Remembering and Forgetting

Sunday, February 5, 2006
Central Lutheran Church

Interim Senior Pastor Mark Bents, Central Lutheran Church

Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he, who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles. Isaiah 40:20-21, 31

As Central is under preparations to mark its 87th anniversary on Palm Sunday, we pause and focus on the words of Isaiah to gain appropriate perspective. No one could have predicted 87 years ago all that would have happened in and through and to this church. No one could have anticipated the wonder of its ministry, the hurt folks have inflicted on each other, the daring of its mission, the fearfulness that has been experienced during transition times.

After all these years, the church in the United States has become timid, and society has become seemingly uncaring. In another portion of second Isaiah we receive words of hope:

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one what I called him, but I blessed him and made him many. 51:1-2

Isaiah encourages us to remember, to be involved in selective remembering. His focus was not on a busy tallying in order to remember every little detail. The community is invited to focus on the pure models of faithfulness that stand at the head of the parade.

Remember Abraham, and the fathers of faith in this community. Remember the fathers who got started against enormous odds. Remember Abraham, who moved off into an unknown land and followed the call of God. Remember Abraham, who left what is safe and comfortable, who had courage to argue with God. Remember Abraham, who made powerful, daring and intercession for the sake of Sodom gone astray, willing to risk. And like him, remember the past fathers of this church.

Remember Sarah, the mother of our faith. Well over age 87, she laughs at God’s power, but was convicted and transformed in God’s call. She birthed a son, which created a future for her and her family. She served God’s impossibility. She is a model for resurrected faith! She came to believe and trust that God would create newness out of defeat, barrenness, and even death.

Remember your fathers of faith. Those who risked and dared and obeyed God’s call. Remember your fathers that have cared for the city gone astray. Remember your mothers of faith, those who laugh and for God’s power gave new life.

Names of mothers and fathers sometimes are forgotten. So we tell and retell their stories, the jokes they enjoyed, and the pictures that we have. We tell the stories of what they did. And we do so with gratitude for courage and freedom. We stand in awe, the miracles which God did through them.

We are wise to remember that:

1. We live in a society that remembers almost nothing. I recall trying to teach the history of the early church to a young adult class in one congregation. I asked when the church began, to which a reply came, “It all began in 1949 when my pastor was born.” The church has a long, time-tested shape for mission and faith. We need to remember and remind each other.
2. We remember so that we do not forget. The church did not just come into being by accident. Every congregation has its origin, its great missional moments, its people with intensity, and people who sacrificed with vision.

Central stands on the shoulders of mothers and fathers who have been obedient to the gospel. Remember, give thanks and be amazed, and sign on with their passions.

There is a danger in remembering of a kind. When we remember with nostalgia, a romantic kind of remembering that says the “good old days were 27 years ago.” I remember I was pastor of a church in northeast Iowa that was nearly defunct. Every year in the fall a pie social was held. In prior years 3, 4 and 500 people would fill the basement with excitement and delight. Many people would come and eat pie. Now, only 50-60 people would come, all others were gone. One of the acts of nostalgia was to set up tables for hundreds. Many pies went uneaten.

One last portion from Isaiah:

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:18-19

The people of Israel were excessively in love with past time. They completely misunderstood the present. The ancient Israelites (600 years earlier) loved to talk about the Exodus from Egypt. This was God’s powerful, old intervention. The community memory, long ago when somebody did something special. To them, Isaiah said, “Do not remember the former things,” as if to say, “Forget it.” Forget the past. It is a memory. Why? God says, “I am doing a new thing!” There is a new liberation, a new history, a new homecoming. Drink deeply of the past. But turn your attention to the present. It belongs to God. And God is leading us into the future where Good is calling us to a deep and different newness.

God is doing a new thing. Liberation is from Babylon, not Egypt. New things for early Christians. Healings, new healing, liberating work of Jesus. No more talk about old stories. Talk about what Jesus did.

For us? For this great Church as we turn into God’s future? God is doing a new thing. God is fashioning a new pattern where privilege will have to attend to poverty; where power will have to submit to pain; where advantage will have to be recruited for compassion, and where old priorities will have to be repositioned to let in people long kept out. God is doing a new thing!

1. Loss of the old scares us, all of us. We feel threatened and displaced. With all that loss it causes us to do anxious, mean and selfish things to each other. It is useful to turn and notice the level of stress that loss of the old produces, and seek to honor each other in our fear and our anxiety.
2. Nobody knows the shape of the newness. This creates uncertainty, anxiety in our great missional issues. We live in this time of transition until God’s Spirit leads us to freshly formed life together. We live in anticipation of God’s newness requiring waiting and watching for glimpses of God’s work and God’s will.
3. Newness of God seldom comes without obedient human investment. That is where the church comes in. The church is not permitted by God to sit around in its building and on its reputation. The church is summoned by God to be at work for God’s current newness, to think with riskiness of Abraham and receive with delight each new day as mother Sarah. The church is to be the womb of birthing a new wonder in the world, to be a river in the desert, a genuine human home in the arena of stark fear. This requires of us to think quite freshly toward the future, to think large about the mission in this city and the world. It is for this that you have been called.

So, if there are old hurts and quarrels, get one’s mind off them and get refocused on the call of God.

Then, after the waiting and watching, join the procession. The church is not for sitting, but for coming and going, departing and arriving. Go out in peace and in joy, not anxiety or discomfort. Go out as lives transformed from “grasshoppers” to “eagles.”

Go out from the old, tired stuff, from the fears that divide you. Go out from the quarrels unresolved and old sins forgiven. Go out from old decisions that have scarred and wounded, from old memories that would become graven images. And go into God’s new demanding mission, a new way and place of life like father Abraham. Go out to your neighbors and community for an act of generosity and hope, like mother Sarah. Go out singing, celebrating and grateful.

The mission of Central is not finished. The work of Central is not a holding action. The future of Central is not business as usual. Be involved with passionate remembering, liberating forgetting, and joyous departing. Go out! Amen.  

(Indebted to Walter Brueggemann. The Threat of Life.)

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