Reflections to Annual Meeting - 2000

Western Regional Minister Joseph Neville

Joseph Neville

God made us, wrote Elie Wiesel in the Gates of the Forest, "because God loves stories. And that is neither as odd nor as silly a thing to say as it may have sounded to you just now - not for Jew, or Christians - not people whose ideas about God are grounded in the Old and New Testaments. If you press them to tell you what he or she knows about God, and if you keep on pressing hard enough and long enough, they will finally have to say, "Well let me tell you this story...!"

Regional Ministry in CT is a story of three people who wear holes in their trousers or skirts, as the case may be, and car seats. We live with our phones dangerously attached to our ears, according to the latest microwave scare. We enter cyberspace via our e-mails, respond to pastors, Search Committees, seekers of positions, providers of positions, as well as seekers of references, providers of references. We occasionally sit in a Lawyers office explaining the issues of church and state, Association autonomy, and misconduct. We are often the front line facing the myriad questions about our UCC identity, polity history and practice. We put out fires, and depending on with whom you talk, create some. Ours is an enviable task! Sought after by many, captured by a few. Like the old lines in a sixties detective program, 'There are a million stories in the naked city."

But, what do our stories mean in the life of this church? Our collective stories speak the language of human relationships in dialogue with God! For as we interact with each other, there is the hope that my memory of your story and your memory of my story will blend into one memory both of us share, and the two of us begin a story together. We call that lasting friendship, or sometimes we call it love. No matter what you think of stories in general, you know that your own story is the single most important thing about you - it's who you are. And it becomes especially clear - sometimes very painfully clear - when your story is all mixed up and blended together with the stories of other people. Every story is about a human being as he or she remembers it. When we see thousands of people jammed together in city streets, we realize that human life itself is a fantastic web of interwoven stories - that politics is a way people have of interweaving millions of human stories - that sociology is a feeble attempt to describe the ways people find of weaving stories together - that psychology is the study of human stories as they relate to other human stories. That art and music and drama and architecture all express human stories, all of them holding the marvelous potential to become part of other human stories, to change the ways we remember who we are.

God made us, Wiesel says, because God loves stories. The simple truth is that when the ancient people of the Bible came together to worship God, when it came time to confess their faith in God - They simply told a story - they remembered a story together with God.

One story that has meaning for me is found in Deuteronomy 26: 5-9. Listen: My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down in Egypt to find refuge there, few in numbers; but there he became a nation, great, mighty, and strong. The Egyptians ill-treated us; they gave us no peace and inflicted harsh slavery on us. But we called on the God of our fathers and mothers. God heard our voice and saw our misery, our toil and oppression; and God brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders. God brought us here and gave us this land, a land where milk and honey flow."

We hear a human story about some enslaved migrant workers who ran away one day, still owing money to the company store. Only they don't just remember running away. They remember being freed by a liberating God who was in the thing with them - A God who would not settle for slavery as the last word about them. And forever after that the people who worshipped the God, of whom the Bible speaks, have remembered that story as their own story. And the story became as a creed, a confession of faith - something to be remembered out loud in every time and place when it was important to say something about God.

This is what motivates me to carry on in my ministry. I need to ultimately know that God is in this thing with us to the depths - even to the death - no matter what. But more than that, God's story with us, with God's beloved world, is still underway. The God we remember is still liberation and reconciliation. The God whose justice we remember in so many explicit and detailed ways still calls us to work for God's justice, for God's peace, for compassion - in every place our capacities and influence can reach. With that kind of memory and that kind of hope we are challenged to live right now in anticipation of the day when "The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea."

God made us, because God loves stories!