When Imagination Replaces Memory
Sermon
Light in the Land of Shadows
Cycle B Sermons for Advent, Christmas, And Epiphany, First Lesson Texts
Object:
One of the fascinating aspects of being human is our ability to create time. We have memories and can literally sit in the present but remember and live in the past. On the other hand, we also have imaginations and can literally live in the future. We can sit here and imagine what we're going to do as soon as worship is over.
Most of our problems in life don't come from our imaginations. They come from our memories. The past presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, a lot of good things have happened to us. These things, if remembered, can give us great confidence in ourselves each day. Unfortunately we sometimes forget things we should remember. On the other hand, some bad things have happened to us. We can remember some things we should forget and let them become a lead weight, dragging us into despair. The prophet Isaiah confronts this two-edged sword.
It is a fact that we humans are what we are due to the way we edit our memories. We tend to be selective in terms of what we bring forward from our past.
You know how selective memory works. There are students who can memorize and bring forward the exact batting averages to the third decimal point of the entire starting lineup of the Philadelphia Phillies but can't remember Monday's history lecture. And some people, perhaps even in our audience, can remember their social club's entire creed and the names of all the members, but can't remember the two names of Abraham's sons.
Sometimes entire nations engage in selective memories. Consider the American Revolution. Our national consciousness remembers the determined colonial settler being pitted against the foreign forces of the King of England. Actually Americans fought Americans. Benjamin Franklin stopped speaking to his Tory son. Only a third of the colonists actively supported the war, and we are told by the historians that nearly as many Americans fought for Britain as fought against Britain.1
And consider our wonderful memories of Christopher Columbus. When he arrived in the New World he frequently hanged thirteen Indians at a time in honor of the twelve apostles and Jesus. Every male over fourteen years of age had to bring a quota of gold every three months to the conquistadors. Those who could not pay this had their hands cut off "as a lesson." Half the 250,000 Indians on Haiti had been murdered or mutilated or had committed suicide within the first two years following Columbus' discovery of the New World.2
Remember and forget. Much of who we are as people and as nations revolves around how we edit our memories. Psychologists assure us that the seeds of so many difficulties we experience in adult life were sown in childhood. Many of our fears, inhibitions, phobias, or what not, come to us out of early childhood experiences which we have not forgotten. We leave our childhood behind and come to young adulthood but those ghosts from the past can pursue us. We can leave young adulthood behind and the ghosts from our college experiences can pursue us right into our graves.
This is no small matter. How timeless are the truths we find in the Bible about human life. There is an amazing event in the account of the Israelites' flight from Egypt. At one point the Angel of God, which went before the Israelites as a cloud, had to go stand behind them to help them close the door on their past. At that juncture it was not so much the threat of the Red Sea in front of the people that created the panic as it was the hosts of Egypt behind them. Harold Cooke Phillips is quite correct: "Is it not true that often our greatest enemies are not those in front of us but those behind us?"3 Many of us worry about the job market, the future of our ever-warming planet, and the future threats, from AIDS to cancer. But is it not true that at our base level we, like the Israelites, are harassed not so much by the enemies we must one day meet as by the Egyptians we have already met? This is what makes life so difficult. We have these ghosts pursuing us. We think we have escaped, then we hear the clatter of their horses and see the dust of their chariots! These things harass us because we leave the doors of our memory partly open to them. At some point we must set the Lord our God not only before us but behind us -- between us and those memories from the past.
One of Epiphany's wonders is God's capacity to break up old patterns of reality and permit us to begin anew. The lectionary text from Isaiah serves as a pivotal point in Israel's understanding of her mission. She is called to make a sharp break between her past and her future. Her circumstances are to be transformed. Her death to her past will become her very future as she replaces her memories of suffering and abuse with an awareness of God's generous new future.
In this respect Jesus' words have some healing power. "Love your enemies! Bless those who persecute you. Turn the other cheek. If someone asks you to carry his pack one mile, you carry it two miles." Forgive people, how much, seventy times seven? Why this absurdity? "Parents, don't provoke your children to anger." What is this nonsense? Why?
We close the door, my friends. We make ourselves fit for our future. The parents of the Jivaro tribe of Indians in Ecuador have an amazing custom. Every night, when their children go to bed, they linger by their bedsides. They whisper into the ears of the children the names of all the people they must hate when they are older. This is the tribal way of keeping its feuds alive from generation to generation.
The adults can keep their hatred and negativity alive in the minds of their children. Like an acid in the soul, the constant remembrance of evil can eat away at each generation. Such selected memory is a horrible thing.
