Sermon – I Love to Tell the Story

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, PA on Sunday October 4, 2026. I was in response to Exodus 12:1-3; 13:14-17; 15:5-6. You can listen to the sermon audio through this link.)

Last Sunday we sang “I Love to Tell the Story.” The woman who wrote it was named Katherine Hankey. She grew up in London in the 1800s, the daughter of a rich banker. She spent much of her life teaching the Bible to young women who worked long hours in London’s factories.

When she was about thirty, she got very sick and was stuck in bed for months. Lying there, she wrote a long poem about Jesus. She called the first half “The Story Wanted.” She called the second half “The Story Told.” She was hungry for a story strong enough to hold her up, and God gave it to her.

One verse we sing goes like this: “I love to tell the story, for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.”

The people who know the story best are still hungry for it. So we tell it again this morning. And that’s what our reading from Exodus is about.

Our reading gives us a few short pieces of the story of God bringing Israel out of slavery in Egypt.

Look at how it starts. The people are still in Egypt. They are still slaves. Pharaoh hasn’t let anyone go. And God says to Moses and Aaron, “This month shall mark for you the beginning of months.” God starts the calendar over. Before the people have taken one step toward freedom, God is already telling them how they will remember it. God plans the telling of the story before the story even happens.

Then in chapter 13 God says, “When in the future your child asks you, ‘What does this mean?'” “What does this mean?” is the question Martin Luther asks over and over in the Small Catechism. Some of you had to memorize the answers. Luther got that question from somewhere. He got it from the way God taught Israel to pass on the faith. A child asks. An adult tells the story.

And here is the answer God gives the adult: “By strength of hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery.”

Did you hear the little word in there? Us. The Lord brought us out. That adult wasn’t there. That adult may be telling the story hundreds of years later. And still the answer is “us.”

Jewish families still do this every spring at the Passover meal, the Seder. A big part of that meal is called the Telling. The youngest child asks questions, and the family answers by telling the Exodus story. 

There is a teaching almost two thousand years old that says in every generation, each person should see themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt. The story pulls you inside it, so that you hear it as someone God set free.

Then we skip ahead to chapter 15. The people are on the other side of the sea. And what do they do? They sing. “Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power; your right hand, O Lord, shattered the enemy.” The story turns into a song. Just like it did for Katherine Hankey in her sickbed, a hundred and sixty years ago.

There’s one more verse I don’t want us to miss. Chapter 13, verse 17. When Pharaoh finally lets the people go, God doesn’t lead them on the short road. There was a shorter way, along the coast. But God says, “If the people face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt.” So God takes them the long way around.

Think about that. These are people who had been slaves, whose baby boys had been thrown into the Nile. And God knows that the first time they get scared, they might want to go back. That’s how strong the pull of Egypt is. Egypt has its own story, and it is a powerful one. Even people who suffered under it can find themselves missing it.

Pharaoh had a story. Some people are born to rule, and some are born to make bricks. There will never be enough bricks. If the slaves complain, work them harder. Every empire since has told some version of that story. The strong take what they want, and everyone else is there to serve them.

Every nation tells stories about itself, and ours does too. A historian named Richard Slotkin wrote a book called A Great Disorder. He says America runs on a handful of big stories, what he calls national myths. They are stories about the frontier and the founding, about our wars and about the civil rights movement. Slotkin says these stories are so powerful that you can often predict who will win an election by asking which candidate tells them best. People vote for the story they believe they belong to.

Right now our country is in a deep fight over which story is true. Who are we, and what is America about? Christian nationalism is a story that says God made a special deal with America. There are stories about money that say if you’re poor, you must not have worked hard enough. Some of you have heard that one said right to your face.

The people at the top work hard to tell their own story, and they don’t want other stories getting in the way. Sometimes they even borrow God’s words to do it.

Two weeks ago, the Secretary of Defense, launched what he calls the “Send Me Tour” to recruit young people. The name comes from Isaiah chapter 6. 

He told a crowd of college students that for 250 years Americans have raised their hand and said “Send me” to go and fight our enemies.

Let’s look at what Isaiah 6 actually says. Isaiah sees a vision of God, and he falls apart. “Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips.” He knows he’s a sinner. Then an angel touches his mouth with a burning coal, and God takes his sin away. Only then does God ask, “Whom shall I send?” And Isaiah says, “Here am I; send me.”

