Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac 
              Jacob wrestling with the angel
              Jacob and Esau's rivalry 
              Joseph in Egypt 
              Joseph and his brothers
              The many stories of David - David and Goliath, David and Saul, David and Bathsheba.

These ancient stories have been retold in almost every generation, and to retell them in a contemporary setting is to use them to interpret the present. It makes the ancient story our story.

Perhaps the most fertile of all biblical stories is the Exodus. It's not only the defining event of the Jewish people, but it was used by the gospel writer to tell the story of Jesus, and also to reveal the way God works in all history. References to the Exodus abound in the New Testament and in Christian worship and theology as well.

To use the language of psychology, the Exodus has also been identified as an archetype story, a story that gives meaning to the human venture, a story that, when you read it, you can say, "That's my story, too."

Ever since Joseph Campbell was on Public Television with Bill Moyers we have been able to use the word "myth" in its proper sense. Before Campbell, myth was thought by most Americans to be something untrue, just a story.

Thanks to Campbell, we now know that myth is the truth in story form. Or as I heard someone say, a myth is a true story, and it may also have happened.

But most importantly, Campbell showed us that myth defines a people. A people need a story to be a people. A nation needs a common story to become united as a nation.

Then it occurred to me that we as Americans have two stories in common - the stories associated with our two national festivals, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. If we are going to be united as a people, it will probably come through a common acceptance and a common interpretation of these stories.

The story associated with Thanksgiving is the landing of the pilgrims in New England. It is significant that the pilgrims themselves turned to one of these ancient stories, the story of the Exodus, to interpret what happened to them. They saw Europe as Egypt, the Atlantic as the Red Sea, and these shores as the Promised Land. Interpreting their experience in light of the Exodus story is what enabled them to face the hardships of those beginning years. They were sure that God had guided them from bondage to freedom, and they could endure suffering because they believed that through it they would be led to freedom and a better life.

Just as significantly, when the only non-voluntary immigrants to this country, the African-Americans, sought to make sense of their experience of slavery, they used the same biblical story, the Exodus, and interpreted it for their situation. Egypt is where they were. The Promised Land was freedom. The songs that they created, and that have become a permanent part of American culture, are replete with the images of the Exodus.

That is what a story can do when it becomes an archetype, or a universal story. It gives definition to the present, brings insight and strength to go on with the struggle.

The story of the Exodus is not only in the Thanksgiving story and in the liberation of black people in this country, it can also be found in two of our most prominent symbols, the Statue of Liberty and the American Dream.

The Statue of Liberty is a beacon pointing the way to a Promised Land. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free." In earlier generations the Statue of Liberty was the symbol of America. But in this generation, the American Dream has gained more prominence as a symbol of what America is about. The American Dream symbolizes the belief that America is where anyone, regardless of race or religion, can live in freedom and insure a future for themselves and for their children.

That dream brought millions to America, especially from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and increasingly in the 20th century from Asia and Latin America. Lord Acton, at the end of the 19th century, looking at the emigration to America, said, "America is a magnet." It still is. Those of us who live in California are aware that there is a new immigration to this country, mostly Asian and Hispanic. In six more years the non-white population in California will be the majority. In Los Angeles it probably already is.

I grew up in that city. I return to it now in amazement to see what has happened. In the days in which I was growing up there it had a largely homogeneous population. Today it has become a multicultural, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic city, perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in America, and in my eyes, it is wonderful. What a rich life is possible in such a meeting of our cultures.

The phenomenon of multi-culturalism is not unique to Los Angeles. Every major city in this country is experiencing the same phenomenon, and there is a reason for it. The Exodus story makes sense of what is happening. The story is universal. It belongs to everyone. It is everyone's story to the degree that all people believe they have been promised a good life, and that you can move from bondage through struggle to a promised land. And in the minds of most of the people of the world, the promised land is still America.

I believe that what is happening is, in fact, the fulfillment of the American dream. It will infuse the nation with a vitality and a creativity, the makings of a truly great civilization. But there are those who disagree. In fact, there are those who are working to deny that dream to all, but that has always been the case in America. There has always been a debate on immigration. Now what that debate really is, is a debate on how to interpret our story. Are we the haven for the tired and poor? Who is to be included in the dream? How many can we receive on these shores?

There are those who see the growing pluralism of our country as a threat. And they're right, it is a threat, unless we have a common history, a story large enough to unite all of us.

I submit that there is only one such story available to us - the story of the Exodus. It is what we all have in common. Everyone of us believes that life is a journey from where we are to where we want to be.

We may experience it differently - as pilgrims escaping religious intolerance; as slaves escaping bondage; the oppressed escaping poverty; victims escaping persecution; refugees escaping the ravages of war. We all have in our past a version of the same story. If it is not our personal story, it is our ancestors' story.

There is nothing else to unite us. Unlike other nations, we are not united by race, or religion, or a common ancestry. We are united alone by a story.

I came across an interpretation of that story written by Fay Moskowitz. She was reminiscing about her girlhood Thanksgiving. Her parents were immigrants, trying to learn the strange customs of a new land. She was born in Detroit in 1930, in the tightly packed neighborhood with other Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia. When the Depression came, her family moved to a small Michigan town, and the gates of her Edenic innocence closed behind her and her Americanization began in earnest.

Growing up now in a Gentile community, she wanted to fit in. She wanted to be American, but she was also proud of her Jewish heritage. Her parents had seen to that. She tried to convince her parents that her Gentile friends didn't have a monopoly on every holiday in the school calendar.

Halloween was tough. Her parents never moved beyond bewilderment at the pranks and the tricks that accompanied that holiday.

