REMEMBERING TOGETHER

October 2, 2022
17^th Sunday after Pentecost
World Communion Sunday
Lam.1:1-6; Ps.137; 2 Tim.: 1:1-14Lk. 17:5-10
Rev. Denise Clark-Jones

Just when you thought you were going to be relieved from hearing from Jeremiah’s tales of woe, today we hear from the poet of Lamentations, which does not sound like it’s going to be any more uplifting. The book of Lamentations is a collection of 5 poems written by someone who, like Jeremiah, experienced the downfall of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile. The poet is looking mournfully at the destruction of his beloved city, Jerusalem; his country, Judah; the temple; his friends, and his own house. He or she is experiencing loss like the people of Ukraine, the grieving families in Uvalde, Texas, and the hurricane victims in Puerto Rico and Florida are today. We can identify with the grief, which accompanies both communal and personal loss because we have all experienced it in one way or another.

The poet of Lamentations is experiencing the loss of identity, as one who belonged to a people, who once had God’s favor and promise, but now feels God’s anger and absence. By this point, all the people, who were not killed or considered too weak or insignificant to be a threat to their conquerors, had been marched to Babylon to live in exile, where they could be watched for any signs of insurrection. To make matters even more grievous, this tragedy did not have to happen. Judah had lost her memory of what God had done for the Jewish people in the past. They forgot that they had been blessed to be a blessing, and had been lured away from God to seek the false idols of power and wealth. They had stopped listening to God and followed the voices of their own egos. Short-term gains were pursued at the expense of long-term goals and the well-being of future generations.

Why do we read so much in the Old Testament about Israel’s downfall as an empire? It is because Israel’s demise followed the pattern of all empires that have fallen since. The prophets’ warnings continue to call out to God’s people. We would be naive and foolish to think that the places and institutions in which we live cannot be lost to us. They can be lost when the values of a culture and/or a nation’s leaders are antithetical to God’s Word, which demands justice, mercy, and peace. When Golden Calves are erected and become trophies in the battle of one nation against another and create conflict within its own people, empires rot from within. Israel and Judah’s plight, warns us that if we believe we have been adopted into God’s covenant with Abraham, we need to remember the purpose of that covenant. God blessed Abraham’s descendants to extend to all four corners of the world by serving as a light to all the nations; not to conquer, but to serve as an example of a righteous nation for others to emulate. If we also revere God’s covenant with Moses, we must remember that God gave the people the Law, which prescribed a way of life, so that all people may live together peacefully, and all can thrive. But such memories are easy to dismiss because they make us accountable and convict us when we, like the Israelites, create and submit to kingdoms that are not God’s kingdom.

Psalm 137 provides the response to the reading from Lamentations. The psalmist joins the poet in a duet of grief. The psalmist describes the intense sorrow of a people, who had lost everything, and evokes painful memories: “By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” (v.1)The rivers of Babylon are the famed Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that flowed through ancient Babylon and now flow through contemporary Iraq. The psalmist continues: “There our captors asked us for songs, saying ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (v.3-4) They were being asked to perform as happy slaves for their masters, being mocked for their absent God. There is grief, to be sure, but there is also an undertone of anger and resentment.

The last verses in the section of Psalm 137 are particularly difficult for us to read: “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (v.8-9) These hate-filled words are shocking until we recognize that these are not God’s words. The Psalms are poems written by human beings expressing their deepest emotions to God. The psalmists wrote about the human condition and psyche. The psalms express a wide range of human emotions: grief, anger, cynicism, as well as joy, awe, and hope. This psalmist reveals, in that last verse, the dark side of our souls. Anger and resentment can lead to thoughts of vengeance, harm, and even murder. Why do we read in several verses in the Old Testament about “dashing little ones against a rock?” It is because everyone knows when you take away the children of a community, you destroy its future. The biblical model for this was the Egyptian Pharoah’s order to the midwives to kill the male children of the Hebrew women, which was then re-enacted with Matthew’s story of King Herod ordering the murder of all male children under two in Judea to prevent the reported child-king from replacing him.

But it isn’t just murder that destroys the next generation. Future generations were denied a future beyond servitude when laws were enacted in the former Confederate states prohibiting teaching slaves to read or for schools to be formed for slave children. After slaves were freed and given the right to vote, former Confederate states enacted state laws that prevented people from voting who could not read, thus ensuring white supremacy carried on into the future. It is why Native American children were taken from their families and put in so called “Indian schools,” which punished them for speaking their native tongue and teaching them to be ashamed of who they were. Once grown and back on the reservation, they were kept in their submissive place by laws restricting their freedoms. Money earmarked to help Native Americans was diverted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to non-Native recipients. Sounds a lot like the current welfare scandal in Mississippi recently revealed, doesn’t it? In the recently aired documentary by Ken Burns on PBS, historical records were revealed that Hitler looked to the U.S. treatment of Native Americans and Jim Crow Laws to design his persecution of Jews in Germany, then the rest of Europe. Eventually, his policy was to kill all Jews, including children.

With the angry pen of an ancient poet, we see the reverberations of fear when a people desire to kill the future of an enemy people. When their former privileged and glorified status is taken away or threatened, these communities seek vengeance and retribution, which will continue to punish groups of people seen as the cause of their pain and suffering. This mentality has been exploited by the wealthy and politically powerful to engender animosity against non-whites as far back as the first hundred years of white colonization of “The New World,” which was not new, only new as a land that was controlled and dominated by European white people.

