Sermon: Storied Identity

Psalm 78:1-7

Who are you?
Where did you come from, and how did you get here?
What would happen if you lived as that person?

Those are big questions. We could make them all metaphysical and abstract if we wanted to, but that would draw us away from being grounded. These questions don’t need to be hypothetical or out there somewhere. They’re right here. They’re us.

Who are you?
Where did you come from, and how did you get here?
What if you dared to live as that person?

Those questions aren’t hypothetical at all. They’re not even general. “Hi, I’m a carbon-based life form. I came from the merger of two sequences of DNA, and I got to this moment by continually inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. And here I am, living as a human being – a general, run of the mill, cookie-cutter human being.”

No. Those questions are way more than that. They’re far from being general. They’re specific. They’re specific because you’re specific. The answers to those questions have names. Your life and identity are answers to those questions, and you’re sitting next to others with answers as specific as yours.

This is because we all have stories. Our very identities are storied. They’re woven together with narratives and experiences. They’re knit together with people – people with names, faces. Our stories have places. They have contexts. They’re so much bigger than we are, and yet somehow, they meet up in us. We live as the intersection of people, names, faces, places. They reside within us.

And how does the awareness of that truth function as a spiritual discipline for us? We’ve been talking about spiritual disciplines all semester. We’ve taken time to contemplate their impact. What meaning do they have for our lives? How do they give a Christian witness in mission to others? We’ve talked about prayer, proclamation, Sabbath, and Sacrament. How does the awareness of our storied identity function as a spiritual discipline like these others? The act of Remembrance is a spiritual discipline – a way of being Christian, a way of being human. How might we practice this discipline together?

Who are you?
Where did you come from, and how did you get here?
What if we truly lived as the people God has storied us to be?

In the 1890s, the main building of the University of Texas was not far from the Capitol. The University was only in its second decade with about a thousand students. Not too far away, there was a church in East Austin -- Highland Presbyterian Church, in its first decade. People in that church began to be concerned about the students at the university. “Who are we called to be for them, these students who are only a forty-five minute walk away from us?”

After all, there weren’t cars. There were simply students on foot and a church that saw a need. That church had a dream. They began a mission project. They organized a Sunday School and church services in a building on August Street -- Nueces Street, as it’s called today. And they met in the Austin School of Theology, a separate institution.

In 1897, the Austin School of Theology was forced to close its doors because a lack of funds, and this put Highland Presbyterian Church is a difficult position. They had a congregation in East Austin and now a mission congregation that was doing well. What would they do? They took a risk. They bought that building for $750 and Highland Presbyterian Church moved from East Austin to campus to continue its ministry to students. They stayed in that building for 8 years and then moved a couple of streets over in 1905. That same year, they changed their name to Highland University Presbyterian Church. That’s our congregation. In 1947, Highland was dropped from the name, and University Presbyterian Church continues to live as a community, the result of a dream 111 years before this moment.

We worship in a house of stories. The people of that congregation knew they had stories to give, not only their personal stories but the collective stories that they all shared, stories that bonded them together as a people – stories of Abraham who journeyed into a dream of God, a dream revealed as a starry sky of descendants, more inclusive than anyone could have imagined, stories of Moses and a people journeying through the wilderness toward liberation and promise, igniting stories that would follow – inspiring marginalized people to look to that Exodus for strength in their own movements of liberation, stories of prophets who told the truth about injustice, stories of outsiders like Ruth from Moab who demonstrated her faithfulness and showed others that the People of God cannot limited to ethnicity, stories of John the Baptist who taught people to prepare the way for God’s reign, stories of Mary, a young unmarried woman who could easily have been disregarded in her culture, but who instead bore God to the world and taught us to bear God toward one another, stories of Jesus of Nazareth, her son, the prophet, teacher, Messiah, and Son of God who called everything into question – eating with tax collectors and sinners, making disciples of men and women alike, healing, touching lepers, teaching about a Kingdom of God where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, calling out unjust rulers and establishments – stories of his life of obedience and stories of his death full of love and forgiveness – even to death on a cross – stories of his resurrection, miraculous and mysterious, stories that cause us to rise toward freedom and to be resurrected toward new life with and for others calling everything into question, stories of apostles -- Paul, a converted Pharisee who saw a vision and traveled the 1st century map sharing the message of the One who appeared to him on a dusty Damascus Road – and common people -- Aquilla and Priscilla, tentmakers, Lydia, a maker of purple dye, Barnabus, Timothy, and Phoebe, a deacon – common people who shared the ways that God’s Story swept up their stories, stories which have impacted us and swept up our stories along the way. These are the stories that Highland Presbyterian Church had to give, and they’re ours to remember and share. We live and worship in a house of stories.

