Roots John M, Buchanan
Deuteronomy 26:5-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Communion Meditation Columbus, Ohio

February 27, 1977 ~ Lent

The Jewish writer, Elie Wiesel, tells the story of the great Rabbi who, when
his people were threatened, would go into the forest to meditate, There he would
light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the
misfortune averted, Later, when his disciple had occasion, for the same reason, to
intercede with Heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master
of the Universe, Listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able
to say the prayer,"’ and again the miracle would be accomplished, Still later, in
order to save his people once more, a third generation Rabbi would go into the
forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but
I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle
was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune,
Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to
light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the
forest. All I can to is tell the story, And this must be sufficient," And it was
sufficient, (Sam Keen, To A Dancing God, p, 82-83)

Theologians and philosophers know the importance of stories: so do children,
Rabbinical literature knows how essential stories are. The story of a people is
what makes them a people, The story, out of the dim pint, handed down from genera-
tion to generation, is what tells people who they are.

No one in history ever knew that more thoroughly than the Jews, When they
escaped from slavery in Egypt and spent forty years wandering in the wilderness it
became very important not to forget how it all had begun, And so their religious
rituals heavily emphasized remembering: liturgical acts were prescribed which re-
called great events in the past: remembering was a major part of what it meant to
believe, After they settled in the land and became an agrarian rather than a
nomadic people it became doubly important to remember who they really were, Yearly,
at the Feast of Weeks, the head of each family brought a basket of fruit to the altar
in the Temple, The fruit symbolized the gift of the land Jahweh had given them, And
as it was presented on the altar, the ritual required the worshiper to say: "A
wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there,
few in number,..'' and so on, until the whole story of their Exodus and conquest of
the new land was completed, "A wandering Aramean was my father,: That is to say:
this is who we really are, We may look like wealthy farmers, but we're really just
relatives of a nomad who one day wandered down into Egypt in search of food,

William Muehl observes: ",,,this is the glory of Israel, is it not? That its
God is remembered, Not simply believed in as a working hypothesis, Not merely
acknowledged in a rational fashion, Not defiantly affirmed as one affirms an un-
popular truth, But remembered in an almost sensuous way, much as one recalls the
dramatic moments of his personal past...,There is about many Jews the kind of aplomb
which comes of having in one's own parlor the things which other men only see in
museums," (All the Damned Angels, p,102).

The story is what gives a people identity, More than that the story of who
they are gives them something to live and die for, Valley Forge: "O say can you see
by the dawn's early light": "Four score and seven years ago our forefathers,.."

~ 2 -

One of the most interesting phenomenon to occur for a long time was the incred-
ible popularity of television's serialized version of Roots, No one, I take it,
expected it to be such a smash, Even the people who are paid to know such things
were surprised, Obviously, black people found it terribly intriguirg, In interviews
later many said that although the series told them little they didn't already know,
it was presented in such a manner as to tell them who they really were, for the
first time, And for those it was a very good and healthy experience,

Even more interesting is the fact that white people also seemed to gain a sense
of their own story: not simply that our relatives did that to their relatives -
although it was rightfully a part of it, But that each of us has a story: each of
us has roots somewhere back there, None of us began here,

The best part of the book was the last chapter in which Alex Haley described
the torturous, twelve year labor of research, As he began to collect data, and as
it became clear that he could complete the project in an historically, respectable
manner, he traveled back to Tennessee to see an elderly aunt who was very ill, As
a boy he had heard her tell the old stories about slavery and their forebears, When
he related what he had in mind - how he intended to discover everything there was
to know about their family and write a book, she aroused from her sick bed, approved
of the project with great animation and said: "They's all up there watchin' you."

