Do we mind what we choose to remember?  Deuteronomy 11: v 1-11

Sermon for Sunday 11/11/07 @ 1045am

Occasion: 'Remembrance Sunday'
 

Do you remember the colour of the carpet which was in the church two weeks ago? That was a stupid question; wasn’t it? Why would any one want to remember the colour of the carpet? In what way would that help in anyway we live our life? So it does not matter if you cannot remember the colour of the carpet. As the old saying goes: ‘it is not the end of the world’.

It is not as bad as forgetting your debit card at the shop after paying for your shopping. Friday I took my car to the garage for annual service and MOT. It didn’t get ready until the evening; in fact it wasn’t until after five O clock that they called me to go and collect it. The traffic was terrible; earlier in the afternoon I had lost almost an hour in a traffic jam between Cradley and Stourbridge which had disturbed my visiting programme. When I found myself in another traffic jam between Cradley and Amblecote where the garage is, I felt my brain squeezed a bit. But I eventually arrived at the Garage and collected my car. The only problem was that I forgot to remove my Debit Card from the machine. It was only when I arrived home that I was told that somebody from the garage had just rang to say they will keep the Debit Card for me and that I shouldn’t worry. I went back to collect it yesterday. But earlier in the day on Friday, at lunch time, I was in WH Smith looking for a book I had promised to buy for my son. And when I arrived at the till, one of the ladies working in the shop had just found that the previous customer had left his or her credit card in the machine too. So at the end of the evening I could take consolation in the fact that I wasn’t the only one.

You can relate to this story because like myself leaving my Debit Card at the Garage in Amblecote, and the customer who left the credit card in WH Smith, we often struggle with failing memories. One of the side affects of living in the West with its fast pace of life is that all of us forget things: purses, keys, appointments, you name it.  I bring all this up this morning because I want us to look at the story of how the people of Israel were constantly told to remember the important things that had happened to them. It appears that they had a memory deficiency. Their recollection problem was unique in that they remembered the wrong things and forgot the right ones. Contrast Deuteronomy 11:1-9 and Exodus 16: 3. Whenever there was a problem on their journey to the promised land, the Israelites didn’t have to be reminded about the fleshpots, delicious cucumbers and melons of Egypt; but they needed always to be reminded of the good things God had done for them. 

In the reading Madeline did for us from Deuteronomy 11:1-9 the people of Israel are told to remember what they had seen with their own eyes. They were asked to remember the hand of God in their deliverance from Pharaoh’s oppression. Indeed, if you paid close attention to these few verses when they were being read to us a few minutes ago, then you may have noted something that crops up again and again,  "what the Lord did to the Egyptians’. It was his mighty hand and his outstretched arm, his signs and his deeds. This is the ringing opening line of one of many speeches Moses made to the people encouraging them never to forget God. This is indeed the place to begin because knowing what God has done in our lives and in the world motivates us to worship him alone; it leads us into true discipleship.

The first verse introduces the commandment to love God. Before Moses repeats the commandment at the end of the passage, he asks the people to remember a series of things God had done: drowning the Egyptian army with their horses and chariots, splitting the water of the Red Sea, guiding them through the wilderness, then dealing with Dathan and Abiram; these, with Korah, had conspired against Moses and led a rebellion against him. They were severely punished. They perished in the wilderness (Numbers 16). The people of Israel were supposed to remember all of this and learn to obey God. Their song of jubilation at the Red Sea surely looked for all the world like testimony to the fact that they had discovered what their God had done and that he is worthy of praise.

From quite early on in the Israelite journey to the promised land, the call to remember will become the rallying cry for them. By the time you get to Moses' last great farewell speech, the phrase, "O Israel, remember and do not forget" pops up over and over like a kind of holy refrain. That cry echoes down along the centuries as we see Israel repeatedly forgetting, then remembering again for a time, and then forgetting all over again. And even in the biblical story it takes no one less than the very Son of God himself to come down here in person, hold up some bread and wine, and say once and for all, "Remember!". Each time we come to the Lord's table, we not only jog our memories all over again but vow to re-commit ourselves to an ongoing sacred remembrance of all that has gone into our great salvation through Christ Jesus the Lord.

In one sense, it is vaguely shocking that so much depends on memory. But given the current state of the culture, having to lash so much to the mast of memory is also frightening. You may laugh at my forgetfulness on Friday  but hidden within that kind of forgetfulness are the seeds of my misery; the possibility of somebody spending your money depending to be you, or even stealing your identity. As I said when the girl at the garage rung to tell me that I had forgotten my Debit Card, I hadn’t arrived yet;  so she spoke to Price. She said: ‘Tell him I will not spend his money’.  I was reassured by that.

We are a society afflicted with amnesia. Some of us find it difficult to hold on some precious memory, something more secure than this moment, something by which to anchor our lives. Having no sense for the past can result in us not having a common sense in the present. But let us remember that we are not saved by what we know (as though being intelligent with a good memory made a person closer to God than the one who isn't quite as smart). We're not saved by what we know but by the grace of the One who knows us and whom we know, too. But to know God is to love God, and so our love should make us want to remember all that we can. Remembering what God did for us and for our nation and for the world is what gives us the strength to live faithfully. The human heart can be that perpetual factory of bad thoughts.

In Deuteronomy 11 Moses asks the people to remember God’s mighty acts of deliverance; this is not the only place in the Bible where memory brings strengths. The thief on the cross knew what he was doing when he asked, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." But even before that, it was Jesus who looked at his disciples to say, "Remember me!" The question that echoes down along the ages, burning with an intensity no other question could, is whether or not we do, as a matter of fact, remember him.  

So let us pause for a minute or so and reflect on how we arrange our own memories, distill them, rework them and even perfect them; we probably find that we do ourselves disservice by not making them more faithful to the facts. Let us remember that who we, present here today, are in large measure determined by what we choose to remember and how we choose to remember it. We endow our past with significance by selectively keeping certain memories and stories alive, refreshing them, commemorating them, passing them down to our children. We pass to them our failures as well as our disappointments. We condense them into lessons, learning more from them over time than they originally had to teach. We tend to think of our parents differently when we ourselves become parents, for instance. We may then choose to replace tattered memories of them formulated when we were younger with new, happier memories from just as long ago. Meaning comes from fashioning and refashioning our memories into a coherent pattern. Not all coherent patterns are equally conducive to our happiness. We can choose to keep alive only memories that darken the present with their shadows. We can be more healthy, more reconciled with ourselves, with others by organizing our past in ways that prove most conducive to balance, reconciliation, and hope.

Remembrance Sunday is a significant event, not only of memory but of hope as well. I like the meaning of wearing both read and white poppies: the red remembering the lives lost defending our freedom, and the white as a sign of peace we hope and pray for.   

Well, how are our memories this morning when it comes to remembering things? Perhaps God has used our time of remembrance to jog our memory and help us see that we really need to rethink how we work out the things we constantly want to remember. Some of us here this morning may need to ask God’s forgiveness for how we spend time remembering the bad things rather than the good ones. Since we have this constant temptation to remember the wrong and bad people do to us, we may be here and feel God leading us to appreciate more the good things people have done for us so that we can do the same for others. And remember there are things in life that are just as well forgotten. Amen  

By Rev Paul Nzacahayo

© 2007