And we may have never met those people from Highland Presbyterian Church, but here we sit as their children. We’re the recipients of their love and intention for us. Could they have imagined us? Maybe not. They couldn’t have imagined us dressed the way we are. They certainly couldn’t fathom that we keep in touch through the week on Facebook – let alone our use of televisions, radios, planes, or even cars. They couldn’t have foreseen our technology. They wouldn’t have imagined a church where people could worship desegregated from one another. They certainly wouldn’t imagine a 26-year old woman speaking the words of a sermon about them. They might not have imagined us specifically, but here we are specifically their children.

And how will we live out that truth? Again, we’re not general. Each one of us is a child of people and experiences outside this congregation’s history. We’ve been mothered and fathered by countless individuals who have loved us and believed in us. We have even been born from our painful experiences. We wouldn’t be ourselves without them. We are children of events, places, people, and circumstances. We’re specific. And how will we live as their children?

And so we ask our questions again:

Who are you?
Where did you come from, and how did you get here?
What if you actually lived as that person?

And those questions are intricately tied to these:

Who are we?
Where have we come from, and how did we get here?
What would happen if we lived fully as ourselves – each one of us, bringing our stories and identities to the table – to share and be formed together?
And who would our children be, and how would they be formed in and through us – simply because in this present moment we remembered and lived as the people God has called us to be?

This semester we’ve talked about how powerful the effects of our actions can be. We’ve said that our dreams and actions can often be the catalyst that sets a string of events into motion – just like a ripple effect. We can live our lives knowing that we are receiving the ripples of the people who have come before us. We are affected by them. We may give thanks for those some of those ripples. We may want to make waves of our own, shifting the direction of negative forces from the past that continue to plague individuals and communities.

But despite some of these negative forces, we know that we live in gratitude to those who have set nurturing ripples into motion for us. Some we haven’t even met. But we are connected to them.

I have a friend who has always felt a deep connection to her maternal grandmother. She never met her because her grandmother died before she was born, but she certainly heard stories about her from her own mother. There’s no question that my friend has received ripples from her grandmother’s life. She received love and affection through her own mother who passed it down to her. Her grandmother’s love and influence trickled down to her, and the effects of her grandmother’s life will surely pass through her and through her children and her children’s children. And we could say that even tonight we’re receiving the ripples of her life as we talk about her in this sermon.

We can certainly think about these effects trickling down in time, but here’s an interesting question: Does my friend give ripples back to her grandmother? Does she affect her grandmother?

I have a feeling she does, maybe in ways more cosmic and intricate that we can grasp. But I do know this: My friend gives back to her grandmother when she lives as herself. She gives to her grandmother when she allows herself to be unconditionally loved by her mother. My friend’s grandmother would have wanted her daughter to have the experience of loving unconditionally. When my friend lives as herself – as a beloved child -- she is fulfilling a dream her grandmother had for her mother.

My friend gives ripples to a grandmother she’s never met because she fulfills a grandmother’s dream.

And that’s true for us tonight. We fulfill the dreams of people we’ve never met when we live into the truth that we are Children of God. Austin Agape, Campus Ministry at University Presbyterian Church – fulfilling the dream of people who lived in 1897.

What if we practiced the spiritual discipline of Remembrance and lived as the people we’re called to be? I wonder, how would that affect University Presbyterian Church in 2008? Well, we could try this. We could tell each other about the people and experiences that have impacted our life. We could pass on their ripples to others. We could even tell the stories we’ve unfortunately been taught to leave out, stories that have been squelched by society or been self-silenced. What if we even brought the part of us that we thought would be rejected? What if we took a risk?

I know one thing. We would affect each other. When a comet collides into another object in space, its orbit changes, and it can’t take the same path anymore. Bring your true self. Be a gift, and we won’t stay the same either. As we remember together, we will continually re-membered together.

Who knows? Maybe our children will tell about it.

- Renée Roederer, Campus Minister