Re-membering
A sermon preached January 25, 2004, by deacon Dave Skidmore.
First Reading: Luke 23: 32-33, 39-43
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a
Responsive Reading: Psalm 90
Introduction
I remember that my father used to say that the pun is the lowest form of humor. His habit was to say this, with great self-satisfaction, after having offered up what he considered to be a particularly amusing pun. Cautioned by this memory, I must tell you that today’s sermon topic, “Re-membering,” is essentially a pun. I hope it does not prove to be the lowest form of sermon.
I would like to explore the topic of “Re-membering” in two senses: the sense of bringing to mind a time or place or person from the past and the sense of healing, or putting the pieces back together – re-membering. It is easy to see the relationship. How do we remember something, in the more common sense of the word? We recall bits and pieces of the past – an image, a smell, an emotion – and put them together in a way that creates a memory. And, surely, remembering in the sense of recalling the past and re-membering in the sense of healing are linked because if psychotherapy teaches us anything it is that retrieving the memories of the past, fitting them together, and reflecting on them is a healing act. I think this can apply both to individuals and to groups.
Before I go further, I should say that I owe my appreciation of this double sense of the word “remembering” – and God’s role in remembering, in both senses – to my memory of a Memorial Day sermon Bill Fox preached from this pulpit some years go.
To Remember and Be Remembered Are Precious Gifts
To remember and to be remembered are precious gifts. Earlier this month, Rev. Walter Shropshire, in his sermon on Epiphany, told us how, for Christmas, he gave each of his adult children a book of family photographs featuring them as young children. Of course it was, as he relates it, a big hit.
My daughter, Emily, gave me a similar gift, a 2004 wall calendar, for the kitchen. Each month features an enlargement of a different family snapshot, sometimes of her, sometimes of us together, when she was a baby or a little girl. It’s a wonderful gift for me to remember this Emily of the years just past as she embarks on her teen years and the circle of her life, of necessity, grows ever wider than her immediate family.
I have atop the entertainment center in my living room another gift: a small, ornate pink cup, with the gilt inscription in Gothic type, “Remember me.” It was once owned by my father’s mother and was given to me thirty years ago as a keepsake after she died, at the age of ninety-two. I think of its inscription as a request from her. “Remember me,” it says. And I do. I had it for years before I realized that the inscription, at least originally, was not a request from her, that most likely someone gave her the cup. Perhaps a parent, or a sibling, or a dear friend gave it to her before she immigrated to this country from England in 1901. I don’t know.
But the cup that someone gave my grandmother and the calendar that Emily gave to me this Christmas powerfully underscore an important point: Not only do we want to remember, we also long to be remembered. That, at least in part I think, was what motivated Emily’s gift to me and the gift of the cup to my grandmother. Of course, that also was the request of the criminal on the cross next to Jesus: “Remember me.”
Memories Are Evanescent
But much as we treasure them, memories are inherently evanescent. Thus, we expend much energy and effort in preserving them.
Just after college, I had a roommate who recorded every event of his life in scrapbooks. If he read a book, he wrote a brief synopsis and pasted it in the book. If he ate at a restaurant, he recorded the menu. If he went to the movies, he saved the ticket stubs. He acted as though, if he forgot the meal, the movie or the book, those experiences would never have happened.
And I think we all know someone (and I have been this person at times) who, camera in hand, annoyingly insists on trying to record every moment of every vacation and every family gathering, who seems to believe that if a tree falls in the forest and he is not there to take its picture (now, of course, with a digital camera) and e-mail the picture to everyone in the family, then it did not fall. We want so much to remember.
After a point, it is absurd because we know that, as much as we try to preserve memories, ultimately we cannot. The unknown giver of the cup to my grandmother is not remembered, at least by me. Like old soldiers – like us – memories fade away and are gone. They fade out because, in the words of the psalmist, “We fly away.” No matter how many mementos and snapshots we paste into scrapbooks and photo albums, as much as we vow to “Never, forget,” eventually, one way or another, we do.
Who here can tell me what they had for lunch last Tuesday? Or, a bit less trivially, have you ever had the experience of looking through your high school yearbook, seeing someone’s picture and handwritten message and realizing you had no idea who that person was? Or perhaps, some years after graduating, you met a favorite teacher at a reunion and, a brief way into the conversation, realized the teacher had forgotten you.
Forgetting, the opposite of remembering, can be, at best, mildly irksome – “Now, where did I put those car keys? – and, at worst, a profound grief. Many of us have had the experience of watching someone we love – a grandparent, a parent, a friend, or even a spouse – lose their memory to Alzheimer’s or some other dementia. We lose them, before their time – and they lose us.
There’s a famous poem that addresses the ultimate futility of memory, Ozymandius, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poem’s narrator relates the story of a traveler, who came upon the wreckage of an enormous statue in the desert.