God sends Isaiah to speak. He is to be God’s voice to a stubborn people with hard hearts, telling them the hard truth of judgment and the hope that comes after it. Nobody gets conquered. Nobody gets killed. When you take a story about God washing a sinner clean and sending him to preach, and you turn it into a war cry, you’ve twisted God’s story into Pharaoh’s story.

We live in a time when even pictures and voices can be faked, and it’s hard to know which stories to trust. Plenty of people have quit believing in anything at all. Nothing can change, so why try? That is exactly what Pharaoh wants you to believe.

The stories we tell matter. The stories we leave out matter just as much.

Slotkin points out that when white Americans told the story of the Civil War, the people most often left out were the very people who had been enslaved. Their voices were missing from the story of their own freedom. Some stories get left out because they tell a truth that people in power would rather not face.

That happens right here on Allison Hill. There are patients in our clinic who go years without seeing a medical professional, and there are woman across the street who are being sold by someone else. When their stories get told at all, they usually get told wrong. They get turned into stories about laziness or bad choices, so the rest of society doesn’t have to look at uncomfortable truths.

We do it with our own lives too. We all have a story we tell about ourselves, and we all know which parts we skip.

There’s a book by a doctor named Bessel van der Kolk called The Body Keeps the Score. He spent his career with people who lived through trauma. What he found is that even when we leave part of our story out, our bodies remember it. The heart races. You flinch when someone raises their voice. You can stop telling the story with your mouth, and your body keeps telling it anyway.

We see this every week. So much healing begins when people can finally tell the true story of what happened to them. That includes saying out loud whose fault it was. So many people carry blame that was never theirs to carry. When the true story gets told, a new story can start. A story of healing.

Israel’s story starts at the bottom, in the brick pits. And God makes sure they keep telling that part, generation after generation, because that’s the part where God shows up.

Jesus knew this too. In Mark chapter 5 there is a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. Her body has carried her story all that time. She has spent every penny on doctors, and the law says she is unclean, so she has been pushed to the edge of everything. She sneaks up in a crowd and touches the edge of Jesus’ clothes, and she is healed. She could have slipped away. But Jesus stops, and the whole crowd has to stop with him. He keeps looking until she comes forward. And Mark says she told him the whole truth. Jesus stood there in the middle of the road and listened to all of it. Then he called her “daughter” and sent her home in peace.

That’s the good news for the stories we leave out. Jesus stops for them, and he wants to hear the whole thing. God knows every page of your story, including the parts we skip, and God has not closed the book on you.

Here’s something I’ve noticed. Some of the best storytellers in history have come from the bottom, from the people the world tried to silence. They had to be good at it. When you’re at the bottom, nobody hands you a microphone. You need a clear vision and a story so strong people can’t ignore it. And you have to keep telling it, over and over, because the people who do well off the way things are will keep trying to shut you up.

Martin Luther King Jr. stood in Washington in 1963 and told America about his dream. Again and again in his preaching he told the Exodus story, the story of a people walking out of slavery toward a promised land. He was telling God’s story, and he dared the whole country to step inside it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who stood against Hitler. He was arrested, and from his prison cell he wrote letters to his family and friends. Around that time he wrote that he had learned to look at history from below, through the eyes of the people who are left out and who suffer. The Nazis killed him a few weeks before the war ended. They could not stop his story. People are still reading those letters more than eighty years later.

Dorothy Day opened houses in New York where hungry and homeless people could get a meal and a bed, and she ran a newspaper that sold for a penny and told the stories of poor workers the big papers ignored. She did it because she believed Jesus was standing in that soup line.

Recently I visited the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Whatever you think of his politics, it’s a place built to tell a story. Inside, you walk through the story of the White House as the people’s house, and then you’re invited to carry that story forward by building up your own community. At the very top is a room where you look out over the South Side of Chicago through giant letters cast in concrete. They are words from a speech he gave in Selma, Alabama, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. That was the day in 1965 when police beat people who were marching peacefully for the right to vote. The words begin, “You are America.” You look out at a city through the story of ordinary people who were beaten on a bridge and kept on walking.

