Sacred Memory (Sermon)

“Sacred Memory”

Psalm 66

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/3/15

         I’m Presbyterian through-and-through, and gratefully so. But we “frozen chosen” can certainly learn from our spiritual kindred who embrace the idea of testimony a little more warmly. Now, living in a storytelling atmosphere, Jonesborough Presbyterians may have a slight edge because at its heart, that is exactly what testimony is – storytelling.

         “Come and see what God has done!” cries the psalmist.

He calls specific attention to the Exodus, but Psalm 66 is not directed toward Israel’s story alone. The psalmist turns outward, toward the nations and declares to anyone who will listen the wonderful story of what God has done and is doing for him, for Israel, and for all creation.

         Like much of the storytelling we hear from professional tellers, testimony is more than entertainment. At the heart of testimony lies an intimate and sacred memory of God’s active presence in the world.

         Here’s the rub, though: It is a biased memory. As a library of testimonies, scripture is the collective memory of countless generations of people who claim to have experienced God through all manner of heroes and villains, joys and sorrows, teachings and dreams, things that many people dismiss as wishful thinking, superstition, or even neuroses. It achieves nothing to argue about who is right or wrong on this. Testimonies are faith statements that can no more be proved than disproved, and sharing them can be a little risky. Telling a personal memory in which we claim to have experienced the presence and Love of God can leave us vulnerable to ridicule and self-doubt. Among other things, the psalms affirm those who claim a sacred memory, and they encourage all of us to keep hearts and minds open to the often-hidden but always reliable Yahweh.

         The writer of Psalm 66 praises God for faithfulness and goodness, but his praise does not deny that even the most blessed of lives include experiences of heartbreak, torment even. He praises God for delivering Israel from Pharaoh and shepherding the Hebrews through the wilderness. And he does this with candid but poetic passion because experiences of slavery and exodus are not only painfully real, they are continually real. Each generation of Hebrews learns this for itself, and each generation then learns to sing the words of Psalm 66 for itself.

         “You have tested us. You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water.”

         The psalmist does not get specific, and that’s intentional. His generalities invite both individuals and communities to remember all their own shadowed and deathly valleys. None of us need reminding that life includes suffering. But we all need reminding that faith is the holy “in spite of” through which we remember and claim God’s presence even when we all we remember feeling is God’s absence. Lament and praise, says the psalmist, are two sides of the same coin.

         Years ago Marianne and I watched a documentary on PBS. The title had hooked us. It was called God Grew Tired of Us, and it tells the story – the nightmare – of the Lost Boys of Sudan. The Lost Boys spent several years wandering the wilderness of east Africa trying to escape their country’s brutal civil war. Their journey from Sudan was part Hebrew Exodus and part Bataan Death March. After some four or five years of wandering, the boys ended up in the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya. Life there was only marginally better, but they were not being tortured and killed.

         In 2001, the US government agreed to help 3600 of the young men relocate to various places in America. The film focuses on three of the Lost Boys, and takes us into their hearts and minds as they wrestle with the profound challenges of transitioning from an impoverished but very community-oriented culture to an environment of individualism and excess. One of the most daunting tasks for many of the Lost Boys was to try to make peace with their new life while remembering both the life they had left behind and their brothers who were still living it.

One of the young men featured in the film is named John Dau. John Dau stands just shy of seven feet tall. He is beanpole thin. He remembers that while the boys were making their horrifying passage, despair caused them feel as if God had grown tired of them, and of all humanity. They felt as if God were just allowing the world to grind to a dark and violent halt.

         John’s height thrust him into a leadership role among the wandering brotherhood. One of his jobs was arranging burials for those who died along the way.

“Imagine,” he says, “Learning to bury at 13. It was very bad. It was very bad.” By the time the boys reached Kenya, their numbers had fallen from 27,000 to 12,000. They buried 15,000 boys, an average of 8 per day.

         “You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water.”

         The psalmist and the Lost Boys have drunk deeply from the same well of suffering. But suffering is not all they share.

John Dau looks back now and says, “God was with us, anyway.”

The psalmist says, “Yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.”

“A place of abundance,” says the NIV.

“A well-watered place,” says The Message.

         It is not likely that the writer of Psalm 66 experienced the Exodus, but he lived through his own “toils and snares.” Just as the Lost Boys did.  Just as each of us does. We cannot avoid soul-crushing burdens, the confines of nets, the struggles of “fire and water.” Such things are endemic to the human story. And yet, through the holy, “in spite of” lens of faith, we look back and recognize God’s presence even when apparent evidence to the contrary would tempt us to deny it. Faith is the container for our sacred memory. It inspires our testimony, our sacred storytelling.

         “Come and see what God has done; he is awesome in his deeds among mortals. For you have tested us; you have tried us as silver…yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.”

In that spacious place, we have the opportunity to see that trials do not defeat us. Indeed, they may strengthen us, deepen our faith, and make us whole.

         The table before us is set with a foretaste of God’s most spacious and abundant place. It is a place of lament and praise. A place of sacred memory. It is a place where we claim the holy “in spite of” of faith because it is a place of Resurrection. And in the spacious eternity of Christ’s table, there is and will always be room for everyone.