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair;
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
God Remembers
If Ozymandius only knew what the future would bring, it would have been he who despaired, not those looking upon his works. So what’s the answer to this bleak inevitability? Can we be re-membered?
The answer, I believe, is a resounding yes. That is what I would most like you to take home with you today. Yes, we can be re-membered. If we can believe in the possibility of an eternal God for whom a thousand years is like a watch in the night, the answer is yes. If we believe in a God who, according to Luke, forgets not even one sparrow, the answer is yes. When we forget and are forgotten, God remembers andre-members us. How can we not be remembered if, in the words of Paul, “we live and move and have our being” in God? The criminal next to Jesus knew this, even as his body, like Jesus’, was being broken on a cross. Even at the hour of his death, he knew.
And, as I said near the start of this sermon, I believe this is true for communities, for churches, as well as for individuals.
Re-membering By Remembering Is What Churches Do
Churches, and this church in particular, are places where we do a lot of remembering. We are, after all, the Universalist National Memorial Church. With our tower we remember Owen D. Young, a businessman who worked for peace after World War I. In our library, we remember Clara Barton, who nursed the wounded of the Civil War and founded the American Red Cross. The altar in our side chapel is a memorial to Russell Chapman’s brother, killed in the Second World War. There are many more.
With Communion, the central sacrament of our faith, we re-member Jesus. “Take and eat this in remembrance of Christ,” we are told. “Drink this in remembrance of Christ.” With these symbolic acts, we re-member Him and seek to make His Word a living presence in our lives. And, by remembering Him, we open ourselves to grace – the realization that God remembers us.
Right now, I think we can all do with a bit of re-membering, a deeper awareness of that we are never forgotten, because in some sense we are feeling dis-membered by recent events. Some deeply regret that Pastor Wells was asked to resign. Some, with deep regret, believe it was necessary. How are we to move forward?
Remember Who You Are
There are no pat answers. But, perhaps part of the answer is we must remember and re-member who we are. Now, I’ve most often heard the phrase, “Remember who you are,” used in the context of an admonition to teen-agers. It’s something your mother or your father might have said before you headed out on a date or for an evening with your buddies. Now, I know, when a parent says something like that, they are not saying, “Remember, you are a teen-ager with a thirst for beer and without common sense.” No, they are saying, if one reads between the lines, “Remember you are a fine person with a family who loves you. You are a child of God.” In other words, “When faced with difficulty or temptation, remember your best self – and behave accordingly.”
Today’s reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians offers the opportunity to extend the remembering pun a bit further. It likens the church to a body. The whole body is not just an eye or an ear. The body has many members: the eyes and the ears, the hands and the feet. And Paul writes of the various gifts the different members bring – such as leadership and teaching and healing. And he speaks of what can happen when the members of the church are re-membered. He says, “Strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”
So, how do we re-member and find this “still more excellent way”? A way to start might be for each of us to recall our individual memories of our times here together. Our memories are idiosyncratic, but I’m sure we hold many in common. I’ll mention a few of mine. Perhaps it will help you think of yours.
I remember sitting in the side chapel on Good Friday, about ten years ago, awestruck as Terrell Izzard, from across the church, sang, in his clear, clear, tenor voice, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”
Not many years later, I remember the smell of Kirk Denton’s sage and onions cooking before our Christmas madrigal dinner.
More recently, I remember Perry King strumming a Hank Williams tune on his guitar at a service this summer, and I remember the mums that Donna Simonton planted to brighten our front yard.
I remember the determined glint Jennifer Sandberg gets in her eye when she’s circulating the signup sheet for the Maundy Thursday potluck dinner. And I remember how Al Templeton always looks you in the eye and waits for an answer after he asks you how you’re doing.
I even remember, in a sense, memories that are not mine, that are before my time, but that have been retold to me by others. Memories such as Clara Wiley and the young adults of the church climbing the tower when the church was new and greeting the Easter dawn with hymns, and of the congregation singing “To Be A Pilgrim” as a farewell tribute to Bill Fox and his family before he headed off to his new church in California.
Conclusion
So, what’s to become of our church and all these evanescent memories it holds? Will this liberal Christian church in the heart of the city – the church that boldly proclaims the final harmony of all souls with God – go the way of Ozymandius?
I have little doubt that a thousand years from now this church will no longer stand. We will not be here, and those who remember us will not be here. (Although, if a wanderer in some far-future desert that was once Washington encounters chunks of stone, I kind of hope it’s those stones over the altar that, nearly indecipherably, spell out, “God is love and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.”)
But, in the meantime, I do not doubt at all that there are memories yet to be made here. I hope and trust that ten or twenty or thirty years from now, some of us will be here to re-member them. And I know that no matter what the future brings, that not one precious moment we have spent or will spend here is lost to the God who forgets not even one sparrow, and for whom a thousand years is like a watch in the night.
For “In Him we live and move and have our being.”
Amen.