That’s who God keeps choosing to tell the story. Slaves in Egypt. Factory girls in London. Fishermen in Galilee. And the people of Allison Hill. The people the world overlooks often see most clearly what God is doing, because they need God’s story the most.

All of those storytellers were pointing to a bigger story. In many ways the whole Bible sets two stories side by side. There’s the story of empire, the one Pharaoh tells, and Rome after him. And there’s God’s story, which keeps breaking into the world and turning it upside down.

God’s story starts with who God is. In Exodus chapter 3 God says, “I have heard their cry,” and “I have come down to deliver them.” God hears people crying in the brick pit, and God comes down to set them free. They had nothing to offer. God acted because that’s who God is.

And then God came down all the way. In Jesus, God stepped inside the human story. The Gospel of John calls Jesus the Word made flesh. Jesus is the story God has been telling all along, told in a human life.

Jesus told stories too. He told about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to go find the one that’s lost, and about a father who runs down the road to hug the son who wasted everything. Over and over, the people the world left out became the heroes of Jesus’ stories. He ate with them and touched them. He healed them and listened to them.

On the night of the Passover, Jesus sat at the table and told the old Exodus story one more time. Then he put himself inside it. This is my body. This is my blood. 

The next day the powers of the world did what empires always do with someone they can’t control. They killed him. And on the third day God did what God always does. God brought life out of death. God led Jesus, and all of us with him, out of the last Egypt there is, the grave itself.

And here is one of my favorite stories. On that first Easter Sunday, two disciples were walking home to a village called Emmaus. They were heartbroken. Their story had fallen apart. The risen Jesus walked up beside them, though they didn’t recognize him. Luke says that beginning with Moses, Jesus told them the whole story and showed them how all of Scripture pointed to him. Beginning with Moses means he told them the Exodus story. Then he sat at their table, took bread, blessed it and broke it, and their eyes were opened.

Jesus still does that. He walks beside people whose stories have fallen apart and tells them God’s story until their hearts burn. Then he makes himself known at the table.

That’s why the church keeps telling it. We build our whole year around it, from Christmas through Holy Week to Easter and Pentecost. We tell it at the font, where the baptism prayer remembers God leading Israel through the sea, and every person we baptize gets carried through those waters too. A sermon is that same story told again, so the risen Jesus can meet you in it this morning.

The stories of the world say the way things are is the way things have to be. That poverty is just how it is. That war is normal and cruelty is the price of getting ahead. Jesus’ story says no. Pharaoh does not get the last word. The tomb is empty. The risen Jesus is still walking these streets of Allison Hill, still stopping for the ones the crowd walks past. He sees the image of God in every person who comes through our clinic doors, and in every one of you. And he loves people who have done nothing to earn it, because love is who God is.

In a few minutes we will come to this table. And I will say the words we say every time: “taking bread and giving thanks to God, Jesus said: Take and eat; this is my body, given for you.”

Those words are our Telling. They are our version of the parent at the Passover table answering the child. And just like that Passover meal, this meal is about more than remembering something that happened a long time ago. When you hold out your hands, you receive the body and blood of Christ. You are at the table. The story happens to you.

Like those two disciples in Emmaus, you may find your eyes opened in the breaking of the bread. The risen Jesus is here, at this table, for you.

So imagine a child in this room tugging on your sleeve when you come back to your seat. “What does this mean?”

You can answer the way God taught Israel to answer. By strength of hand the Lord brought us out. Out of slavery and out of the grave. God brought us out, and God is still bringing us out.

The world will keep telling you its stories. Some of them will tell you you’re worth only what you earn. Others will tell you nothing will ever change. And when you get scared, you’ll feel the pull to go back to Egypt. Everybody does. That’s why God takes us the long way around, and why God keeps putting this story in front of us, week after week, at the font and at the table.

Katherine Hankey lay in a sickbed and found that she was hungry for the story. Then she found that the story had found her. And she spent the rest of her life telling it.

The story has found you too. Come to the table and step inside it. Then go out onto these streets and tell it, with your words and with your lives, until everyone on Allison Hill knows they are part of it.

I love to tell the story, ’twill be my theme in glory, to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love.

Thanks be to God.