We continue to live in a socio-political climate in which white supremacy is blatantly pursued by lawmakers who seek to gain office or keep office by appealing to the activating primal fears and resentments with their false and vicious rhetoric. Yet, when we trade hate for hate, we become that which we hate. When we deal with our fears by becoming fearsome to others, we become controlled by our fears. We have seen this in civil wars throughout the globe, in war crimes, genocide, and terrorism. Week after week, we witness domestic terrorists, armed with assault rifles, who have experienced their own internal Babylons. We watch with tragic regularity, American terrorists, with memories of perceived injustices, spray bullets into crowds of vulnerable people, particularly school children, in retribution.

The psalmist’s bloodthirsty fantasy, to “take your little ones and dash them against the rock,” speaks to the tragic fact that when you kill a community’s children, you kill the future of that community. This is an important lesson for our society. When we give low priority to children’s health, education, and general welfare, we are taking away from our future as a nation. A self-serving attitude of concern only for our own children diminishes the future of all. Hope for the future is expressed in action in the present.

The hopeful words expressed in this first poem in Lamentations were born from the poet’s memory of God’s steadfast love, mercy, and faithfulness. Remembering God’s saving actions in the past ignites hope for the future. The poet gives voice to the true and reliable nature of God in the third poem of Lamentation:

“Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord…  but this I call
to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;²³they are new every morning; great is your
faithfulness. (Lam. 3:18-19, 22-23)

Simply stated, God is steadfast in love, merciful, and faithful and so we can have hope, no matter how dire our present circumstances are. Hope demands present action, but it can also require patience and waiting. At the center of Judah’s disobedience was the failure to wait for the Lord. In the desire to fulfill their hopes, they circumvented the path God had set for them. In their impatience, the community was fractured with one group hoarding wealth at the expense of others in the community. Today, we see how the tremendous wealth gap in our country has been created by trust in wealth.  Wealth has been used to manipulate the economic and political system to allow for easier access to wealth for those who are already wealthy and ensure the means of their hoarding wealth. Tax laws have been enacted which keep money out of the pool of money available for the common good of our whole society.

The poet of Lamentations encourages the people to support one another in their remembering. Hearing the poet’s grief process, preserved in these poems, reveals how memory led the poet to hope and to encourage the Jewish people to remember their collective memories of God from their shared history. These poems, describing the hardship of defeat and exile, were meant to empathize with the feelings of loss and to motivate their striving for a future that matched God’s dream with their own. For their hope to be a reality, they must join together in caring for one another and for future generations.

Likewise, our faith is strengthened by the remembering we do at the Lord’s Table when we celebrate communion. We remember the steadfast love of God through Christ who commanded we eat and drink together “in remembrance” of Him. We remember God’s steadfast love that sacrificed the Son for the sake of the whole world. The memories we intentionally invoke in the sacramental celebration of The Lord’s Supper constitute a hopeful act. We envision the fulfillment of God’s promise that we will partake of a heavenly banquet with all of God’s children. As one biblical commentator put it: “We need each other, the worldwide communion of believers, to support the collective memory of God, to be reminded of God’s present movement in the world and our lives, especially when our memory begins to fail.”

I often use a confessional prayer in my funeral liturgy in which I ask God “to redeem our memories.” Our memories, not all of which may be welcome, are redeemed when we remember the past joys with gratitude. At the Lord’s Table, we remember Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross and his steadfast love for humanity and God to the end of his life on earth. The gospels tell us that Christ’s resurrected body still bore the scars of crucifixion when he appeared to the disciples. These were the ones who would lead his ministry into the future. He did not want them to forget the past, but to remember his suffering and sacrifice for them when they took on his life-giving mission of healing a hungry and suffering world.

Christ commanded his disciples at his Last Supper to remember what he did for them, represented by the sharing of bread and wine. Jesus wanted them to remember his faithfulness, despite understanding they would not be faithful to him at his crucifixion. He wanted them to remember his mercy, steadfast love, and forgiveness. Even our little faith, perhaps as small as a mustard seed, maybe rekindled to burn warm and bright by the power of the Holy Spirit. The disciples’ place at the table was not secured through merit, and neither is ours. But with his gift of holy communion with us, we are shown mercy, love, and hope for the future in the kingdom of God. The symbolic act he did that evening in the Upper Room demonstrates his sacrifice so that our past is redeemed and our hope for the future can be born again.

When we come to the Lord’s Table, we remember that God created us to be in communion with one another, to need one another, and to love one another. We come together, with the blessed memory of what God, through Christ has done for us. God has forgiven us so that we are freed to forgive others, putting aside our fears, jealousies, and resentment. At this table, all Christians come together to share a vision for the future of God’s kingdom on earth.

Amen. May it be so!

© Rev. Denise Clark-Jones, 2022, All Rights Reserved
Westminster Presbyterian Church | 1420 W. Moss Ave. | Peoria, Illinois 61606
WestminsterPeoria.org  | 309.673.8501

“Why am I a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church?  Two words keep  floating up in a rather persistent way  –  “home” and  “family” – and I realized that it is an inescapable fact that is what this church means to me. During my 40 years here, so many life events have happened and Westminster has been there for me through all those times – good and bad.    It has been my home and family.  They say “home is where the heart is” and I’ve found the heart of Westminster to be as open and warm as a family’s!”