Come, now is the time to… what were we doing again?
Deuteronomy 6:4-12; 20-25
You may or may not realize this about me, but I do not have a great memory. For some things, I suppose I do. My sister has on occasion reminded me that it might creep people out a bit when I remember things about them when we met only once a long time ago and they have no recollection of who I am (I tend to think that everyone likes to be remembered). But on the whole, I am often dismayed at how my memory fails me. I keep my calendar glued to me at almost all times because if you question me out of the blue, I may not remember what I’m doing tomorrow, or what I did yesterday. I can’t always remember all of the details of events in my life. My sister is often the one who recalls the little details that others may not deem important, but that fill in the gaps as we put something back together in the re-telling.
We re-tell stories a lot in my family, and I’d say that it’s a regular part of any family’s life. Do you remember the time when we entered a car rally as a family? Oh, yeah, and our only opponents had been doing car rallies for years! I remember their clipboard with a light attached, designed especially for night driving. Didn’t they have a super deluxe compass too? What compass did we have? We borrowed one from the organizers. I also remember that I had to stand in the deep ditch to get a compass reading. I had to do that too! Oh, really? I guess we both did our part. And how crazy was it when we won! I know! It was like the David beats Goliath of car rallies. Man, we had a lot of fun as a family down by the lake in the summers.
These conversations take us back to those experiences, don’t they? Whatever has faded in our minds becomes clearer again. We can be reminded of what we once knew but have forgotten. We might learn how another person remembers the experience differently. Even if we remember the time well, the recitation can bring us back into how we felt or what we learned when it happened. The simple act of remembering guides us in how to live. In the joyful re-telling of family stories, and also in the tearful re-telling, I come back to the love I have for my family and the desire I have to act out of that love, rather than acting out of the feelings of separation that physical distance can cause. The communal memory of a family is a powerful thing.
The significance of the communal memory – this is one of the things that Moses is trying to communicate to the Israelites in this passage of Deuteronomy. Moses begins "Hear, O Israel". If you’re into tidbits of Biblical scholarship, this first verse is often called the shema. That’s the Hebrew verb at the beginning of this passage, the command to hear, or also, obey.
"Shema Yisrael YHWH Eloheinu YHWH Echad"
"Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might."
But Moses gets that it’s not just as simple as telling them once and they’ve got it locked away in their brains, ready to inform their every decision. He tells them – Recite these words to your kids! Talk about them when you’re at home, talk about them when you’re away, talk about them as you fall asleep beside your spouse, and again when you get up and are all groggy at breakfast. (This is a paraphrase ;)
Talk about them, talk about them, talk about them. Because, Moses says, when you have come into this beautiful new land and moved into nice big houses that you didn’t do any work on and you eat food that you didn’t have to plant, "take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery" (6:12). Moses knows, or perhaps God has pointed it out to him, that people forget. I mean, they don’t completely forget. If someone had asked the Israelites – hasn’t God done miraculous things for you people? The answer would be – Oh, yeah, for sure… God… brought our ancestors out of slavery. But the further they move from the act of remembering that together, the less they remember to act out of that memory.
"When your children ask you in time to come…" what does this all mean? Why do you believe what you do? What happened to make you live this way? Moses says – you will know how to answer. And tell them the whole story. So it becomes your story. The whole generation of Israelites who escaped from Egypt died before entering the promised land, but Moses says – you say to your children: We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. The story is told and re-told to remind the people of Israel that this is their story. This is what God has done for all of them. They are to remember and live out of this story.
At the North American Young Adult Fellowship retreat in October, here in Calgary, we talked about the stories out of which we live. We talked about the stories from Scripture, from our family heritage, and from our own lives that have shaped us. Because without those chances to tell our stories and to hear each other’s stories, it can be easy to forget. We can know as much as we like, but we need to help each other remember again and again if we want it to change the way we live.
What happens when we gather together like this on a Sunday morning? A lot of things happen, including the absolutely central act of giving praise to God who in turn transforms us that we might effect change in the world. You know what else we do in Sunday morning worship? We remember.
We remember who God is. We remember what God has done for us. We remember how God calls us to live.
Why do we need each other in this act of remembering? Why is worship so important when there are lots of other beneficial things we could be doing on Sunday mornings? I mean, it’s not as if we really forget, right? If someone asked us – you’re a Christian, right? We’d say – Oh, yeah, for sure… I follow Jesus. But, actually, we do forget. Or at least, the further we move from the act of remembering together, the more we forget to act out of our remembering, and the more we act out of a sense of separation from God that can come from the distance we ourselves create.
Some family stories come to our memories very easily. But others only come out as our families get together and tell them to each other. It’s like that when we get together for worship. We have our own understandings of God at the forefront of our minds, but when we come together and sing songs that express things differently or hear a Bible story that we haven’t looked at in a while or hear each other share about what God is doing in our lives, our memory is informed by the communal memory of the faith community throughout time and space.
Also, like the stories within a family, we might remember different parts of the story of God’s encounter with God’s people. Depending on the places we are coming from in our lives and in the week we have experienced, we will remember different important aspects of worship. Some will remember that God is to be praised today. Some will remember that there are laments to be cried out to God today. Some will remember that God is ready to hear our confession today. And some will remember that when we leave here, it is to witness to the One who was done wondrous things, and been with us through it all. We need each other to remember the whole picture of our experience as God’s people.
Although on a single given Sunday morning we may not address all of these aspects in full, our worship is an expression that arises from the whole human encounter with God. It is our central act of communal memory. And this explains why we include in our year’s traditions a day we call Memorial Sunday. If worship is our central act of communal memory, an expression of the whole human encounter with God, then it is natural in this setting that we remember those who have died this year.
We need each other to remember God’s faithfulness, we also need each other to remember one another’s burdens and griefs. Some of these burdens are those that we already share as a community – the loss of members and participants in our church that many of us feel. Other griefs may belong only to one or a few people, but here we ask each other to help carry them. Then we remember that we are not alone.
In our service of remembering in a few moments, we will take time to name the people who have meant something to us and who have left life in this world in the past year. As we remember these people together, it is appropriate to also reflect on the other losses that we have experienced this year. The loss of a job. The loss of health or strength. The loss of a relationship. There are also losses of life that are not always named aloud but hurt all the same. The early loss of a pregnancy. The loss of a beloved pet. It is also natural that on this day we remember griefs from years past that continue to live with us, in whatever stage their healing is.
This is the shape of our remembering today. Even in this, though, we know that in our worship we always come back to remembering who God is, who we are in God, and how we are called to live because of it. What have you remembered today about who God is and how God is calling you? How have you opened yourself to being reminded? As we support each other in the remembering of those we have lost, let us be reminded that the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. Let us love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might. Keep these words today in your heart. And talk about them.