Christ Church 4-26-15 – Lent 4-B
Patrick Gahan
Psalm 129—Wouldn’t Miss It for the World!
“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world” – that’s what he said after I thanked him. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
The exchange is fresh on my mind, as it occurred only two Thursdays ago. We had just concluded a beautiful burial celebration that included two glorious anthems and a quiver of hymns, complete with exhilarating descants, that filled this room with hope no sermon could convey. So after the service I dashed to the steps leading to the loft to thank the members of the choir. Mostwere clad in their work clothes and speeding back to work.
Toward the end of that procession down the loft steps, I stopped one senior member of the choir. When I expressed my gratitude, he looked back at me with a quizzical expression, “I wouldn’t missed this for the world,” he declared. “He was my friend, and he gave so much to me. I couldn’t possible forget that.”
His words caught me off guard, and I had to step out of the aisle and sit in a pew. The senior choir member had just uttered a central Gospel truth: Christians are in the business of remembering, no matter how much the world tries to wear us down and berate us into forgetting. We remember even in the worst of times – even in the face of death of our loved ones and the death of our dreams – that God comes through to us in our darkest hours.
When we remember, we are like the Jewish pilgrim who sings out this truth:
‘They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young
–this is how Israel tells it –‘ Psalm 129:1
And then the people following him in the traveling caravan repeat the painful truth of their experience:
‘They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young’
but they never could keep me down’
Their evil plowman plowed long furrows
up and down my back; Psalm 129:2-3
Yet that sets the pilgrims to sing all the louder:
Then God ripped the harness
of the evil plowman to shreds
Oh, let those who hate Zion
grovel in humiliation. Psalm 129:4
Our great-great-great-great grandparents in the faith admit that times have been bad, they’ve been hard, they’ve even been deadly, but that just sets them to remembering that God has never failed them. They would not miss remembering that for the world!
We Christians don’t need stamina as much as we need a dose of confidence, and confidence only comes through remembering. Of course, that is what we do in this room. Week after week, we sit and hear about God’s utter dependability in the words of the Bible.We then kneel and pray in certainty that God heeds our intercessions and thanksgivings. And we stand and confidentlysing out our convictions with our hymns. We either remember or lose confidence to live the robust, courageous, creative life of a Christian. Forgetting topplesnot only our faith, but also our very humanity. Forgetting begins to make us something less than human.
Remembering is not a passive enterprise in the least. The world works determinedly and devilishly to blanket us with spiritual amnesia, so that the evil plowman can cut all the life out of us. Christians are the great vanguard of freedom, beauty, and compassion. We Christians know that freedom only comes through following God’s eternal truths expressed in Holy Scripture, that beauty is the result of humbly believing that we are made in God’s image, and that compassion is the result of submitting to the Holy Spirit and being made more and more like Jesus. The world wants none of that. But we are not the first to encounter this crucible – not by a long shot. Just one generation after Jesus’ resurrection – just 30 years after the first Easter –the early Christian community was flagging under the relentless persecution and subtle marginalization by that first century Roman world. To rally the ragged faith community, the unknown writer of Hebrew issued this promise – this remembrance:
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:1-2
Who could doubt that Christians today are the object of overt, relentless persecution? Have you read or viewed the petrifying accounts of ISIS executing Christians week by week? As for subtle marginalization, note how the Christian family is being diminished. Our world, right here in America, belittles any notion that God orders families and relationships. Yet, we are surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses,” and the backdrop of that “great cloud” is Jesus on whom “we fix our eyes.” He who “endured the shame of the cross,” he who could not be scorned, whipped, tortured, or humiliated so much as to discard us, will always, always remember us. We “can run with perseverance this race of life, and experience real life.”
While we are remembering, I brought along this sandwich bag. I received it unexpectedly in the mail last Friday. It is from my Aunt Kathy in Ft. Rucker, AL. In it are photos from my childhood – black and white photos of my siblings and me. I see my brothers and sister – so alive and set upon a long life none of them received. I see me, toddling around with an Easter basket in the loving presence of a family I thought unassailable. I see my mother in a full color photo, and it takes colorto capture her vitality and beauty. How she lit up everyone’s path that crossed hers! I thought all these photos long gone due to the frequent unplanned moves and narrow escapes of my childhood. I imagined these photos left atop a forgotten hall closet of a rental house or tiny apartment from which we fled.
Yet here they are, and they have set me to remembering. It is painful to see them all alive and to even see myself before the family wars ensued. And yet I mostly see grace etched across every photo. Christ is the backdrop of these celluloid keepsakes. He forgot not one of us, and neither will Christ forget you.
We shouldn’t miss it for the world!