"Completely Ordinary Human"
#92-15Presented on The Lutheran Hour on December 8, 2024
By Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler, Lutheran Hour Speaker
Copyright 2025 Lutheran Hour Ministries
Reflections
Text: Malachi 3:7
"Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive."
Persian-American author Daniel Nayeri wrote that, and when I read it, it really got me thinking. But I almost never heard of Daniel Nayeri or read any of his stuff, or even cared to. The only reason I ended up hearing his story is because I went to this conference to see someone else, a famous person. But the famous person had a family emergency and was a no-show. And I almost left the event before it started. "Who even are these other people?" I thought. Why should I give them my precious attention? Maybe it's our culture that's got me thinking like this—that my attention is the most valuable space in the world, and I shouldn't let just anybody into it.
Daniel turned out to be one of the people I didn't come to see who spoke at the conference. But something he said caught my interest early on. "Okay, okay, this guy's interesting. I'll give him a chance," I thought. I'll let him dwell in the kingdom of my attention a little longer. Now that I'm saying this out loud, it doesn't sound so good. And you might be thinking, "Well, that doesn't sound very Christian." And you're right. It doesn't. I'm confessing to you, right now. I'm admitting that if you were inside my head, and could hear my proclamations, they would sound less like Jesus, and more like that evil king from The Thousand and One Nights.
Did you ever hear that one, or read it, The Thousand and One Nights? It's sometimes called The Arabian Nights. I had read it, or some of it, years ago. But it was this guy, Daniel Nayeri, that Persian guy from Iran, who was at that conference, he's the one who re-introduced me to it, which is one of the many reasons I'm glad I stayed.
The story of The Thousand and One Nights starts like this: once upon a time, there was a murderous king. To be fair, he wasn't always murderous. He had discovered his wife cheating on him. Enraged, he kills her and her boyfriend. But that didn't make him feel any better. So every day, when he looked at the world, all he wanted to do was burn it down. So he did, little by little. Every day, he had his chief servant bring him a new bride, a new young woman for him to marry. And every night, after he married her, he had her killed, too. This went on and on until there were no young women left. The people of the kingdom fled for refuge into other lands and took their daughters with them. And now the king's servant is afraid the king's going to kill him, too, because he can't find any more brides. That night, when the servant returned home, as you can imagine, he's feeling pretty lousy. Here, he had stood by and watched his boss ruin all these people's lives. And for what? So that he could keep his cushy day job?
At home, the servant's daughter noticed the defeated look on his face. His daughter's name was Scheherazade. She was what you'd call a bookworm. She always had her nose buried in a book, always reading something—biographies, legends, adventures of old. And she remembered everything. She could recite epics and poems and proverbs by heart. That night when her forlorn father slumped in his Lazy Boy®, Scheherazade put down her book, and asked him, "My father, what's wrong?" He told her the whole story—about their evil king, and how there were no more brides left for him to murder. Scheherazade was quiet a moment. Then she said, "O my father, how long will this slaughter endure? Should I tell you what I have in mind to save both sides from destruction?"
"Tell me, my daughter," said he.
She answered, "I will that you would give me in marriage to this king. Either I will live, or I will be a ransom sacrifice to deliver us."
Scheherazade's father thought this was a terrible idea. And he threatened to beat her, even for mentioning it. But Scheherazade was strong-willed: "I will not desist, my father," she said, "Your threats will not change my purpose." And so, she married the evil king. Before she went to him, she told her younger sister, "Listen, my sister, when I've gone to the king, I will send for you. And when you come, you say to me, 'O my sister, don't be sleepy. Tell me a story ... to speed our waking hours.' And I will tell you a tale that will be for our deliverance, and if it be God's will, it will turn the king from his bloodthirsty custom."
So, it happened. That night, after the wedding, she sent for her sister. And her sister did as she'd been instructed. She asked for a story. Scheherazade replied, "If the king would permit me."
"Tell on," said the king, who was restless and pleased at the prospect of hearing a story.
So, Scheherazade began, on this first night, the practice that would keep her alive for the next thousand nights, because each night she would leave off leaving the king wanting to hear a little more. And each night, she began again, the sound of the storyteller begging to stay alive.
