“This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.”

Rabbi Adam Morris, who is an OT consultant for our Church School curriculum, has made a great and helpful observation. He writes: “We learn a great deal about others from the stories they choose to tell about themselves.”

We all have stories, some good and some painful, and it is in these stories that we discover who we are and who we have been, and who we want to be, or perhaps to put it better, who God intends us to be.

You have heard many of my stories, some funny and factual like the day that my 5th grade teacher demoted me from Chief to Indian in a school musical because of my inability to sing, and left me with this odd combination of a passionate love for singing and a non-existent self-confidence to actually sing.

Some are more serious and mythical, true stories that explain so much, such as the death of my older sister two years before I was born and the sense of responsibility that I have carried throughout my life, to live for both of us.

Some are just examples of how remarkably dumb a fairly well educated man can be, such as the time, a decade ago, when I tried to run away from home.

There are many reasons that I tell my stories, they are not remarkable but they are the only stories I have, this is the only life and faith I know and the stories help me to understand and explain how God works. Our stories are the lens through which we see and understand this world of God’s. So, I try to pick choose the stories that help demonstrate, that in a remarkably uncommon life, lived out in remarkably uncommon places, there are flashes of divinity, glimpses of glory to be seen and to be savored.

I know, as I look back, that God has been with me throughout my life, but I also know that it is only in the telling of the stories that we can connect the dots and fill the empty spaces and see just how very much God has been with us in obvious and subtle, and blatant and unobtrusive.

Next year will mark the 175th Anniversary of the founding of our congregation and on Tuesday night I have invited the Consistory to begin thinking about how we can best honor those faithful few dozen who gathered in this room in 1834 to seek God’s will for their lives. And if you have ideas, especially ideas that you are willing to take on some responsibility for, please let any of the Consistory members know.

And I will tell stories that I have heard over the next year or so. Stories about how we were only a few votes from being Presbyterians; stories about the closing of the Church and the semi-merger with the much stronger Reaville Church during some early lean years; stories about the steeple that blew over and resulted in the building of the Narthex; stories about the minister who was kicked in the head by a borrowed horse and died and about the unpopular minister, a few years later, who was offered the loan of a horse; stories about the digging out of the basement and the use of dynamite on stubborn, large rocks; stories of the young minister from Pompton Lakes, the other one, whose father was a tinsmith and whose widow was my Sunday School teacher and about the resulting tin walls that we have today, and what they hide, oh I know that I will tell stories that I have heard and learned and loved.

And the stories will all be about how and where and when the people of God in Clover Hill found Jesus.

But that’s next year.

For this year we have other stories to tell, stories to tell each other, stories to choose from, stories that reflect the ways in which we have found Jesus.

September is the month for story telling, the classic school essay “How I spent my summer vacation” is an exercise in faith as we look back from the vantage point of September each year.

On Thursday morning I wrote to the email list of the Church about the memories of Septembers past and the ways in which this month is the start of the year for us, in God’s words to Moses “This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.”

So what are the stories that we have to tell in this month?

What are the stories that we choose to tell in this month?

Are they stories of temporary joys and sorrows or do we have stories more lasting, more self-defining to tell?

For the Jews it was the story of their political journey from slavery to freedom, from exile to home. And we have heard a lot, more than enough perhaps, over the last few weeks about political journeys of some individuals, but who will tell the story of where our nation is going? Who will help us to trace God’s hand in the issues of the day? That isn’t the job of the politician and when they try it gets awkward and embarrassing at best.

The Exodus story, as we have it, was probably gathered together during the exile to Babylon, centuries later, a time when people needed to be reminded that God is not just a God of the good times and prosperity, but a God who is with us in our sorrows, in our failures, in our times when we are imprisoned by decisions that others made.

I don’t think that kind of story can or should be told at a political convention, I don’t think it can or should be told on the campaign trail, but I suspect that God will tell it about the political conventions and the election process. But God will tell it through those who have learned to stand and wait, to watch and listen. It is our task as Christians to tell that story, a story in which the politicians are minor characters – the Pharaohs, the Caesars, Pilate and the Presidents – who are used by God in the ongoing task of bringing all of his people to freedom.

And so in this September of 2008, as we live still imprisoned by a war that drags on and an economy that keeps sliding away under us and by old biases of race and gender that are used, by all sides in the process, to hide the realities, and I find it hard not to come to that conclusion, then we need to tell the stories of God being with us in order to set us free.

You see, it is not, at its heart, merely a political story that was being told, it was, far more importantly a spiritual story.

The ritual of the Passover feast is still with us today, and in the worship and in the ritual the Jews remembered their identity, and in remembering they could follow, not to their past but to their future.

Here they moved into freedom, here they moved to receive the law, to enter the covenant, here they went from being the Hebrew people to being the nation of Israel.

As the story was told, each year, there was the realization that starting over is always an option and that God is always making everything new.

Here we find the echo of creation, the starting over of the new life, these same things were going on in homes throughout our area this week, clean notebooks, sharpened pencils, unblemished grades were all around this week.

And that’s what Baptism is about, as well.

Not only has the slate been wiped clean, not only is Norah recognized as a part of God’s beloved family, but with each Baptism we recall every Baptism, for we are all linked by this sacrament that we have shared in.

Today and every Baptismal day is the reminder that starting over is God’s way of recycling us, and our lives, so that each day becomes the clean sheet, the unblemished report card and you and I are as pure and holy and fresh as Norah is.

Every day is the best first day of school ever.

So what are the stories that you have to tell?

And what are the stories that you should listen to?

Today at the Church picnic I know that we will be swapping stories and it will seem like polite and casual conversation, but I will be listening, expecting to hear those echoes of heaven, expecting to find Jesus in the stories.

And I will not be disappointed, for I never have been, so I hope that you join me in the telling and in the listening. For I know that in each child that we receive, we find Jesus.

And I know that as each child teaches us humility and simplicity Jesus finds us.

So we begin again, and, as to paraphrase Broadway, we try to remember, all of the other new beginnings of September and when we remember, we follow.

“This month shall be for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.”