Remembering Not to Forget

January 31, 2021 The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany The Rev. Mark Pendleton Christ Church, Exeter Remembering Not to Forget Epiphanies are moments when something is revealed. What had not been seen or known is now more fully in our sight and understood. There is an interesting twist in today's gospel reading about who it is that does the revealing. In the passage from Mark, Jesus is at the beginning of his ministry. He had returned to Galilee after his baptism and forty day in the wilderness of temptation to begin calling his followers. John the Baptist had been arrested. In the urgency of the now, Jesus entered a synagogue and began to teach. When one thinks about what Jesus spent most of his days doing it was teaching and healing. And then a man with an unclean spirit cried out, "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God." Mark 1:21-28 Even the unclean spirit knew who Jesus was and what he came to do. As followers of that same Jesus of Nazareth, in the back of our minds, at the center of our hearts and on the tips of our tongues we are all, in our own way, trying to work out this relationship of the one who stands with and between us -- and the God of creation. We pray to God in Christ's or in Jesus' name. If the stars in the heavens do not bring us closer to the mystery of the divine, we turn to the face of the one who became flesh and walked among us. And we find our way through darkness by returning and returning to all that he did and said. I thank our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry for his mission to reclaim the Jesus Movement as the purpose of our church, for before there was dogma and doctrine and church governance, Annual Meetings and vestries and buildings to maintain, there was a movement. There still is a movement. And like any movement, like waves on an ocean, life and energy must move and never stay in once place for too long. Jesus himself revealed his mission: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Luke 4:18 That is the mission that can be our guide through life. Justice and compassion, release from what holds us down and keeps us back, freedom from the inner voices that tells us we are worthless when God tells us that we, like his son Jesus, are beloved. This is the mission that can move us closer to light and further away from darkness. Closer to truth and away from falsehood. Closer what is real, and away from human-made idols that distort who God is. Like many, I was struck from what the President said on the night before his inauguration. Looking out at the Reflecting Pool, surrounded by 400 lights to commemorate the 400,000 victims of the coronavirus, Joe Biden said: "To heal, we must remember." Five words that stood out more than so many others that have been left unsaid. He continued: "It's hard sometimes to remember. But that's how we heal. It's important to do that as a nation. That's why we're here today. Between sundown and dusk, let us shine the lights in the darkness along the sacred pool of reflection and remember all whom we lost." These are the words of faith - healing and remembering - spoken by a devout man and only this nation's second Roman Catholic President. This man is as imperfect as the next but one who has known loss and tragedy and with hope, by God's grace, can lead this nation to a brighter place. Remembering is how we grieve. Remembering is also how we learn. We look to history, to yesterday, to make our way through an event or crisis that we are experiencing in the now. We ask ourselves: have we felt this way before? Have we seen this or heard that before, and if so, what did we learn? Are we wiser today or has the world left too much scar tissue to allow us to feel much of anything? Knowing what we know today, will it change the way we act? Scores of writers and philosophers would tell us that we struggle to learn from history. Georg Hegel: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope reflected: "I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline." I think about my grandparent's generation. They spoke often about what it was like to live through the Great Depression -- the hardship and scarcity they remembered that shaped the rest of their lives. Others who lived through those years did not suffer in the same way if they had food on the table. I had a great Uncle who flew biplanes in WWI over Europe. I can only imagine what it was like to fight in a world war and also see the devastation of the great Spanish Influenza that hit just as our troops headed overseas. I have seen archival black and white grainy photos of that period of children and adults in bread lines on the streets of American cities - all wearing homemade masks. They knew, 100 years plus years ago. It is possible to learn from history. Ancient cultures knew about quarantines and isolating the sick, something that far too many failed to learn. The reason we gather to read and listen to Scripture is that it teaches us about the why of God. It tells the story of creation, the calling the people of Israel to be the first to receive this news, it lists the many prophets who speak on God's behalf, and for Christians it presents to us the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We read again and again, over and over again, about his life, his teachings, his values, his power, his embrace of the world, and about his death and resurrection. We retell this story every time we celebrate Holy Eucharist. How he promised to be present with his followers forever. We read and learn as our way to remember to remember. To remember not to forget. In Scripture, we are reminded of the covenant that God has made with God's people. We hear from Deuteronomy how Moses is the beginning, a protype, of the kind of prophets who will come after that will help God speak and the people to hear and listen. When I was rector of a very diverse congregation in suburban Maryland just outside of Washington, we were struggling how to communicate and educate our members about why they should care about contributing or financially supporting the church. We came up with a new name of the effort that year: From Contract to Covenant. Our objective was to distinguish between a written legal agreement - a contract - that is negotiated between two parties, that can end when the terms expire - with that of Covenant. Contracts can be broken. Covenants in Scripture are forever. God is our God, and we are God's people. In baptism we are marked as Christ's own forever. Another recurring theme in Scripture is idolatry. I remember an opening line from a book I read in seminary that stated that the problem the Bible addresses is not atheism. Atheism may be something people wrestle with today, but not back then. The problem was idolatry. God put it near the top of the Ten Commandments. (Exodus 20:4-5) You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God. Idolatry has always been and perhaps always will tempt and challenge us. After all, who wouldn't want to replace an invisible God with a projection or a replacement and form it into something we can name, worship, control, give loyalty and devotion to if it feeds our needs. Idols are distractions. Idols are pale replacements for what is real. A prayer that I have shared in recent weeks offers these words: O God who illuminates the darkness help us smash the heavy idols we hold, so that we may live freely and lightly in Jesus Christ our Lord. The challenge of idols confronted the apostle Paul when we arrived in Corinth, one of the most important cities in Greece where pagan temples were in abundance. Paul founded the church in Corinth. Paul walks us through his argument and what he sees as the danger of weaponizing knowledge. 1 Cor. 8:1: "We know that 'all of us possess knowledge.' Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him." So, it is not the knowing that is as important as being known. What Paul is describing is the power that comes with knowledge and the influence it can have over those he calls weak. When it came to eating meat offered to idols, some of those with puffed up knowledge thought: "what the heck - it's just meat after all." What harm can it do to us if we reject the idols it was offered to. And he calls out their over-size influence. They are not being careful with others in the community who do not think as they do. In Paul's view, if eating meat is causing confusion: "I will not eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall." A challenge before us in the exchange of ideas and experiences with those we meet - or often avoid -- is how not to use puffed up knowledge to shame those who may not know or have not heard or have been swayed by false arguments. We as a people have come through a bruising election during a Pandemic when lies and truth were up for grabs to a point of insurrection. To me there are no easy answers but only hard work to heal and repair relationships. And then there is truth. Truth is a word that gets tossed around quite a bit. And it was Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus who said: What is truth? John 18:38. Your truth, his truth, her truth: whose truth will prevail? Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life. John 14:6 What began at that synagogue that morning in Galilee was the beginning of reclaiming and reconsecrating the good from the evil, truth from falsehood, freedom from possession and oppression. Each and every day is about this newness. Let us embrace it with urgency of now. 2