Come and Hear What God Has Done

the Reverend Dr. Robert Coughenour
guest preacher
United Church of Christ
Saint Petersburg, Fl.
August 7, 2011

Scripture: Psalm 66: 1-5,16; John 14:15-21

Come and Hear What God Has Done

Thesis: Our memories are essential components of our individual and corporate identities. This message treats of the biblical data of memory and some theological aspects of memory. The sermon wants to help us to consider the biblical, theological, and practical aspects of memories and aids to memory as they relate to your congregation. Perhaps we shall see once more that memories are for both healing and hope.

Recently I read a piece titled “The Stories We Tell Ourselves” written by Jon Meachem, former editor of Newsweek magazine and now executive VP of Random House Publishing Co. He wrote, “We are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories are necessarily rooted in our experience, and by how we interpret the experiences of others.” He calls rehearsing these stories of our individual lives, family and nation, “the mechanics of memory.” “What we choose to remember is critical,” he wrote, “since the narratives that play in our heads shape everything.” What an interesting notion when we apply it to our individual lives, and even to a congregation.

Come with me now as we have a look at the scriptures and what they tell us of a kind of remembering that should lead us to be moved in spirit and to be grateful. You will understand what I mean.

Memory is an essential component of who we are as individuals, and who we are as the body of Christ, the church. Where would we be without memory and aids to remembering? Memories are reservoirs of meaning. All those keepsakes we have in our homes prove it, and some of them are very precious indeed. The Bible has a lot to say about memory. It is a really important theme. No fewer than five different Hebrew words in the Old Testament are used for memory or remembering, and at least three words in the Greek New Testament. Literally hundreds of texts call God’s people to remember. Let’s have a quick look at what the Bible has to say.

First of all, the Bible tells us that God remembers. Seventy-three times it is said that God remembers. And God’s remembering always implies God’s movement toward the object of God’s memory. In most all the passages God’s memory includes both the great deeds of the past as well as God’s continued concern for God’s people in the future. What God remembers is especially important. God remembers the covenant made with the people, “to be their God and they would be God’s people.” God’s promises become the foundation of the people’s faith for themselves and for their children. To say that God remembers God’s people means that God is always moving out toward God’s people, to embrace, to love, to hold, to keep, to cherish, to correct, to save. Most important for us is what God does not remember. God says, “I will remember your sins no more.”

Secondly, the Bible tells us that Israel remembers. Ninety-four times in separate texts memory plays a significant role. Israel, God’s people remember God, remember God’s commandments, remember one’s own sins; remember special days such as the days of Exodus from Egypt, and the freedom from tyranny. Memory plays a central role in making Israel constantly aware of God’s benevolent action as well as aware of her own covenant pledge to be faithful to God. What memory does is to reconstitute the acts of God, as if they were happening all over again.

And that brings us to recognize that we also remember. Come to think of it, the entire Church Year is organized to emphasize our participation in the Lord’s saving acts. This view of the Bible and of history sees an historical event of the past as a happening. And the sense and significance of that event can be ours as well. I do not know how you read the Bible (if and when you do), but when I read these texts about God and God’s people, it is not simply reading words, not just some mental exercise, but a visceral one. I guess you could call it “entering into the text.” I feel it in my bones when I’m standing with the crowd when Moses comes down the mountain, or when I’m in the boat with the disciples and a huge storm comes up. I’m at the edge of the crowd when Jesus is teaching his beatitudes. I’m disheartened and horrified and frightened and feeling like a coward when I hang back at the edge of the people when they nail Jesus to the cross. I’m shocked along with May and Mary Magdalene when we run to the tomb and find it empty.

You are surely aware that the everyday life of any people is informed, shaped, directed by past events ; and future hopes are based on the interpreted past. That is what makes memory and aids to memory significant. In reading the Bible, learning biblical history, participating week by week in Christian worship something happens to us. All the biblical forms of communication are aids to memory; to narrate a story; recite a poem; pass along a law; to quote a proverb; to propound a riddle; all these recall again, and again, and again, with clarity, who God is, who we are. They shape our identity and they give us direction toward who we shall be. They give us a place to stand in the present. They give us an ethical and religious stance with our feet planted in the world we live in. We come, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, to have an identity.

As I watched Alzheimer’s disease progressively rob my mother of her mind, of her identity, her sensitivity, her compassion, her essential being, the links between memory and human consciousness, between memory and identity and lived reality became all too clear to me. And those who cared for her had to struggle to find ways to keep her remembering. It was a losing battle.

From the standpoint of a local congregation, we have to adopt some tangible method of rehearsing the corporate past of God’s people of whom we are a part. We must continue to read the bible intelligently, to worship meaningfully, to find ways to teach our children and ourselves; to tell others of our story of whose we are and whom we serve. We have to do this if we are to have a future and too be freed to act responsibly in the present.

Cultivating our memory is not simply a nice thing to do; I believe it is an essential discipline because the biblical message, the Good News of Jesus Christ, is aimed at reclaiming human life for God. It comes as no surprise to your congregation that the Gospel program includes the political, social and economic dimensions of life. Yours is a congregation that keeps remembering who you are and why you’re here.

I want to get very personal here; I trust you’ll hear the heart-felt encouragement in my words. I read very recently a book by a friend who summed up for me in a very sharp way my own past in the church. He wrote “The evangelical sub-culture in which I was raised was infiltrated by pernicious racism, captured by right-wing nationalism, absorbed with rampant materialism, and defended by haughty self-righteousness. But, it taught me to ask the right question. What about Jesus?” Well, I like your language as I found it on your web-site, and you do speak my language; acceptance, belonging, compassion, courage, creativity, diversity, joy, justice, peace. I like that you keep remembering that you have “found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus.” I like that you uphold a progressive Christianity, that you are a just peace congregation, that you are an open and affirming Church. And it’s not so much that I like it, but I believe yours is the way God through our Lord Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit has been saying all along!!

So my Christian friends I encourage you, each and every one, keep on keeping on, keep remembering, keeping bringing to mind what God has done in coming to this broken old world to make it right again. Keep on saying over and over to all you meet, these words of the Psalmist, “Come and hear, and I will tell you what God has done for me.”