Keep Telling the Story

6 July 2026  Hosea 2:14-16,19-20

“And there she shall answer me as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.” (Hosea 2:15)   

What if the Jews are right. What if the story that pulls all of the data of experience, and all the peoples of the earth, into one is the story that pulled a band of slaves out of Egypt because God pursued them, and is pursuing them still in the person of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. 

None of the stories of the modern era that have stirred the moral consciousness of the world and led to no-kidding moral improvement could be told without that story.

Heroes like Harriet Tubman, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela would have been mute (and largely unsuccessful) without the story of the Jews. It is a powerful reason to pay attention to what the story says.

The abolition movement, prison reform, labor reform, the civil rights movement, movements of indigenous and dispossessed people for their human rights, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland, free speech and democracy movements in South Korea, the Philippines, even in China, have all invoked the story and used the language of the Exodus, the Prophets, the Sermon on the Mount and the Revelation to John. Heroes like Harriet Tubman, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela would have been mute (and largely unsuccessful) without the story of the Jews. It is a powerful reason to pay attention to what the story says.

And moral progress isn’t all. In the lifetime of the oldest living Americans, life expectancy has increased by nearly twenty years for both men and women, all races and ethnicities. In less than two generations diseases that used to kill millions have been obliterated, joints can be replaced after breakfast and before lunch, hearts can be repaired by operations inside blood vessels, and people commonly carry around computers millions of times more powerful than the systems that first put humans into space. All of these scientific accomplishments, and more, arose when they did and where they did because people assumed that the closer you looked at the cosmos, the more likely you were to find something good – an assumption unknown and unwanted by the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese, an outlook unique to the First Book of Moses, commonly called Genesis.

There is powerful and compelling evidence that the story of the Jews, culminating in Jesus of Nazareth, has had it right all along. Rival stories like Capitalism and Communism borrowed wholesale from that story, but left out important bits, and have always had to be corrected, and the correction has always come by way of the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, and the Gospel.

The current generation is suffering from a well-documented “crisis of meaning,” which the formerly chic “New Atheism” of the early 2000s has been unable to heal. Even Richard Dawkins, he of The God Delusion, and the so-called “Four Horsement of the New Atheism”, now calls himself a “Cultural Christian” because his once ascendant atheism has no antiobiotic for the civilizational rot that is everywhere apparent.

“And there she shall answer me as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt” (Hosea 2:15). We still need the story of the Jews. We still yearn for it, and hope, sometimes despite ourselves, that God is pursuing us still.