God Does Not Forget

I had been sitting with her for some time. Outside in the hallways, the nursing assistants were busy with medications and others were collecting the trays from lunch. Another resident was calling out for a loved one who had long since died. Yet another sang an old tune whose words I couldn’t make out.

She, however, was calm and composed, still the figure of quiet dignity that I had always known. Occasionally she shared a story or a question – each of them disconnected. There was no current I could detect to what she was talking about. Her memory was gone – fragmented into a hundred little sections that made it difficult for her even to recognize me. I often wondered if she even registered that I was there. How many times did I think about how awful it was to lose your memory – to forget the names and faces of those who were closest to you?

Then as I got ready to go I asked if I could pray with her, something she was always ready to do. She bowed her head and closed her eyes. I reached for her hand and said a few words that I can’t remember. But then I started in on the Lord’s Prayer. About two lines in I heard her voice joining in with mine. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” Her illness could not rob her of these words which she had been saying all of her life. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” She was there. For a moment she was at peace, wrapped up in a prayer that had been with her at moments of joy and moments of crisis, Sunday in and Sunday out for 92 years. “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” She was smiling as I left.

A few weeks ago I was teaching in Dallas and it was the first time I had taught in the Course of Study School in two years. I noticed, as I tried to dust off my memory of Martin Luther and the Reformation and of more recent folks like Karl Barth and Billy Graham, that I was feeling mentally rusty. Things just didn’t flow as easily as I was used to. Once I got back into the stories, it was great. I remembered why I love this stuff. But I’m learning that it’s going to take more mental exercise to try to hold on to all that I’m used to holding on to.

All those old jokes about memory are starting hit home. Like the one about three aging men who are at the doctor's office for a memory test. The doctor asks the first man, "What is three times three?"

He says, "274."

The doctor rolls his eyes and looks up at the ceiling, and says to the second man, "O.K., it's your turn. What is three times three?"

"Tuesday," replies the second man.

The doctor shakes his head sadly, and then asks the third man, "Okay, your turn. What's three times three?"

"Nine," says the third man.

"That's great!" says the doctor. "How did you get that?"

"Simple," he says, "just subtract 274 from Tuesday." [i]

Makes perfect sense to me.

But here’s the thing that makes this a subject for a sermon. We may be prone to forgetting things or even to diseases that rob us of our memory, but God does not forget. That is good news.

It’s important for us to hear because we Americans can be pretty rootless. We stay on the move. Sometimes we are a long way from our extended families. Sometimes we want to escape who we have been and try to start all over at some new place. We are a nation of self-made men and women. Right?

But we can never really escape our roots. The people who loved us and cared for us as children never really leave us. Our parents and grandparents, our friends and neighbors - they leave an indelible imprint on our lives, for good or ill, and in whatever life we lead we take them with us, continuing a dialogue with them through our decisions and our actions.

I think about this whenever I go back to Southampton County, where most of my extended family used to live. It's a little like Northampton County actually - flat, tidewater, peanut country - full of sandy soil and pine trees. Really it's a very uninteresting county - not much to see, not much to do.

But it was always a magic place to me. Maybe that's because of all the stories my Dad and Mom used to tell me about the county - about my relatives from long ago and about their childhoods. Maybe it was magic because it was place where my parents were very relaxed and I was able to spend more time with them. Maybe it's because part of me was there - not so much in the land, but in my relatives, and I was able to discover myself in them a little bit more with each trip.

So where is the gospel in this reminiscence? Well, Christians need to have that sense of connection, too. We need to know what makes this world and our lives magical. Paul knew this when he wrote his letter of introduction to the Christians in Rome. We don't know what the Roman church was going through, and perhaps Paul didn't either, but we do know that the Roman Empire of that time had some features that were very similar to our own.

It was a place of great mobility. Great highway systems and a strong military presence made travel easy and relatively safe. Because of that mobility people might find themselves living hundreds and thousands of miles from the place they were born.

