The book of Deuteronomy is believed to be a series of speeches given by Moses to the Israelites who were preparing to enter the land of promise after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. For forty years the Israelites had been wandering in the desert and they were finally about to settle down and begin the life for which their parents and grandparents had longed. Moses would not get to go with them; he had already learned from God that he would not enter the land of promise. But he wanted to make sure that the people were prepared for the life that awaited them there, a life that, compared to their decades of wandering in the wilderness and subsisting on manna, would be the very definition of down to earth. They would build homes, plant and harvest crops, and raise children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
And even though Moses wanted the people to have lives of creature comforts and stability, a life he never really knew, he also worried about what might happen to the people when life got easy. He was afraid that once they got settled the people would do the very thing we human beings do so well. They would forget where they came from. When they no longer lived in tents and scraped manna off the ground for their daily bread, when they became accustomed to a life of relative ease, when this happened--as Moses was confident it would--he waned the people to remember.
A man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease moved to a nursing home, where his memory slowly deteriorated until he no longer reliably recognized his wife of fifty-some years. Still, she visited him daily. One day, after entering his room, she asked him, “Do you remember who I am?” He looked at her hard for a moment and then said, “I don’t remember who you are but I remember that I love you.”
Memories--of people, places, events--help us make sense of our lives. Memories enable us to construct and understand our identity, as individuals, as families, as races, as nations. And the memories that define us don’t have to be our memories; they are just as likely to be memories passed down to us from our parents and grandparents or even from teachers and history books. Of all the things Moses wanted the people to do once they had settled comfortably in the land of promise, the most important was for them to remember how they got there.
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What pictures do you carry around in your wallet? Pictures of your children, your grandchildren? Perhaps a picture of the last vacation when all the family was together? A couple of years ago, I was talking to a stranger on a airplane. When he found out I had children, he asked to see pictures. After I showed him the pictures of the kids in my wallet, I asked if he had any pictures of his grandchildren, whom he had told me about with the naked pride of a loving grandfather. He opened his wallet and instead of glossy, color photos of smiling children, he withdrew a creased, black and white photograph, torn around the edges. The photo featured an unsmiling couple. The man wore a suit with no tie; the woman wore a wedding dress. “These are my grandparents,” the man told me. “They were married in 1913. Grandma’s wedding dress cost $14, and Grandpa’s suit cost $35. Eighteen years later, Grandpa died plowing his field with a team of horses; the horses got spooked and they dragged him to death. Grandma never remarried. She raised the children and helped raise me and my siblings, too, after our dad, one of her two sons, died in the war. I always remember her praying. Don’t get me wrong,” he said, as if he should apologize. “I love my kids and my grandkids are the light of my life. But without these two people, none of us would be here -- not me and not any of them.” (1)
Without memory, we have nothing to anchor our lives...nothing, that is, but the present moment. And if we only rely on the present moment to try to understand who we are, we will flounder. A friend of mine once visited a church which had an iron-clad rule for worship: they would not sing a song or hymn that was more than fifteen years old. I might be able to understand such a rule in a nightclub that was trying to stay hip, but a church? Songs and prayers and creeds from the past are the very things that teach us who God is and who we are as God’s people.
Say this, Moses told the people: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien...and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us...we cried to the Lord...the Lord heard our voice and...and the Lord brought us out of Egypt...and gave us this land...flowing with milk and honey.”
Moses wanted the people to remember where they came from because if they did they would surely remember God, whose love and grace and power in the past had given the people the present in the land of promise and hope for future generations.
“Remember that Jesus never asks anybody to simply think about him, or agree with him,” William Willimon once wrote. “I think...the church makes a big mistake in presenting the Christian faith as a set of principles, a set of ideas to agree to. We ought to present the Christian faith as a set of PRACTICES—things that we do, a way of life, something that we take up and follow, a way of walking behind Jesus of Nazareth, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” (2)
Even before the great acts of God in Jesus Christ, Moses understood that telling the people to remember their past would not be enough. Like us, they needed not just pictures in their wallets to remind them where they came from, they needed things to do to put those memories into action. So he tells them to do more than just remember. Moses gives them practices. And the first to return the first fruits of their harvests to God.
When the Israelites harvested their crops and set aside the very first stalks of wheat, ripe pomegranates, and juicy olives for God, it was a tangible act of remembering that the land from which these fruits were harvested was a generous gift from a loving God. But giving away the first fruits is a present act too, an act of sacrifice since it is no easy thing to give away the first ripe crops when you have patiently tended them for a growing season. Returning the first fruits of God is also an act of faith in the future; an act of trust that by God’s grace there will be more fruit to follow, enough to meet the people’s needs.
Moses also tells the people that once they have given their first fruits to God, they should have a big party to celebrate the bounty of the land...a party not just for their group of insiders who all shared a common history, a common set of memories. Moses tells them to invite outsiders to the party as well, Levites--who had entered the land of promise but did not receive land for themselves--and the so-called “aliens,” the the non-Israelites who lived in the land. Moses knew that if the people continually remembered their history and their ancestors, then they couldn’t help but remember that they came from people who had often been strangers in strange lands, aliens themselves, and so the people should reach out to the aliens among them and share their bounty with them.
Deborah spent years running the streets, consumed by prostitution and drugs. Her chaotic and out of control life was her birthright; in a sense, it was the creased and damaged photograph she carried around. You see, she had inherited her mental illness from her parents. She learned to steal from her mother. Her mother’s boyfriends taught her the skills to be a prostitute before she was a teenager. During her years on the streets, Deborah ran up over $30,000 in debt from her emergency room visits and transports to local detoxification clinics. Deborah was arrested a dozen times a year, spending on average a 100 days a year in jail. Deborah’s life changed in when she realized she had to change her life or die on the streets. So Deborah got an apartment through a homeless shelter. The shelter provided her not just a bed and a meal, but also connection and care around the clock. The catch was she would have to be clean and sober; get on (and stay on) her mental health medication; and find a legitimate source of income. (3)
That shelter that finally saved Deborah’s life was a ministry run by a church. That church was full of people who remembered what God had done for them, and those memories inspired them to return their first fruits to the church and then to reach out and share the bounty with others through missions like that shelter. Through such ministries they made the memory of God’s grace a present reality for Deborah and many others like her, people who did not have their own memories of God but who could benefit from the memories of others.
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Today is the first Sunday of Lent, and we begin this season by celebrating together the Lord’s Supper. For Christians, this celebration is the equivalent of reaching into our wallets and pulling out a worn and faded picture. As we hear and speak the familiar words of the communion liturgy, as we observe the ritual of elders passing out the squares of bread and the thimblefuls of juice, as we taste the familiar flavors on our tongues we receive once again God’s gifts of the past, present, and future. This meal is a picture we pull out time and time again to remember where we came from, to remember whose we are, to remember the sacrifices that brought us here. We begin this season of Lent by remembering God’s gracious actions, not just for us, but for a wandering Aramean, for a people wandering in the wilderness, for Mary and Joseph in Nazareth, for a man named Jesus, and for generations of his faithful followers. We turn these memories into practices by offering the first fruits of our lives to God and by inviting the strangers in our midst to join the celebration. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. See the photo this story is based on here under “Friesen.”
2. William Willimon, Pulpit Digest, Logos Productions, January 2007, quoted in a sermon by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, "Deeper" at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, Feb. 7, 2010.
3. From a sermon preached by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, "Deeper," at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, Feb. 7, 2010.
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