Telling a story can be a profound act of survival, or maybe, hope. And possibly even love. But, it may just be someone hustling to stay alive, like the story someone gives you when they're trying to sell you on something, whether it's a used car or a time-share or an excuse for a mistake they made. Sometimes stories are just elaborate forms of manipulation. But they can be more than that—more than just the teller's attempt to live another day. They can also be told in love, and for deliverance. That's what Scheherazade's stories were for the evil king. She was trying to make him human again, to pull him out of himself, to save him from wanting to burn the world down, and to save the servants from the shame of not caring enough to stop it.
That's also how the work of a prophet is described in the Bible. A prophet's job is to make us human again. And we need someone to humanize us, because we're all a little like that king, the one Scheherazade was trying to save. So, what happened to him, the evil king? Well, like you, he's been hurt. And as the saying goes, "Hurt people hurt people." And he was more than hurt. He was betrayed and defeated, which eventually happens to all of us. In this mortal life, we all get betrayed and defeated. And our manipulations to prevent it come to nothing. Even if you're famous. Even if you're the king. So, this king, hurt, betrayed, and defeated, started to tell himself that the whole universe must ultimately be a story of hurt and betrayal and defeat. So, he wanted to watch it burn.
Now, maybe you've never wanted to see the world go up in flames, but have you ever stood by or looked away while others try to burn it down? Or maybe you just don't care so much anymore about the world, so long as you can keep your cushy job, and it doesn't interfere with your retirement? But that's the problem, see, as the prophets see it—the "not caring" part—because it means we've given up hope that this world can be or will be different. We've given up the hope of being human. We've become content with something less than human, like the evil king whom Scheherazade was trying to save with her stories. She was trying to show him that life is bigger than his personal experience. Because if you believe that your personal experience is the whole story, you become less than human.
Now maybe that sounds counterintuitive? Because so often we hear that to be real, you have to be true to yourself, and only to yourself. That's what makes you a real human—making your individual experience the most important thing. But if that were the truth, what would it say about other humans? It would make them into objects in your field of your attention, like pawns in your kingdom that you can use or abuse or ignore. Like a nightly bride for an evil king, or an evening snack served to a monster, so you can keep your day job, or else, not important to the story.
Putting your own experiences and expectations at stage center, like I was doing at that conference I mentioned, degrades the experience of other humans. And by degrading others, I degrade myself. And look, that was just one example from my life. I do this—all the time. And you do, too. When we are degraded, when we degrade others, we start to believe that there is no bigger story to tell. And if the whole world burns, who cares?
That's our problem. And that's why God sends His prophets. God's prophets speak into the hurt and hate and apathy. In the Bible we're told that Moses was the epitome of a prophet, the standard that all future prophets would follow. And what did Moses do? Like Scheherazade, he told stories. Now, unlike Scheherazade, Moses actually lived most of the stories he told. But not all of them. Some of them, he just re-told what others had told him—the book of Genesis, for example. Moses hadn't even been born to experience that.
Also, different than Scheherazade, Moses' stories were not fables or fantasies. They were factual reports of real events. And many of these, Moses lived firsthand. Like when God led Moses to where God's people were enslaved in their sub-human conditions. And Moses led them out. And God delivered them. But how did Moses share that deliverance with future generations, and with us? Like Scheherazade, Moses told stories. He wrote them down. He told the story of what God did so that we would come to know and trust God, as he did. The first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, the Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—these all tell a story. It's the story of God: what God did to save His people, and to live with them. Moses didn't just live the story, he told the story of what God did, so that you and I could be part of what God is doing. That's the work of a prophet—to live and to tell God's story—because listening to this Story makes us human again.
God continued to send His people prophets, after Moses. And the central message of these prophets could be summed up like this—it's a call from God: "Return to Me, and I will return to you" (Malachi 3:7b). That's how the last prophet of the Old Testament said it—a guy named Malachi. Malachi spoke the story of God to the people of God when they were feeling defeated. Persians were in charge of their country, and they weren't super happy about it. Some would have been happy to just let it all burn. They weren't offering their best to God anymore, but their garbage, and sometimes not even that. Like Scheherazade's evil husband, they were mistreating people. They weren't killing their wives, but they were divorcing them, and treating other people like garbage, too—people they didn't think were important to their stories, such as orphans and widows, migrant workers and immigrants. God's people were degraded and degraded others because they stopped listening to the story.