The Fourth of July was acceptable. They would go to the parade, holding little American flags that they had bought at the dime store. And at night they would go to the stadium to watch the fireworks and listen to the concert of patriotic music. All that was fine.

But it was Thanksgiving that meant the most. She wrote this:

"I fell upon Thanksgiving with relief and recognition. Here was a time, like Passover, when families gathered at table. Another joyful occasion to commemorate faith and the safe crossing of wide waters, a time to give thanks for deliverance and freedom. At last I had found a bridge to America. My parents could cross it with me, side by side."

And she concluded with this:

"All that was a long time ago. I am a parent myself now, at home in America, a person my mother would have called a regular Yankee. My husband I have faced each other across countless Thanksgiving feasts of our own. Three of our four children have married. All of them have brought to our table partners with backgrounds different from ours. In our variety we form what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called a "pied beauty," a beauty made up of patches of many colors. Ours is a country dappled with diverse cultures. I pray we sustain those of all creeds and colors who have come here by whatever means. I pray we can continue to welcome those outside our shores who still see us as the promised land, and dream of working for a share in our bounty.

"This Thanksgiving, once again, I will give thanks for our differences; they have made America unique. But as I look around our festive table I will celebrate our commonalities as well, for it is in the resolution of our differences that we will keep growing toward greatness."

That's the way you use the story to interpret our time. You celebrate the differences that make us unique and the commonalities that make us one.

If that could happen, I think you could hear Governor Bradford, the first governor of the Massachusetts colony, say again, "And thus they found the Lord to be with them in all their ways, and to bless their outgoings and their incomings."

Lydia Talbot: Your redefinition of myth is vital in our culture today and as you extend the example of the Exodus story into contemporary life, you really give us some handles on how to face the multi-cultural society that we live in today. But that wasn't so easy for you in California over this past year with Proposition 187. Can you tell how the church came to terms with the immigration realities there and in light of the Exodus story?

Trotter: The church in California, and the church anywhere, I believe sees the inclusiveness of people in a society as the way God wants us to live. In situations such as we face, not only in California but around the country and indeed in other countries around the world, it is a unique historical phenomenon of peoples moving out of their ancient lands and coming together across cultural and racial lines for the first time and in the numbers that had never happened before. I believe that the church is an institution that is able to provide a framework of meaning that would allow people to understand what is happening and to see it in a positive light, as indeed the way God wants us to come together. There is not only the story of the Exodus, there's also the story of Pentecost, which is the story of all nations coming together in one place and being united by a common story - the story of what God has done for us. I think that's what drives the churches to see that the coming together of peoples is not a bad a thing and not a fearful thing, but it is a good thing and potentially a very rich thing.

Talbot:  But you say it's a debate on how we interpret our story. What are those forces these days in our society that you think stand in the way of that kind of unity and harmony that our common story could lead us to engage in?

Trotter: I think that there is a temptation to understand who we are in racial terms or in class terms, and what is happening today is a direct threat upon both of those understandings of who we are as a people and it has been the American understanding of itself which has said that we welcome here people who have been oppressed in other lands. But we've forgotten that, I think, because we had up until recently generally a homogeneous culture of European immigrants to this country, and now we have immigrants from all over the world coming. And, for the first time we must look at who we are as a people and recover what I believe are our roots as American people. That goes against the common understanding that many people had - that we are united, we find our meaning and our purpose in clans rather than in larger groups.

Talbot:  And so to celebrate the diversity is the challenge.

Trotter: Absolutely.

Talbot: Now, Mark, you are pastor of a major Methodist church in San Diego. You are a leader in the denomination - your denomination - the United Methodist Church. What are the issues that are confronting Methodism these days?

Trotter: Methodism really wears the same face as the country. We are a national church in the sense that we are in every region of this country, and when we come together as a denomination, say in our General Conference every four years, we can see mirrored in the delegations that arrive at the General Conference the issues that are confronting the nation as a whole. So we and any other national church have an opportunity of addressing those issues as a united people seeking to find resolution to the problems that face America today. Those are the problems, essentially, I think, of inclusiveness. Are we going to be a nation that will tolerate people who differ from us, not only racially and culturally, but also in terms of our ideas, our political ideas and our religious ideas? We are going to be a diverse culture and we will have to learn to live with one another.

Talbot: I must ask you about your own pilgrimage. What was your call to ministry about?

Trotter: Well, I believed many years ago that God had called me to be a minister because I felt that I had been touched by the Good News, what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, and I wanted to tell other people about it, and to understand its full ramifications for a life, not only as individuals but as a people. I guess I had a dream like most people, young people, of what life was about and how I fit into it, and I followed that, I felt, with God's leading.

Talbot: You say many years ago. Was that in childhood, boyhood days, in school?

Trotter: No, I was in college and I had resisted the call to the ministry for many years and finally, I decided that this is what I should do.

Talbot: Now, you come from a family of clergy.

Trotter: That's one reason why I resisted it!

Talbot: Well, now say more about that. Resistance is important in terms of discipleship.

Trotter: I think young people want to find their own way and my father was a minister, my older brothers had gone into the ministry, and I was determined that I would be myself, and over against this was this strong feeling that I, too, was being called into that same vocation.

Talbot: In the moment that we have left, what are you writing these days? You're the author of many popular books.

Trotter: I'm not writing at present, but I'm looking forward to some time when I can get by myself and do that.

Talbot: And on what?

Trotter: Well, probably something, another interpretation of a book of the Bible.

Talbot: Good. Wonderful to have you with us, Mark Trotter.