More Than One Story
(38) “John was saying to him, ‘Teacher, we saw someone in your name casting out demons, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’” (Mark 9:38, my translation).
In 2009 I listened to one of the first TED talks I ever heard. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author and intellectual, talked about “The danger of a single story.” At this date, the talk has been viewed nearly twenty-nine million times. If you have not heard the talk (or if you want to watch and listen again), you can find it at https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare.
Adichie shares stories about narratives she has heard and narratives she has learned that boil the world or people or a person down to a single thing. A single story, she says, will “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” John and the other disciples tell a single story about the unnamed exorcist in Mark 9. That single story is “he was not following us.”
“It is impossible to talk about the single story,” Adichie continues, “without talking about power.” Many singular stories establish boundaries between “us” and “them.” That is certainly one of the functions of the story John tells in Mark 9:38. John and his colleagues don’t focus on what the exorcist does.
In fact, he is casting out demons in the name of Jesus. That seems like a good thing. But, John says, he’s not following us. He doesn’t belong to us. The unnamed exorcist is not one of the cool kids. He’s not one of the insiders. He has the wrong identity, the wrong pedigree, the wrong credentials. He’s one of them.
I invite you to think of all the stories that create “us” and “them.” There is the story of male dominance – a story that delineates differences between men and women. We all know, at least after John Gray’s 1992 book, that “men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” There is the story of Indigenous genocide. Native peoples are savages to be assimilated or erased because they can’t possess the land like civilized Europeans. There is the story of anti-Blackness. Black men are either hapless, subhuman fools or terrifying, subhuman Black beasts.
These are only a few of the “us” and “them” stories we tell (especially as White, Male, European, Christian, Western individuals). We can add more, of course. We tell stories about fanatical Muslim terrorists. We tell stories about murderous and raping Mexicans pouring across the southern border of the United States. We tell stories about lazy unemployed people who would rather eat chocolates and collect checks than earn an honest living. We tell stories about crazed White Nationalists who threaten Truth, Justice, and the American way.
Not all stories are equally limited or equally false or equally dangerous. But all stories lie to the degree that they leave out the details that make the subjects human. What about this unnamed exorcist? First of all, did he have a name? Was he just a camp follower who hadn’t gone through the regular onboarding process for the position of “disciple”? Did the power of exorcism in the name of Jesus land on him spontaneously, as the spirit of prophecy landed on Eldad and Medad in Numbers 11? Was he better at it than the Twelve – who had recently failed to cast out the epileptic spirit of the boy who simply needed more praying?
We don’t know because John and the others weren’t interested in another story. We do know that John and the others are very interested in position, power, and privilege as they follow Jesus. Another story threatened this campaign for jobs in the cabinet of the new Messiah. So, they had to put a stop to it.
“It is impossible,” Adichie reminds us, “to talk about the single story without talking about power.” She describes a term from the Igbo language that helps us get a grip on this. The term, she says, is “nkali.” It is this part of the talk that really nails the conversation to this section of Mark’s gospel. The term is, according to Adichie, a noun that means something like “to be greater than.”
Boom. We find ourselves immediately back a few verses in Mark 9. The disciples spent the trip from Caesarea Philippi to Capernaum arguing about who was greater. The disciples were arguing about nkali. “Like our economic and political worlds,” Adichie continues, “stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent,” she argues, “on power.”
John and the other disciples exercise power in pointing out the “otherness” of the unnamed exorcist. They tattle on his out-of-normal-channels behavior. They exercise power in how they shape the story from their perspective and to advance their agenda. They apply power directly as they try to stop the person from continuing to act (it would seem that they failed in this attempt). They keep up the pressure by urging Jesus to put a stop to this out-of-bounds activity.
“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another,” Adichie notes, “but to make it the definitive story of that person.” The disciples do precisely that. The exorcist doesn’t even need a name. It’s the behavior that tells the whole story, as far as they’re concerned.
Adichie makes a powerful point at this moment in the talk. She quotes the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti who writes that the best way to hijack the story, the land, the history, and everything else that would make a people a people is to start with “secondly.” This is precisely what John and the other disciples do to the unnamed exorcist. They begin their story in the middle of his story and thus claim it as their own story.
“Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans,” Adichie says, “and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state,” she continues, “and you have an entirely different story.” We can add examples.
Start with the failures of “inner city” schools and not the histories of segregation, redlining, White flight, White riots, and maldistributed funding, and you get a story that blames Black people rather than White people. Start with the poverty of Pine Ridge and Whiteclay and not with the genocide and Indian schools and stolen land and broken promises, and you get a story that blames Indigenous people rather than White people. Start with AIDS ripping through communities of gay men a generation ago rather than the violent homophobia of American culture, and you get stories of the “gay cancer.”
Once you see the power of “secondly stories,” you will see them everywhere. These are the stories that underwrite and expand imperialism, colonization, racism, genocide, sexism, and all the other power games we continue to play inside the church and out.
This is not how Adichie ends her talk. Nor is it how Jesus leaves the situation with the disciples. (39) But Jesus said, ‘Don’t stop him, for there is no one who shall perform power based on my name and shall soon have the power to speak evil of me. (40) For the one who is not against us is for us. (41) For the one who might give you a cup of water in the Name that is “Messiah,” I tell you truly that one will not lose his wage.” (Mark 9:39-41, my translation).
Don’t stop him! For the one who is not against us is for us. It’s the sort of meme-length aphorism that helps make the Markan script so memorable (and easy to memorize). “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign,” Adichie says, “but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people,” she observes, “but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
Jesus tells the story of the unnamed exorcist in a very different way. Look at the outcome, not the identity. Did he cast out a demon in my name? That action will not leave him unchanged. Not only has someone else been set free. Someone else, the exorcist, has been drawn closer to the Kin(g)dom of God in your midst. The story is not about “us” and “them.” The story is about how “us” is infinitely bigger than our small minds can comprehend.
White, Western, male-dominated Churches are shrines for the Single Story. The question for too long has not been, “Is that Other Person following Jesus?” The question for too long has instead been “Is that Other Person following us.” That is something that must change if the Church is to remain faithful. “When we reject the single story,” Adichie concludes, “when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
What can it look like for churches to be homes to multiple stories rather than shrines to the Single Story? Every White congregation can seek a healthy dialogue with other-storied communities. Every Christian congregation can seek a healthy dialogue with Jews, Muslims, and other communities with different spiritual stories. We can be places where belief is not an entrance requirement and where doubt is celebrated rather than denigrated. We can become communities of discernment and deliberation rather than of judgment and violence.
Oh, is that all? Unfortunately, the Twelve are not having it…
References and Resources
Kiel, Micah D. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-26-2/commentary-on-mark-938-50-4.
Lev, Uri Mayer-Chissick Efraim. “’A covenant of salt’: Salt as a major food preservative in the historical Land of Israel.” Food and History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007), pp. 9-39. 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.100220.
Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard L. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels Kindle Edition.
The Acedic Lutheran 