It creates a lack of emotional confidence in life for each succeeding generation. Very precious things are ruined by keeping old grudges, resentments, and vexations in mind. There are some things we have to forget. If we remember all the hurt we have experienced, life becomes clogged and choked. Life is essentially a process of managing our memories. We should constantly sort out our memories, throwing away things we ought to forget and keeping things that are precious. We either manage our memories or they manage us.
This is easy to say and hard to realize. It is not human nature to forget our unpleasant experiences and remember the good. In fact, Ford Motor Company once conducted a survey among its customers. Ford discovered that the person who has had a positive experience with the car he purchases tells an average of two other persons about that good experience. But the customer who has purchased a lemon of an automobile or had a bad experience with the service department tells an average of thirteen other persons. That's the way we humans are: we remember the ugliness and forget the beauty; we hold to the hate and let go of the love; we remember the cruelty rather than the kindness.
One of the amazing tendencies in life is the ability of evil in the world to shake our faith in God. We all worry about the problem of evil. We study Death and Dying and the Theodicy issue, which, simply put, means if God is all powerful, all knowing, and all loving, why do good things happen to bad people and bad things to good people?
But isn't the presence of good just as big an issue? If there is no God, how do we explain the good? Where did it come from? Isn't the problem of good as big an issue as the problem of evil? How do we account for the beauty of Beethoven, the compassion of Martin Luther King, or the courage of Joan of Arc? Was Jesus merely an accidental collection of atoms?
We should be careful what we remember. There are painful failures in life. There are ghosts from our past that come charging into our present. There are doors that we have to struggle to keep shut. But that is not all of life. In each of us there are some happy memories of times when fortune, even if only for a little while, turned in our favor. Those memories are there to give us joy and confidence, almost like secret helpers, if we do not let the ghosts crowd them out.
Memories are in our lives to strengthen us. And the greatest strength and peace we can know is to get in touch with our childhood knowledge of love. This will take some managing. Some of us need to recast the memories we have of relationships with our father or mother into adult terms. Some of us have been moving through life feeling unblessed. We go through life, even if those parents are long ago dead, forever seeking mother's approval or father's approval. Memories gallop into the present from the past.
One of the greatest powers in life is to have our God move behind us and protect us from those crippling memories. And all of us have them. It is a truly adult and Christian experience to recast our past and maybe see now that a father's love was there but was overshadowed by a misguided life or the demands of survival.
In like manner, how wonderful to realize a mother's love was there but was overshadowed by a misguided life or by the demands of survival. Instead of forever seeking our father's approval or our mother's approval, we may have to put God back there and find the ways in which our parents were truly imperfect and truly human like us. Making peace, whether face-to-face or in the memory of a relationship, gives us tremendous strength. It also grants us the adulthood we desperately need. We can forget and then we can remember. You see, when we make peace with our past in our own mind, the strength of our father and mother, and the strength of their father and mother become a wellspring in our own lives.4
One of the amazing sagas of recorded history lies in the relationship between Israel and Egypt. With the power of God standing behind her, Israel closed the door on the ghosts of Egypt chasing her. And as her future unfolded, Israel drew strength from an unusual source. In her battle with Assyria, her strongest ally was Egypt. In her battle with Babylon, her strongest ally was Egypt. When Nebuchadnezzar had sacked the temple and slaughtered its priests, the prophet Jeremiah was rescued by Egypt. And in the bleakest days of our recent past as Scud missiles pounded into Tel Aviv from Iraq, Israelis sat huddled in buildings, gas masks on their faces, little children hugging desperately to their mothers' sides, and their only hope the Patriot missiles being off-loaded at ports in Egypt.
Consider this Scripture and thought. Matthew 2:13-15 states:
When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him."
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.
What a marvelous "new thing" was this miracle as the Holy Family made its way toward Egypt. It totally transformed the circumstances of heritage. Exile became homecoming as the past was scuttled and forgotten. Just as Isaiah had offered assurance, long centuries before, that the people would be redeemed from even their own worst mistakes, so was God once again moving beyond the accumulated wrongful acts in his people's past. Old patterns of reality were breaking up so new realities could begin.
Collectively, socially, and personally the old patterns are there for us: an agrarian heritage; the white, male establishment; a Civil War, still the precursor of much sectionalism; memories of Vietnam. These civilization points converge with individual remembrances of vocational anxiety, the arguments with the spouse and children and the church that at some point was less than it could have been. One of Epiphany's wonders is God's capacity to break up the old patterns of reality and permit us to begin anew. So be it.
____________
1. Richard Shenkman, Legends, Lies, and Myths (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988), p. 84.
2. Winona Laduke, "We Are Still Here," Sojourners (October, 1991), p. 12.
3. Harold Cooke Phillips, "Closing the Door," in Sunday Evening Sermons, edited by Alton M. Motter (New York: Harper), p. 91.
