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A Certain Kind of Forgetting Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 25, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 65:17-25 Acts 9:1-22
On this Sunday when the nation remembers those who have given their lives for our freedom to worship God as we please, we would do well to consider not only the significance of remembering, but also a certain kind of forgetting. What would human existence look like were we to live in response to the God who not only forgives, but forgets? By and large, throughout the biblical witness, God’s apparent forgetfulness is cause for human lament. “How long, O Lord?” cries the psalmist. “Wilt thou forget me forever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” Or again, “I say to God, my rock: ‘Why hast thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?’” There are also prayers spoken imploring God to remember: “Forget not the congregation of thy poor forever!” “Remember, O Lord, thy tender mercies and thy loving kindness; for they have been ever of old.” And then there are the poignant words of the 77th psalm, “Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” We have prayed these words, you and I. We pray them in times when life closes in and death knocks at our door. We pray them when friends turn against us and there is no help. We pray them when enemies hunt us down and there is no place to hide. We pray them when we cannot pray, believing God to be far removed from our cries…wondering if God “is” at all. I cannot imagine the prayers that have issued from battlefields as enemy fire felled soldiers all around, leaving one alone to cry, “Nay for thy sake we are slain all the day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? …Why dost thou forget our affliction and oppression?” From the human perspective, God’s silence leads us to believe that we have to do with a God who simply forgets. And perhaps that is why, as if in self-defense, we believe we need to remember and hold on fiercely to the wrongs done, the battles fought, the injustices committed throughout human history. “To forget,” said Elie Wiesel, “would be the enemy’s final triumph….Remember….Remember that you were a slave in Egypt. Remember to sanctify the Sabbath….Remember Amalek, who wanted to annihilate you….No other Biblical Commandment is as persistent. Jews live and grow under the sign of memory,” says Wiesel…as do Christians who take and eat in remembrance of Him who gave his life that all might have life and life abundantly. But human memory is a complex and varied gift of God, a gift as subject to sin in retrospect as it is formative of human identity in prospect. Writes Columbia professor Stephen Hall in his review of The Seven Sins of Memory, “We intuitively recognize that memory, miraculously etched and preserved in the architecture of millions upon millions of synapses, is the neural sum of who we are, have been and hope to be. To lose memory is to lose our sense of self.” How well many of you know there is no more stark a reminder of this loss of self than the long good bye said to a parent or spouse or friend stricken with Alzheimer’s disease. Yet short of pathology Hall concludes, “The ability to forget is in some ways as important as the ability to remember. Forgetting--also a biological phenomenon--provides a mechanism of neural triage.” So Wiesel, in answer to accusations asserting his own forgetting of the Holocaust for mercenary gain, addressed the dialectic of memory's saving and sinful potential. “The critics,” Wiesel reports, critiquing him for speaking at an event honoring Thomas Middelhoff, a German CEO who was born in 1953, “have voiced objections to what they perceive as an unduly hasty act of forgiveness…. ‘Even a hundred years will be too soon,’” wrote one, for a Jew to honor a German. “Of course,” Wiesel responds, “Jews must never--and will never--forget the Jewish tragedy that marked the last century and will haunt all centuries to come. To forget would be a sin. To remember is essential; it is a worthy endeavor, a noble cause for which many of us have fought relentlessly. But does it justify intolerance? …Hatred,” he concludes, “does not serve memory.” The question is not only what we must remember as a nation or a culture, as individuals or as followers of Jesus Christ, but why and how and to what end. The most obvious end would be that we hold on to the past, as the saying goes, so history will not be repeated. The mind learns from past wrongs and therefore acts to protect us against those who have done us harm and may do us harm again. Not only the Jews but all of humanity must remember the Holocaust, and to the Holocaust we may add a host of wholesale slaughters throughout history: we must remember lest we forget the annihilating power of human evil. “If the victims remember rightly” says Miroslav Volf, “the memory of inhumanities past will shield both them and all of us against future inhumanities; if the perpetrators remember rightly, the memory of their wrongdoing will help restore their guilty past and transform it into the soil on which a more hopeful future can grow.” Perhaps. But more to the point of human history, human beings seldom remember rightly. Both victims and perpetrators remember wrongly for all the logically right reasons: remember with tit-for-tat justice if the end in mind includes taking the high road…remember with eye-for-eye revenge if the end in mind involves taking the road more often traveled. Furthermore, perpetrators have an uncanny inclination to remember themselves as victims even as victims learn well the ways of hatred by being the object of another’s hatred over the course of a lifetime. We need only turn on the news to watch what happens as remembered wrongs call forth retaliation between Sunni and Shi’a, between Palestinian and Jew, between black and white on our own city streets or as the unspoken subtext of our electoral politics. Consider as well the history of religion and note how memory has served neither the cause of reconciliation or redemption but