at Walt Disney World (Splash Mountain) being re-themed away from its racist origins in the film Song of the South to a more relevant and diverse story line from The Princess and the Frog.
There is no doubt that these actions are painful and confronting. There is nothing wrong with grieving what we feel we have lost. But sometimes, what we have lost has not been the healthiest for us. So what we have really lost is not a statue, but an unhealthy and mistaken understanding of the past. So we grieve, but then we heal.
We often want to have one narrative that is pure and definitive. We resist having to wrestle with the messy details. However, Scripture teaches us that life is messy. Both the Bible and Shakespeare (and Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc.) know that good and bad are intermingled and are something we struggle with every day. They remind us that when we cease to struggle and embrace only a partial truth, we then lose a part of our souls and can even become the very thing we would never want to be.
These are hard times. Our past is catching up with us. Yet, if we go forward with the humility of learning from our past, we have a greater opportunity to experience redemption and live in a healthier world.
I believe this is a God moment. God is calling us to be honest so that we can find healing and hope. Just as we do not erase people from our divine story because of their imperfections, but rather learn how God works through them, we cannot expunge people from history. We cannot deny good and inspiring things that broken people have done. Nor can we use those things to dismiss as irrelevant harm that has been caused.
What we can do is to tell the story in a more complete way that, in the end, can be even more powerful and inspiring and draw us together rather than push us apart. The Good News is that the messiest story of all, our story as God’s people, shows us that if we have the courage and the humility, we can enter into a God-given future that is better than the past. And that is the only direction we can go.
It Matters How We Tell the Story