Armed with a few African words and fragments of a story about a young boy making
a drum in the forest and being captured by slave traders, Haley finally isolated one
village in Gambia as the probable home of his ancestors, Through the offices of
anthropologists, linguists and translators he was put in touch with a Griot, an old
villager whose job it was to know and to recite the entire history of the particular
village, Haley listened carefully for hour after hour as the old man told about
every individual who was ever born in the village, Finally, in what amounted almost
to a footnote, he mentioned KUNTA KINTE, son of Omoro, who went into the forest to
carve a drum and was seen no more, He was home, Slowly he told the Griot the
momentous discovery they had just made: the people of the village were told and very
carefully they approached and touched him, Haley describes it as the most moving
incident in his entire life. He knew who he was: he had discovered his roots,

That hits us, I think, because we have short memories, Somehow, we have gotten
the impression that the past is not very important: that our immediate generation
is sufficient unto itself: that we are who we are on the basis of what we have
managed to accomplish in our own lifetime, How revealing that most ef us don't
know very much, if anything, about our great grandparents,

Elton Trueblood wrote somewhere about this "cut-flower civilization" of ours;
beautiful, fragrant but always in canger of dying because it is cut off from its
life-giving roots, Sam Keen, philosopher, observes that "Modern man has lost his
way in the forest, he cannot light the fire or say the prayer, and he is dangerously
close to losing his ability to see his life as part of any story." (op cit p.85).

Religion is the repository of the story - but in our time we act as if we believe
that faith is totally subjective; dependent on my immediate emotional responses, We
will turn our back on our story at the drop of a hat if a new brand of piety makes
us feel better and promises to get us to Heaven quicker and then have the temerity
to call it conversion,

a

William Muchle, who wrote so sensitively about remembering as an act of faith
for the Jews, observes that ",.,most of us in the twentieth century are doubly dis-
inherited, the victims of several estrangements, We do not remember Jerusalem, But
neither do we remember Bethlehem, Rome, Avignon, Worms, Geneva, Canterbury, or for
that matter the Little brown church in the dell, Most modern men have no memory of
God at all," (Op cit p.105),

Which brings me to Lent and Communion and Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth was
a Jew, We must never forget that, And part of what that meant to Him was that He
knew the story: He knew who He was in light of the story: He knew the power of stories
to tell others who they were and to give them a reason to live and die, Surely He told
svories to His disciples: that is what is so terribly important about the story of His
temptations in the wilderness, the First Lesson this morning, and the traditional
Gospel Lesson for the First Sunday in Lent, Literally everything else in the Gospel
accounts conceivably could have been included in the story because someone witr.essed
it. But in this story Jesus is alone, totally: it occurs before he even knew Peter,
James, John and the others, There is only one way that story survived and it is that
Jesus Himself told it to His disciples, and told it with enough frequency and emphasis
that they made it part of the story, "This is who I am," He must have told them:
"the one who spent forty days in the wilderness: the one who faced some very difficult
temptations and through it all maintained my integrity, When you remember, don't ever
forget that part,"

Jesus remained - a Jew, He knew the story of His people, but He was aware also
that, through Him, God was writing a new chapter, And so when He sensed that the end
of His own life had come; on that dark night when the net of conspiracy was tightening
around Him, He suggested that they take special pains to eat a last supper together,
At that meal He took the food substances they would eat and drink every day of their
lives and turned them into religious symbols - reminders of the story with a new
chapter, "Every time you eat this bread and drink this wine, remember me," They did -
and we do,

That's what Lent is for: a forty day period of time for remembering. In the
midst of turmoil in the near East, tragedy in Uganda, a new budget at home, a fuel
crisis in Ohio and schools closed in Columbus, a time to tell and hear and remember
the story of God and His love, Lent is the time, it has always scemed to me, to say
again who we are: that in and through everything else about us - above everything
else about us - we are followers of Jesus the Christ.

You and I are many people: parents, doctors, teachers, homemakers, attorneys,
nurses, bankers, You and I have many roots - ethnic, geographic; Scotland, England,
Ireland, Germany, France, Poland, Nigeria, India, China, But this is most important
of all, Here are cur real roots,

As the ancients brought a basket of fruit to the altar and recited "A wandering
Aramean was my father..." so we, in our time take bread and wine and recite, "JT be-
lieve in God the Father Almighty, and in His son, Jesus Christ our Lord who - suf-
fered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried," In Creed and Communion -
today - we reaffirm our roots,

The Lord Jesus, on the night of His arrest, took bread, and after giving thanks
to God, broke it and said, “This is my body which is for you; do this remembering
me," In the same way, He took the cup and said, "This is the new Covenant in my
blood, Whenever you drink it, do this, remembering me,"

Let us remember the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen,