I Chronicles 16: 8,9,10,12;Luke  23:42

The discipline of remembering

Today we remember loved ones gone from our lives in the past year.  Perhaps there should be many more candles, for there are always some we haven’t included.  We also remember the sacrifices of our soldiers in the conflicts of years gone by and even today. So this weekend is about remembering and about memory.  In our passage in I Chronicles David reminds the people of all the great things God has  done:”Oh give thanks to the Lord, call on His name, make known God’s deeds among the peoples!”  The people are told to remember.  David is calling them to that discipline.  Remembering is important. That is the first point I would like to impress on you today.  Then Jesus from the cross reminds the convict next to Him that He will remember him. That is the second point I want you to take with you:  We are part of God’s remembering.

In the PBS series Wallander, Kurt Wallander played by Kenneth Branagh is a Swedish detective with lots of demons in his life.  He is one of this those thinking, brooding cops.  This makes him very likeable.  In the last episode of the series last week he is investigating his son-in-law’s father, a former Swedish Navy officer about the death of his wife and about a past incident of foreign submarines entering Swedish waters.  While he is getting closer to the truth, he is called to his doctor’s office and there he receives the news that he has been diagnosed with early onset of Alzheimers.  So he is solving the case while his is losing his memory.  He mutters things to his father who has died and complains how his memory comes only in moments, how the memories aren’t connected.  It is as if the memories are not connected to the larger narrative, the larger story of his life.

The writer Fred Buecher said about remembering: “In one sense the past is dead and gone, never to be repeated, over and done with, but in another sense, it is of course not done with at all or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has happened to us-it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere whether we like it or not, and sometimes it doesn’t take much to bring it to the surface in bits and pieces. A scrap of a song that was popular years ago. A book we read as a child. A stretch of a road we used to travel….Old failures, old hurts. Times to beautiful to tell or too terrible.  Memories come at us helter-skelter and unbidden, sometimes so thick and so fast that they are more than we can handle in their poignance, sometimes so sparsely that we all but cry out to remember more. “ (Frederick  Buechner “A Room called Remember”, p. 4).

Friends, why do we remember? Why should we remember.   Why is not better to forget?  Letting go of things in the past is important, but remembering matters, because people have taught us things about life: about courage or the lack of it and resilience and the lack of it, love or the lack of it, strength and the lack of it. Remembering reminds us what’s possible.  David understands this.  It  is important to know what God is capable of and especially God’s never ending ability and commitment to remember us.

We have to remember the story of the Bible, of God’s journey with people, all the way to Jesus and the life of the Church beyond His presence on earth.   Without memory there is no hope.  Without the memory that things can be wonderful, we will not believe in a future.  As the writer writes about Jesus:”The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait. Wait for Him Whose face we all of us know because somewhere in the past we have faintly seen it, Whose life we all of us thirst for because somewhere in the past we have seen it lived…Remember Him Who Himself remembers us as He promised to remember the thief Who dies beside Him. To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping (Buechner p. 12).  Dear friends, our memory fails us all the time.   Sometimes all we get are patches.  But it is our job to remember what we can, about good people and about our good God.  For those memories will give us hope.  The Swedish police detective Wallander was distressed at the patches of memory that were left to Him.  Our memories are flawed too.  And even if we have perfect recollection, what are our memories by itself. What greater meaning do they have?  With faith, they mean something, because all of our lives- remembered or not- have a place within the memory and purpose of God Who always remembers our lives. Thanks be to God. .