4. Hazelden Meditations, June 15, 1986.
Most of our problems in life don't come from our imaginations. They come from our memories. The past presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, a lot of good things have happened to us. These things, if remembered, can give us great confidence in ourselves each day. Unfortunately we sometimes forget things we should remember. On the other hand, some bad things have happened to us. We can remember some things we should forget and let them become a lead weight, dragging us into despair. The prophet Isaiah confronts this two-edged sword.
It is a fact that we humans are what we are due to the way we edit our memories. We tend to be selective in terms of what we bring forward from our past.
You know how selective memory works. There are students who can memorize and bring forward the exact batting averages to the third decimal point of the entire starting lineup of the Philadelphia Phillies but can't remember Monday's history lecture. And some people, perhaps even in our audience, can remember their social club's entire creed and the names of all the members, but can't remember the two names of Abraham's sons.
Sometimes entire nations engage in selective memories. Consider the American Revolution. Our national consciousness remembers the determined colonial settler being pitted against the foreign forces of the King of England. Actually Americans fought Americans. Benjamin Franklin stopped speaking to his Tory son. Only a third of the colonists actively supported the war, and we are told by the historians that nearly as many Americans fought for Britain as fought against Britain.1
And consider our wonderful memories of Christopher Columbus. When he arrived in the New World he frequently hanged thirteen Indians at a time in honor of the twelve apostles and Jesus. Every male over fourteen years of age had to bring a quota of gold every three months to the conquistadors. Those who could not pay this had their hands cut off "as a lesson." Half the 250,000 Indians on Haiti had been murdered or mutilated or had committed suicide within the first two years following Columbus' discovery of the New World.2
Remember and forget. Much of who we are as people and as nations revolves around how we edit our memories. Psychologists assure us that the seeds of so many difficulties we experience in adult life were sown in childhood. Many of our fears, inhibitions, phobias, or what not, come to us out of early childhood experiences which we have not forgotten. We leave our childhood behind and come to young adulthood but those ghosts from the past can pursue us. We can leave young adulthood behind and the ghosts from our college experiences can pursue us right into our graves.
This is no small matter. How timeless are the truths we find in the Bible about human life. There is an amazing event in the account of the Israelites' flight from Egypt. At one point the Angel of God, which went before the Israelites as a cloud, had to go stand behind them to help them close the door on their past. At that juncture it was not so much the threat of the Red Sea in front of the people that created the panic as it was the hosts of Egypt behind them. Harold Cooke Phillips is quite correct: "Is it not true that often our greatest enemies are not those in front of us but those behind us?"3 Many of us worry about the job market, the future of our ever-warming planet, and the future threats, from AIDS to cancer. But is it not true that at our base level we, like the Israelites, are harassed not so much by the enemies we must one day meet as by the Egyptians we have already met? This is what makes life so difficult. We have these ghosts pursuing us. We think we have escaped, then we hear the clatter of their horses and see the dust of their chariots! These things harass us because we leave the doors of our memory partly open to them. At some point we must set the Lord our God not only before us but behind us -- between us and those memories from the past.
One of Epiphany's wonders is God's capacity to break up old patterns of reality and permit us to begin anew. The lectionary text from Isaiah serves as a pivotal point in Israel's understanding of her mission. She is called to make a sharp break between her past and her future. Her circumstances are to be transformed. Her death to her past will become her very future as she replaces her memories of suffering and abuse with an awareness of God's generous new future.
In this respect Jesus' words have some healing power. "Love your enemies! Bless those who persecute you. Turn the other cheek. If someone asks you to carry his pack one mile, you carry it two miles." Forgive people, how much, seventy times seven? Why this absurdity? "Parents, don't provoke your children to anger." What is this nonsense? Why?
We close the door, my friends. We make ourselves fit for our future. The parents of the Jivaro tribe of Indians in Ecuador have an amazing custom. Every night, when their children go to bed, they linger by their bedsides. They whisper into the ears of the children the names of all the people they must hate when they are older. This is the tribal way of keeping its feuds alive from generation to generation.
The adults can keep their hatred and negativity alive in the minds of their children. Like an acid in the soul, the constant remembrance of evil can eat away at each generation. Such selected memory is a horrible thing.
It creates a lack of emotional confidence in life for each succeeding generation. Very precious things are ruined by keeping old grudges, resentments, and vexations in mind. There are some things we have to forget. If we remember all the hurt we have experienced, life becomes clogged and choked. Life is essentially a process of managing our memories. We should constantly sort out our memories, throwing away things we ought to forget and keeping things that are precious. We either manage our memories or they manage us.