So God sends the prophet to remind them. The very first words of Malachi's book are words from God to His faithless people. God says to them, "I have loved you" (Malachi 1:2a). Malachi invokes the ancient account from Genesis, the first book of Moses, how God loved them and chose them because God chooses to love the world that He made. And God keeps telling the story because His love for them hasn't changed. So, He invites them to listen. To return. To become human again. But the prophet Malachi says something more. He says that one final Old Testament prophet will come. And this prophet, this messenger will be different, because He will prepare the way, the way, not just for another prophet, but for God, for the Lord Himself to come. And the New Testament reveals that it happened in a way that didn't fit anyone's expectations. God, to make us human again, became human—Jesus. The Author of life came to share our life. God was born among us.
Maybe it sounds cliché, because you've heard it a thousand times, this claim about the birth of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas. But there's a deeper truth about the significance of Christmas. It's repeated in many of the old Christmas hymns in different ways.
For example: "O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray; cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today" (Lutheran Service Book 361v4).
And another: "Mild He lays His glory by, born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give us second birth" (LSB 380v3).
And a third: "Ah, dearest Jesus, holy Child, prepare a bed, soft, undefiled, A quiet chamber set apart for You to dwell within my heart" (LSB 358v13).
"Return to Me, and I will return to you"—the words of the prophet mean not just that God's Son Jesus was born among us, but also that God, God's Spirit, wants to be born in us. Because every human was created and is called to be a place where God lives. That's what it means to be truly human, in the completely ordinary sense, to have God's whole life and story living inside you. And to return us to being human, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. He shared our hurt and betrayal and defeat and died with it on the cross. And He rose again so that you can be part of the storytelling that will save the universe when Jesus returns at the end to make a new beginning. God wants this for everyone. As Moses said once, "I wish that all the LORD's people were prophets and that the LORD would put His Spirit on [all of] them!" (Numbers 11:29b).
Daniel Nayeri, the author that I mentioned at the beginning, he helped me appreciate the story of Scheherazade and the thousand and one nights. That was just one of the many ways his story as an Iranian-American refugee helped me see the world beyond my personal experience, which is exactly what stories are supposed to do to us—they pull us out of ourselves. It was in reference to Scheherazade that Daniel said, "Every story is the sound of the storyteller begging to stay alive." That's true. But it's also true that, in Jesus, every storyteller can become the sound of God offering life. Daniel's story—every Christian's story—your story can become one of the thousands and thousands that Jesus is telling to make the world new again.
And by faith, we can see Jesus working in all people, even those who don't know Him yet, because they too were created and called in Christ to become prophets of the living God. to share the story that makes us human again. And I pray I remember that the next time the famous person's a no-show, and all I have is some completely ordinary human in front of me. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad is Untrue (a true story). Levine Querido (2020), 58.
Adapted from Richard Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights. Accessed on Oct 18, 2024 at https://sacred-texts.com/neu/burt1k1/tale00.htm
Reflections for December 8, 2024
Title: Why the Bible Tells Stories
Mark Eischer: You're listening to The Lutheran Hour. For FREE online resources, archived audio, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. Once again, here's Lutheran Hour Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Thank you, Mark. I am visiting with Mr. Daniel Nayeri. He's the author of the book titled Everything Sad Is Untrue. It came out in 2020. It was an NPR Book of the Year, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Amazon Best Book of the Year. Really, really well received. Thank you for joining us, Daniel.
Daniel Nayeri: Thank you for having me.
Mike Zeiger: I really enjoyed reading your book, Everything Sad Is Untrue. And I really appreciate how you reintroduced me to The One Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade. You talk about how she uses these stories to make the evil king human again, which I had completely forgotten about, that frame story to The One Thousand and One Nights. So you're a writer, and you talk a lot about this as a metaphor in your book, Everything Sad Is Untrue. How do you see yourself doing that work as kind of humanizing your reader through your stories?
Daniel Nayeri: I often end up talking to young people. And this is kind of one of the main topics of my talks, is the power of storytelling. Young people, of course, have probably heard a lot of the positive side of storytelling and its power. It can save, it can give you empathy; it can help you walk in someone else's shoes, and all these lovely things. And it's true. But the first metaphor I try to offer for them is that power always cuts both ways. Power can be used to harm or it can be used to heal—and actually it's quite much easier to use to harm. It takes a lot of attention and effort to build something or someone up. And you can tear them down with just a word. To first sort of establish for them that stories have an incredible power, and that they are always wielding that power.
