(RE)Discovering the Whole Story

In this week’s Sacred Story comes from 2 Kings 22-23:3 - a young king unexpectedly finds the Book of the Law, which had been lost and entirely forgotten. It reveals a story that fills in a fuller picture of the beauty and brokenness of God’s people throughout history and their relationship with each other and the Divine. It’s a story a lot like Frozen II actually….which you should go see, but we digress…

This past week I got that itch to do a deep clean of my office.  I went through every drawer of my desk and ever back corner of each drawer. I cleaned out every wrinkled scrap of paper, every rusted paperclip, and every random bottle of glitter glue.  I rediscovered copies of marriage certificates I’d signed and notebooks full of memories I kept during travels. Some of the things were trash and some of them were things I once treasured but had become forgotten - notes of gratitude, the original piece of paper where I first wrote down our bread recipe, sketches of big revolutionary hopes and dreams that have been filed away. And honestly, those are all things I didn’t know I would hold as treasures years later. 

I took the time to sort through each thing and discern its place in my current reality. This itch happens to me most often at landmark moments and in seasons of transition – when the winds of change move through the air just as they carry red and brown leaves slowly to the ground, swirling artfully as they fall. This also happens when you move houses and are forced to reckon with every single object in your possession.  This happens when we pull out the holiday decorations from the attic, where they’ve been tucked away in darkness for a year. It happens when I finally get frustrated enough with never being able to find my things in my purse or backpack, so that I sit down, dump it all out and sort through each piece. It gives me a chance to decide what is still worth keeping and what is only getting in the way – it’s a mix of things like expired coupons and my kid’s school picture or a small drawing she made. And sometimes…sometimes it reveals things that I had thought were lost or had entirely forgotten about over time, and even some things that I have no idea where they came from. 

When I was cleaning out my office I discovered some things that must have been there before I even arrived - lists of people’s names and numbers, pictures of people who had once belonged to a community here, but many who were gone long before I showed up. 

God’s people, the people of Judah, have been through some good kings, some crappy kings, and kings who have their moments.  Now there is a new young ruler who accidentally rediscovers an old story of God and God’s people that has been out of sight, waiting in the shadows, and yet right in the middle of everything. Josiah wasn’t on an Indiana Jones treasure hunt; he wasn’t looking for the revelation; he didn’t even know it existed! But there it was – the true story of his people, the book of the law, the book of the covenant.

Somehow, over the generations, the people had moved a little bit farther and farther away from this book, this story, and this promise which was once their anchor. Other voices slowly mingled into the mix until finally the voice that created and called them was drowned out and forgotten altogether. It’s like when you are at the beach, jumping into the waves and just floating in place. It doesn’t feel like you’ve moved at all until you look up and realize you’ve drifted far from the place you set your chair and towel. 

Advent is a season of waiting for God to arrive, but it’s a kind of waiting like when someone texts you that they’re on their way and you keep looking out the window and down the block to see a sign that they are near. It causes us to pay attention, to notice, to be attentive in ways that we don’t always practice. There’s an old advent hymn… “wake, awake, for night is flying, the watchmen on the heights are crying: ‘awake, Jerusalem, arise!’” Wake, awake! Tis the season for waking up to God’s presence among us, waking up to things we didn’t see before, becoming aware of things that were veiled, things that existed in the shadow all along.

Some of the things we will re-discover are beautiful and hopeful, and some are painful, and often they are both. People talk about our world today and say: “things are so divided, so violent, so hateful….when really…this reality has always been there, it’s just now privileged people are becoming aware of it in ways only marginalized communities were intimately aware before. Whenever it seems like something is happening all of a sudden, we have to ask if that’s really true or if we and our communities have been blind to it.  

We don’t know what we don’t know, until we do.  Did you know there are lots of common words and phrases in our language that have racist history? Sure, there are there many obviously offensive words we’re unfortunately familiar with, but there are many more that we’ve forgotten over time. The word “uppity” is often used today to describe someone arrogant, but it originates as a word used to describe slaves who challenged their subjugation or were even perceived to be step out of line and hope too high. It’s a word steeped in white supremacist power to “teach people their place.” Then there are phrases like “long time no see.” I confess I have been using this phrase myself until I was researching this week. Today we perceive it as an innocuous greeting of someone we literally haven’t seen in a while. But “long time no see” was originally a phrase that mocked Native Americans as they learned a second language.

Re-learning and rediscovering our stories, our sacred stories and our human stories...noticing how they’ve been a part of us all along and yet are doing something new in us now…

It can be a shock to the system. It can make us angry, defiant, confused, ashamed, and isolated – all signs of grief. We grieve for the loss of our sense of security, the loss a worldview we can no longer hold. King Josiah also grieves when what he knew of God is changed as a new revelation arrives.  The tearing of his clothes, an ancient Jewish sign of grief that reflects the ways our souls feel torn apart in these moments. But this tearing apart of his clothes is also an opening of the heart, an act of repentance that recognizes the brokenness of what was and creates room for something different, something new.

So what will this new revelation mean? What are they to make of it? What do they do now that it seems they can’t just go about the same way they had before? The leaders are sent to seek out the wisdom of a prophetess, Huldah. They look to her above the high priests, the king, or any other prophet. She affirms that the stories and the covenant is true and that things will need to be set aright.

It turns out just because Josiah and the people didn’t know these stories, or didn’t intend to do harm, or were weren’t directly involved because it was the doing of generations before or it was just how they were brought up…none of that gives the exempts them from being a part of setting things right. 

I wonder…. what is God revealing to you in this season of light and dark, what is God showing you that you may have missed before? How will you grieve, be torn open in ways that reveal God’s presence in bigger, wider, more powerful and life-giving ways? 

I’ll be honest, this process sounds terrifying and awful in many ways. The fear of stepping on a relational, racial, or spiritual landmine I didn’t know was there can be paralyzing or make us timid enough that our very spiritual growth is stunted. And who wants to be torn open like that? To go through that kind of soul-wrenching process? I was listening to this podcast I’ve mentioned before which is made here in Houston called “The Relay.” The white man who is one of the hosts talked about this feeling of needing to  get his approach to race perfect, because he knew how much hurt and harm a misstep could cause and how saying or doing something wrong might ruin his relationship with the black woman who is hosting with him. But then the woman responds to him and says, “just because I come to you and say ‘this hurts or what you said is uncomfortable…doesn’t mean this is over, that doesn’t mean that trust is broken because I trusted you enough to tell you the truth. And truth is difficult, but it’s made easier with commitment.” That’s the kind of commitment that we as people of faith call a covenant and that is the story that is rediscovered time and time again, often in the unseen people and places that are right in front of us. This scripture reminds us that God’s relationship with us is not so fragile that we can ruin it by anything we do or don’t do. At our communion tables we remember that Jesus was broken open and poured out and that in dying to an old life, we are given a new one.

Here all things from light AND dark are revealed, seen and known before God and before the people in all their imperfection and their beauty and….ALL  of it is STILL held in covenant, in promise, in hope. This kind of hope is so much more powerful than one that is based on the redemption of only part of ourselves or our world.  It’s more than a redemption of our best wishes for ourselves and others, more than any façade, it’s the redemption of ALL things – even the parts we couldn’t or wouldn’t see. The arrival of THIS kind of ultimate and all-encompassing hope is what we’re waiting for. It is already on the way. It will be turning the corner any minute. Thanks be to God. Amen.