A Wandering Aramean Was My Father

We are created to live in a storied world. We are part of a story that begins before us and goes on after us. What we do as a community and as individuals is important. Ever since we told our stories at our 50th anniversary, I have been drawn to the story that is told by this worshipper in Deuteronomy 26:5. Should our worship today be more a story-telling event? If so, how?

This text reminds me of my father and the stories he told. His father was a deputy U S Marshall in Colorado. Dad liked to tell of meeting the reformed outlaw, Cole Younger, in Oklahoma. He told stories of playing sand-lot baseball with Hal Newhouser in Detroit. His favorite was how he once initiated a triple play. He was a wanderer. Then he met a beautiful young woman, daughter of a local grocer, and started going to church with her. As a hot-shot baseball guy, he took her for a ride one Sunday afternoon in his Model A Ford. She responded to his courtship, “Yoakum, I want you to know that I will not marry someone who is not a Christian and who chews tobacco.” Dad swallowed his chew and began talking to the preacher about becoming a Christian. He was baptized and was a wanderer no more.

The wandering Aramean is this story is probably Jacob who slept on a stone pillar and saw in a dream angels declaring that God would be with him wherever he went and promising to return him to this place. Jacob named it Bethel, house of God. Jacob went to the house of a kinsman, Laben the Aramean (Gen. 25). After a long history, Jacob returns to Bethel where he is renamed Israel and told to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 35).

The unknown, humble worshipper in our text locates himself in the salvation story of his “father” and his sons who traveled to captivity in Egypt and were brought back. While there are severeal differences between this OT worshipper and Christian worshippers today, there are striking similarities that should inform our worship. May we learn to tell our story personally and as God’s community, the Israel of God (Gal. 6:16).

—Tom Yoakum