Telling Stories for Healing

Happy New Year! For many people the first of the year is a time of remembering and telling stories. So much has happened in the past 365 days, undoubtedly some of which was hard, or even traumatic. Telling these stories might seem daunting to the point that we’d rather not speak of them at all.

Few people escape a year of life on this earth without acquiring a difficult story to tell: Syrian bloodshed, mass shootings, the devaluing of certain people’s voices within our families, the slow but persistent destruction of addiction in our lives…the difficult stories of a year take on many different shapes and forms. Think back on the past year and bring to mind a difficult story, whether large or small… Hold this story gently in your hands and close to your heart. When we tell our stories in a safe space, God is working toward healing in our lives.

Our human stories and God’s healing work go back for a very long time. We hear one such story in Matthew’s gospel today. Long ago, Herod was in power and he felt his power to be threatened. He manipulated people to try to achieve security for himself, but when that didn’t work, he had all of the children of Bethlehem that were 2 y/o or younger killed. Bethlehem had a population of about 1,000 people at that time, and because of population distributions leaning toward the young, the death toll very easily could have been greater than 100 people. The people of the community were, as Jeremiah predicted, wailing, weeping, lamenting, and refusing to be consoled.

We don’t really know why Matthew’s community held onto this story, but they did. After all, it’s an unlikely story to include in a gospel; it doesn’t exactly make a strong case for Jesus’ value as Messiah. I can almost hear overtones of grief in the Bethlehem community: “If this is the kind of thing that comes along with the Messiah, then count us out. You can keep your Messiah, God, and we’ll keep our children.” But for some reason, it was important enough for them to tell and retell this story for 75 years, until Matthew finally put it down on papyrus.

We also don’t know about the connections between the Bethlehem community who suffered this tragedy and the Matthean community of the gospel narrative. I wonder if the people of Matthew’s community had indeed been affected by Herod’s violence, and I wonder if retelling that story over 75 years was part of God’s healing work in their lives. Perhaps the Matthean community itself didn’t know why they retold the story over time, but they trusted that God would somehow make sense of it all.

There are many parallel examples from our modern day of storytelling-as-God’s-healing-work. For one example, take addiction recovery. Addiction is an enslavement to a substance or a series of thoughts, words, or deeds. There is addiction to gambling, drugs, sex, alcohol, power, money, food, television, and the list goes on… In the midst of addiction the addict does all kinds of hurtful things to self and others. But the process of recovery from addiction involves—in part—telling the truth of what we have done while in the grips of our addiction. On the surface, such a task seems overwhelmingly simple, but in practice, telling the truth to ourselves and others can be extremely hard. Experience reveals, however, that when we shine light on the skeletons in our closet by telling our stories honestly, we regain clarity and a taste of freedom. It is altogether reasonable that Herod was addicted to power, and his addiction caused tremendous harm. Matthew’s community told and retold that story, trusting in God’s creativity to bring about healing.

Another example of healing through stories is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa post-apartheid in the 1990’s. The deal was this: amnesty would be granted to all who told the truth. This radical proposition challenges our punishment-oriented models of justice tremendously, but the reality of the Commission witnesses to the power of human stories, even at their worst, to bring healing. The Commission recognized, in part, that when people had the chance to speak and listen to what really happened, more healing would emerge than if people were punished for their sins in a transactional framework. The TRC is not a transactional framework. It is a grace-centered framework. I don’t know that Herod ever told the story of his violence, but Matthew’s community told that story. They didn’t make Herod out to be a villain either. They simply said, “This is what happened, and this is how it affected the community.” The rest is God’s business.

So I wonder what will happen with our difficult stories from 2016. Will we courageously speak to our trusted friends the truth of what happened? If the Bible is any reliable indication, God seems to have a deep capacity to hold difficult stories, even without the need to explain them away, or even for them to make sense. She certainly has the capacity to hold our stories as she held the story of Herod within the Matthean community for decades. And she certainly has the capacity to heal the wounds of our lives by shaping our stories as they come out of our mouths. There is so much to learn and explore in storytelling. God works for healing within the stories of our lives just as God worked for healing in the Matthean community as they retold the difficult Herod story for so many years. God works for healing in our lives as we tell and retell the stories of 2016. God creatively heals us through our stories. Which ones will we share from last year? Which ones will we create for this year? Share your stories. God can hold them. And God can heal them. Amen.