Also because of that mobility, new religious thoughts and trends and movements spread quickly, capturing the attention of a spiritually hungry people who were very interested in novelty and new things. Christianity was able to spread from Jerusalem at the eastern corner of the empire, all the way to Rome within a very few years. People were fascinated with it and there were a lot of new converts who found new life and new energy in Jesus Christ.

But Paul insisted that Christianity was NOT a new thing. Though he called himself an apostle to the Gentiles, he insisted that Jesus was thoroughly Jewish and that Jesus was a direct descendent of the great figures from the Jewish scriptures that we call the Old Testament. Jesus stood in the line of Moses and Abraham, of David and Elijah. And the covenant God made with the nation of Israel was a covenant that remained in effect.

This was important for Paul to say, for there were many Christians who rejected the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, as the story of another God or a false God with a different people. Jesus Christ, these folks claimed, was the revelation of a new god in the history of the world. And the story of the Jews had nothing to do with them. One of these heretical leaders, Marcion, even fashioned his own Bible which included none of the books of our Old Testament, only one gospel and a few letters of Paul.

But Paul himself stood against this position. He struggled with the relationship of Christians to the old Law of Moses and he said that Christ really did bring about a new possibility for relationship. But when he came to the question of God's relationship with Israel and asked the question, "Has God rejected the people of God?" he answered it with an emphatic, "Of course not!"

Then Paul goes on to warn the Roman Christians not to believe that God's mission with Israel has ended. Despite the hardships that the early Christians faced in dealing with the Jewish synagogues, Paul reminded them that they as Christians had been grafted on to a tree with Jewish roots and not the other way around. There was no room for triumphalism or bitterness because God would not forget the roots.

Long ago God had chosen the people of Israel for a special relationship. It was not an easy relationship and Israel had failed God many, many times, but God had not abandoned the people. They had a covenant - a binding agreement that God had vowed never to break, despite the unfaithfulness of Israel. And though Paul noted the disobedience of the Jewish people of his day, he reminded the Christians that they, too, had been disobedient and it was the failure of all of them that had opened the door to God's new act of mercy and salvation in Jesus Christ. As God had done throughout their history, God took the sinfulness of the world and created a way of redemption.

What if God HAD rejected the people of Israel? What if God had forgotten that covenant? What if God HAD decided to start all over with Jesus and a new people called Christians? Could we be any more sure of our place than the Jews? If God had really rejected them completely, how could we be sure that God wouldn't also reject us? The issue is not just who's got it right. The issue really is the faithfulness of God. And God has remained faithful.

We forget this first covenant with Israel far too often and the results have been tragic. In York, England, where I lived for a year, there is a sign on the castle which says that in the 1500's a group of zealous Protestants cornered a group of 500 Jews in the castle, threatening them with death for their failure to convert to the "true" faith. The Jews inside set fire to the castle rather than submit to the crowd and they all died.

The Nazi Holocaust of the 1930's and '40's in which more that 6 million Jews died was made easier by their demonization of the Jews as unchristian. Today hate groups continue to call Jews "Christkillers" and in the name of Christianity violate Jewish cemeteries and synagogues. And major Christian denominations appoint special missionaries to "convert" the Jews despite this terrible history.

Paul said, "All Israel will be saved". God has not abandoned them or given them up or finished using them. But God has done a new thing in Jesus Christ. And we who follow him need to remember our roots. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And all of us together stand before a God of judgment and mercy.

Paul reminds us that we have a lot of stories to tell as well - stories of wandering patriarchs and resourceful women - stories of all-too-human kings and crucified saviors. And unless we tell all the stories and remember who we are and where our roots lie, we will never begin to see this world for what it really is - a magic place, filled with the presence and the glory and the power of a faithful God who does not abandon us, despite our failures. God does not forget. And that is good news. Thanks be to God.

Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. ...for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

[i] Funnyhumor.com, http://www.funnyhumor.com/jokes/936.php.