This is easy to say and hard to realize. It is not human nature to forget our unpleasant experiences and remember the good. In fact, Ford Motor Company once conducted a survey among its customers. Ford discovered that the person who has had a positive experience with the car he purchases tells an average of two other persons about that good experience. But the customer who has purchased a lemon of an automobile or had a bad experience with the service department tells an average of thirteen other persons. That's the way we humans are: we remember the ugliness and forget the beauty; we hold to the hate and let go of the love; we remember the cruelty rather than the kindness.
One of the amazing tendencies in life is the ability of evil in the world to shake our faith in God. We all worry about the problem of evil. We study Death and Dying and the Theodicy issue, which, simply put, means if God is all powerful, all knowing, and all loving, why do good things happen to bad people and bad things to good people?
But isn't the presence of good just as big an issue? If there is no God, how do we explain the good? Where did it come from? Isn't the problem of good as big an issue as the problem of evil? How do we account for the beauty of Beethoven, the compassion of Martin Luther King, or the courage of Joan of Arc? Was Jesus merely an accidental collection of atoms?
We should be careful what we remember. There are painful failures in life. There are ghosts from our past that come charging into our present. There are doors that we have to struggle to keep shut. But that is not all of life. In each of us there are some happy memories of times when fortune, even if only for a little while, turned in our favor. Those memories are there to give us joy and confidence, almost like secret helpers, if we do not let the ghosts crowd them out.
Memories are in our lives to strengthen us. And the greatest strength and peace we can know is to get in touch with our childhood knowledge of love. This will take some managing. Some of us need to recast the memories we have of relationships with our father or mother into adult terms. Some of us have been moving through life feeling unblessed. We go through life, even if those parents are long ago dead, forever seeking mother's approval or father's approval. Memories gallop into the present from the past.
One of the greatest powers in life is to have our God move behind us and protect us from those crippling memories. And all of us have them. It is a truly adult and Christian experience to recast our past and maybe see now that a father's love was there but was overshadowed by a misguided life or the demands of survival.
In like manner, how wonderful to realize a mother's love was there but was overshadowed by a misguided life or by the demands of survival. Instead of forever seeking our father's approval or our mother's approval, we may have to put God back there and find the ways in which our parents were truly imperfect and truly human like us. Making peace, whether face-to-face or in the memory of a relationship, gives us tremendous strength. It also grants us the adulthood we desperately need. We can forget and then we can remember. You see, when we make peace with our past in our own mind, the strength of our father and mother, and the strength of their father and mother become a wellspring in our own lives.4
One of the amazing sagas of recorded history lies in the relationship between Israel and Egypt. With the power of God standing behind her, Israel closed the door on the ghosts of Egypt chasing her. And as her future unfolded, Israel drew strength from an unusual source. In her battle with Assyria, her strongest ally was Egypt. In her battle with Babylon, her strongest ally was Egypt. When Nebuchadnezzar had sacked the temple and slaughtered its priests, the prophet Jeremiah was rescued by Egypt. And in the bleakest days of our recent past as Scud missiles pounded into Tel Aviv from Iraq, Israelis sat huddled in buildings, gas masks on their faces, little children hugging desperately to their mothers' sides, and their only hope the Patriot missiles being off-loaded at ports in Egypt.
Consider this Scripture and thought. Matthew 2:13-15 states:
When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him."
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.
What a marvelous "new thing" was this miracle as the Holy Family made its way toward Egypt. It totally transformed the circumstances of heritage. Exile became homecoming as the past was scuttled and forgotten. Just as Isaiah had offered assurance, long centuries before, that the people would be redeemed from even their own worst mistakes, so was God once again moving beyond the accumulated wrongful acts in his people's past. Old patterns of reality were breaking up so new realities could begin.
Collectively, socially, and personally the old patterns are there for us: an agrarian heritage; the white, male establishment; a Civil War, still the precursor of much sectionalism; memories of Vietnam. These civilization points converge with individual remembrances of vocational anxiety, the arguments with the spouse and children and the church that at some point was less than it could have been. One of Epiphany's wonders is God's capacity to break up the old patterns of reality and permit us to begin anew. So be it.
____________
1. Richard Shenkman, Legends, Lies, and Myths (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988), p. 84.
2. Winona Laduke, "We Are Still Here," Sojourners (October, 1991), p. 12.
3. Harold Cooke Phillips, "Closing the Door," in Sunday Evening Sermons, edited by Alton M. Motter (New York: Harper), p. 91.
4. Hazelden Meditations, June 15, 1986.