So for the examples being like if you've ever watched someone tear someone else down on social media or in person or gossip about them, you are functionally watching the power of stories to dehumanize others. And if you analyze it, one of the interesting dynamics of the stories is that the early stories are extremely chaotic. Someone will do something good, or free a genie, and the genie will be like, "Great!" And the shackles will come off, and they'll just murder everyone. And you'll be like, "Wow, well, that's not great. Why would you do that?" And it's really what she's sort of describing in these stories, of course, is (the) interior life of this king. And he is roiling with hurt and with anger and with revenge and with his own guilt, most likely. And the stories slowly start to build. This is an oral tradition, so they're not perfectly organized. But you start to see a thread of coherence and logic and heroism and morality, I guess you'd say, into the stories. And so in my book, Everything Sad Is Untrue, that's what the young man is trying to do. He's trying to create a coherent thread out of all these chaotic elements in his life. And so he's holding onto that. And also the major theme, of course, is how we use stories. What are we planning to do with them? We can sort of do quite a lot.
Mike Zeigler: And in your book I love how you address the reader firsthand that, "you are the king, O reader, and you have my whole life in your hands." And I also love how, in the midst of this, you are also introducing us to, well, your mom, but also Jesus, that when we think about the followers of Jesus introducing Jesus to others, and we have the example of the New Testament, the primary way that this is done is through story: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, (Luke's) continuation of (his gospel). It's all these accounts of their experience, their firsthand experience with Jesus. How does that continue as followers of Jesus, to introduce Him to others, the role of story?
Daniel Nayeri: Over and over again, the dynamic which I love is He'll tell a story and then He'll have to explain the story to ostensibly the audience that should get it. There's lessons to be learned there as well of how is He managing the kind of what writers would call the para-text, the text around the text, right? The seed there means this; seed here means that. And you're like, "Oh, thank you. That was all helpful, actually." When Jesus sort of tells a parable, what is He doing? Why wouldn't He just express things in the clearest way possible? I mean, in our human thinking, we would say the clearest way to say this would be to say, "I'm Jesus. I would like you to do these things. Here's (what) I offer"—I mean, it would be a contract. Why doesn't he speak in contract terms? Lawyers have solved this, right? And why wasn't He the best lawyer? He would have a section where He defines His terms. And then He would do all the qualifiers, and He would give us the term of the contract, and what He brings to the table, and what we're going to bring to the table, and the termination of the contract, etc. And then we would be done. Why didn't He do this? And I think the short answer is probably because it's not the best way to do it. But also because when you look at the stories and what they do for us—what does poetry do, what do refrains that we remember, what does a metaphor do, like an image? A contract gives you a relational dynamic. A story allows you to unpack it and to build on it and to layer it and to learn that, my goodness, this was a deeper and more thoughtful experience than I could have ever fathomed.
And that I think is what He was delivering when He is delivering a parable or a narrative or a story, is that is the opportunity for that for us to return to an image over and over and over again. And so it was the best thing He could have possibly given us. It was the most clear thing He could have offered. And it will take us our entire lives to unpack a piece of it. But I can't think of a better way.
Mike Zeigler: I see the story of the story is that, in your book you're developing a friendship in some ways with your reader. So also with God is that He wants to be friends. Behind all of this genius creation there's a Person who wants to be our Friend forever, and He is relational by nature.
Daniel Nayeri: Yeah. Isn't that amazing? A contract would be such an insult. No, to both of us, to all of us. I think it's the story. Yeah. I mean, you could say the capital "S" story of the story is of course the capital "T" truth of the whole thing, just the whole big thing. Every story, a story can't encapsulate that. It can only be a tributary of that.
Mike Zeigler: Thank you so much for making time to join us, Daniel, and I pray God's blessings on your work. I know you're writing more things, and I look forward to reading more from you. But thank you for being with us.
Daniel Nayeri: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Music Selections for this program:
"A Mighty Fortress" arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
"Crucifer" by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
"On Jordan's Bank" From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.