division and distrust. Then finally walk in the door of the place you call home: sometimes we need only turn the key to our own hearts for evidence of memory used to deepen wounds rather than heal them. What to do? Were we able to stop the cycle of violence by some colossal act of collective forgiveness--end the spiraling loss of soul which hatred and distrust set in motion, devise structures and processes whereby human beings could work out their differences with civility and in safety--still I suspect we would remember as those whose memories have yet to be redeemed. Think of marriages that have survived infidelity and betrayal such that two people manage to make a life together again, albeit on altered grounds: there forgiveness is the only hope for the future, but seldom can the human heart really forget the past. Think of communities which have excluded and discriminated, but now manage to reorder the common life toward equality and justice: there may be a new order, but if the racial divide in this country is any clue—if 77% of the voters can walk out of the voting booth in Kentucky and, without blinking an eye, tell an exit pollster that their vote was based on race--then the memory of slavery still holds sway. Think of nation-states which once were enemies and have been turned, by politics or economics, into allies: there is another chapter being written, but the previous chapters continue to harbor ancient distrust. That is how it is with unredeemed human remembering between birth and death. But how will it be “when the tears have dried up and death and pain are no more, what will happen [eternally]” asks Volf, “with the memories of the wounds suffered and the inhumanity of those who inflicted them? When God restores what has been lost, how will the experience of the loss be restored?” We think we are right to believe that the God who has seemingly forgotten us on earth will be the God who makes up for every injustice done to us eternally. There should be consequences forever, consequences which will divide the good from evil doers, right from wrong, just from unjust, believer from reprobate. Then all will be well and all manner of things will be well. Yet think again, for such a paradise can only turn on pain remembered forever. We come by this understanding of paradise honestly. Scripture reveals, again and again, the God who judges--who “keeps the memory of sin long enough for repentance and transformation” to be accomplished by God’s grace and not our own gumption. But at the end, there is the promise in Isaiah and, more to the point, in the Book of Revelation, of the God who finally forgets the former things, and in whose forgetting we are freed from the memory. How else could there be a kingdom where “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. [Where] they shall not hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain” or “a new heaven and a new earth where the first heaven and earth has passed away and there is no more death, neither sorrow nor crying nor any more pain, for the former things have passed away.” This is what human existence would look like--will look like when we live eternally in life of God, the God who not only forgives but forgets. One of the most dramatic glimpses of this kind of life was given on the Damascus road, the road where Saul’s murderous persecution of Jewish Christians was met by Christ’s claim upon a memory redeemed. How else could the one who breathed hatred later write: “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful, not arrogant or rude…”? How could God claim one so full of righteous revulsion to bear the gospel to the whole world were it not for God’s redemptive act of forgiving and forgetting? “Final redemption is unthinkable” concludes Volf, “without a certain kind of forgetting. Put starkly, the alternative is: either heaven or the memory of horror. Either heaven will have no monuments to keep the memory of the horrors alive, or it will be closer to hell than we would like to think. For if heaven cannot rectify Auschwitz, then the memory of Auschwitz must undo the experience of heaven. Redemption will be complete” says Volf, “only when the creation of ‘all things new’ is coupled with the passage of ‘all things old’ into…nonexistence and nonremembrance. When we reach the other side and the bridge connecting the new to the old is destroyed so as to prevent the old from ever invading the new, the last part of the bridge to disappear will be the memory of the old.” In the mean time my friends, how can we help each other inhabit this planet together and with diminished enmity until the kingdom comes? I think, in the mean time, we must remember as those who bear witness to injustice and refuse to be reconciled to it…yet we remember as those who look forward to a new heaven and a new earth because the first heaven and the first earth will pass away. In the mean time, we remember as those whose end is not vengeance and whose means are not violent…yet we remember as those whose hope is in the living God, the God who is able to bring to completion the good work begun by God in us all. In the mean time, we remember as those who are wise as serpents and innocent as doves, with our guard up and our arms open…yet we remember as those who take and eat near evidence of His love, at table with no one but sinners including ourselves, and served by Him who alone died to set us all, without exception, free. But more than all this, in the meantime, we remember as those who stand beneath God’s “paradoxical monument to forgetting…the cross.” There at the center of human history, “God forgets [our sins] the same way God forgives [our] sins”: by taking them away from us, at great price, and placing them on Him who has promised to remember and redeem even you and even me in paradise. He is the One we will meet, face to face, at the end of history’s horrors, and whose glory will be revealed in us such that the sufferings of this present time will not be worth comparing, for the former things will be forgotten for us by the God who--thank God--forgives and forgets. |