March 21, 2010 - Lent 5, Year C (RCL)
“Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.”
These words of the prophet Isaiah
that we heard in our Old Testament reading today
are among the most devastating
spoken in the bible.
In just one sentence, placed on the lips of God, an essential part of what makes us human
is torn away. Our memory.
Memory. It’s one of the most important, and one of the most complex things about human existence.
I still remember the first year class in Psychology that I took in college. One of the areas we studied was the different ways memory can be interfered with, because of damage to the brain. From studies of people with different forms of amnesia, we know that memory involves the hippocampus, the thalamus, the anterior lobe, and many other parts of the brain,
but we still struggle to make sense of how it works. Why do we remember some things and not others? Why are some memories so much more important than others? And why do we feel a terrible sense of loss
about the things we have forgotten, when they’re brought back to mind by a conversation or a photograph?
Part of the answer
is that our memories
help us to understand who we are. They tell us where we have come from; they provide a context for our lives; they explain a lot about us. And shared memories
bind us together, deeper than we can imagine. They are the basis of many of our relationships, and they give us a sense of belonging.
So what are these words of Isaiah, these words on the lips of God. Is it really a command
to abandon
memory?
The memory of the people of Israel is what forms them, it’s what defines them. Every year they gather for the Passover festival.
and recite the story of their Exodus, their escape
from Egypt.
Their prayers are formed by the words of the psalms, imprinted on their memories from repetition day after day, giving thanks for the great things God has done for them.
Their children listen at bedtime
to the exploits of their national heroes,
Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob,
Sarah and Rachel and Leah and Rebecca,
Joshua and David and Deborah and Rahab.
They learn who they are
by learning who their ancestors were,
and they learn who they are
by learning about the God who created them.
And so deep in their bones
the people of Israel
the people of God
know who they are
because of their history.
And they know who their God is
because of their history.
“Thus says the Lord,”
says the prophet Isaiah,
“Thus says the Lord,
who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters,
who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior;
they lie down, they cannot rise,
they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.”
And the people remember, long ago,
back in the times of their ancestor Moses,
who led their people
out of the land of Egypt,
out of the hands of Pharaoh,
out of slavery into freedom,
they remember the time
when the Egyptians were pursuing them
and they came to the Red Sea,
and they were trapped
between the water and the army,
and Moses stretched out his arm
over that sea
and a wind came up
and drove back the waters
and the people of Israel
crossed over on dry land,
and Moses stretched out his arm
and the wind died down
and the waters flowed back
and the Egyptians were drowned.
That is their story;
this is their God.
“Thus says the Lord.”
It’s not so different today. Or stories might not be so dramatic,
but they form us just the same. We learn who we are from our history, from the stories our parents tell us, from the way we do and say things.
The stories of our ancestors
give us pride in our heritage.
We identify ourselves
by the places they came from
even when we
have never been near those ancestral homelands.
After all, how many of the people
who were celebrating St Patrick’s Day on Wednesday
have ever actually been to Ireland?
And the stories of our families
shape us in other ways.
If our parents went to college,
they will likely have told us about it
and encourage us to go as well.
Those of us whose parents lived through wartime rationing
have it drilled into us to be thankful for our food
and we eat everything in front of us
whether we need it, or want it, or not.
And the same is true of our faith. Just like the people of Israel
we are formed by the faith stories we have been told. By the heroes we heard about as children, David and Goliath, Jonah and his whale,
Peter and James and John and their sail boats.
By the words we learned to pray at bedtime each night.
Even by the buildings that we worshiped in.
Those things are wound deep in the fabric of our souls,
the fabric of our faith.
Our backgrounds, our culture, our history,
And so it probably shouldn’t surprise us
that the next words of God
through the prophet Isaiah
came as a shock
to the people of God.
“Thus says the Lord,
who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters,
who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior;
they lie down, they cannot rise,
they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.
Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.”
What????
All our lives
we have faithfully remembered them
all our lives
they have shaped our faith.
What is this that you are telling us, God?
To abandon our history, to abandon our stories,
even
to abandon our faith?
How can we worship you
without our traditions, how can we worship you
without our remembering?
But, you see,
the problem is
that their faith has become
little more than remembering. They have given up
the God of the present
for the God of the past,
they hear about God
but no longer look for him.
They have forgotten
that this is not just a God of stories
but a God of action.
They need to learn
to find God again
not just in history and tradition
but at work in the world around them,
“I am about to do a new things,” God says.
“Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches;
for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert
to give drink to my chosen people,
the people whom I formed for myself
so that they might declare my praise.”
The God they know so well from the past
cannot be trapped in their memories. This God
has done great things
and will do great things. This God will lead them forward,
forward
into places that look like deserts,
but will suddenly become fertile,
into wildernesses
full of tamed animals, praising God.
The promise is there;
are they willing to risk it?
We are not the people of Israel. But I suspect we face many of the same dangers. Especially we Episcopalians.
We have a wonderful tradition, a tradition that we are right to be proud of. A prayer book and liturgy
that help us worship God,
buildings that are beautiful and remind us of the glory of God,
structures that help us live out our lives of faith.
And God has blessed us.
But we cannot live in the past.
We cannot rest on what God has done,
and turn a blind eye to what God is doing now.
We need to be willing to be critical of our traditions, to let go of structures that no longer work for us,
to thank God for working in the past and search out the ways God is working here and now -
and it may be different from how God worked before.
That’s a little scary. Because we cling to our traditions, to the ways that have been tried and tested. It’s safe, it’s secure, it’s what we know. And to look for something different? That’s to move into territory that we don’t know, to risk getting lost, even to fail.
But sometimes
God begins to do a new thing. And the call of the prophet Isaiah, is to be on the ready
for what God will do,
to be looking around us with open eyes
to look for the places that might seem like deserts
but are about to spring with fresh water,
to look at the wildernesses
and find new life.
It doesn’t mean losing our memories,
but it does mean recognizing the difference between the past, the present and the future,
honoring what has gone, but not allowing it to define the limits of our future.
One of the things that I think we often forget
is that the things that we hold dear,
the things about our own experience of faith
would likely be
very foreign
to our own ancestors.
Many people bewailed the loss of the 1928 prayer book that they had grown up with
when the 1979 one was introduced;
what they forget is that before that was the 1892,
and before that the 1789,
and there were riots with the introduction of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.
Change
is inevitable.
And it’s not only inevitable;
it’s the gift of God.
God never leaves us where we are, but constantly calls us onward,
as individuals
and as the church.
What is ahead of us
is to try to work out
where God is leading us.
To look beyond the patterns of the past
to the possibilities of the future.
And that’s work
not just for the rector, or the vestry,
but for all of us.
Where do you see God at work? Where do think
God might be calling us? Can you perceive a place for you, a role
that you might play
in God’s new creation? Where is it
that God is leading us, how is it
that God is forming us?
Our God
has done great things in this place, and God will continue to do great things. God will lead us forward.
The promise is there;
are we willing to risk it?
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010