Advent sermon: Remembering (2) -- What will we remember?, Dec 9, 2018

The second Advent Sunday sermon

Remembering (2) 

What will we remember?

Celebrating this sacred time of Advent, I have been inviting everyone at Immanuel to think about the ‘three r’s’: remembering, resilience and revolutionary. Last Sunday, we reflected on some aspects of remembering: 

Remembering reminds us of where we came from as individuals and as a people; 

Remembering requires us to be truthful. 

Remembering tells us to go and touch again our foundational experiences, the unbreakable wisdom that has withstood, and will withstand, the test of time.

On this Second Sunday of Advent, I would like to ask, what will we remember?

In the Bible, there are many teachings on remembering. Indeed, the act of remembrance seems to be at the heart of the Torah and the Gospel. In faith, God is the remembering God.

Let’s begin with what Jesus said. Jesus liked to tell Kingdom parables, and one of them is, “The kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matthew 13:52). Jesus’ teaching style (“discipleship”) is about learning how to participate in a movement “Of old and new”, learning "An agile process of remembering and forgetting for the sake of obedient newness.” (Walter Brueggemann) 

In the Torah, remembering is, “Remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt.” 

For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread - the bread of affliction - because you came out of the land of Egypt in great haste, so that all the days of your life you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt. (Exodus)

What we learn from this passage on remembering the Passover, is that God commands us to remember our deliverance, when we are no longer enslaved, no longer hungry, no longer in need, and capable on our own. God wants us to remember the time of before self-sufficiency, before our autonomy, God wants us to remember the time of “wretched needfulness” which God answered with the free food of manna. The act of remembering is sacred, very appropriate for Advent, the time when we wait patiently for the coming of Jesus, because we are called to remember the wilderness sojourn when we were radically dependent on YHWH. 

Sacred remembrance is not easy. This act of remembering is not like remembering the dates of appointments, marked on the calendar. This remembering is often inconvenient and costly, because we strive to remember loving our neighbours, foreigners, prisoners, widows, the orphans and the poor of our contemporary time, not by lip service, but by daily service, out of love and not because it’s new policy, in our most ableist society, of the empire, of military armaments, of capitalism, of individualism. We remember, because we are called to live as the people of God, to live the oddity, the peculiarity, the costly inconvenience of facing society’s Giants even when they badger us with constant praise and promotion of the “beauty, youth, wealth, control, security, and limitless well-being” of independent selves. 

Here, another important aspect about remembering comes in. In remembering, it’s important to not remember too little, nor to remember too much. 

Remembering is a balancing act. If we remember too little, we lose the past’s reality in a rosy, unrealistic glow. If we remember too much, it feeds grief, and gives the wrong nutrition, the heartbreaking, constant reminder of our losses. If it is nostalgia, if we prefer the past to the future and resist to the newness that we should welcome, we have this obligation to “forget”, for the health of our being, for the health of the whole community. 

I think I might understand where that balance lies. When I was a youth, I was, (I admit that I still am, a little) a person who seemed to always be a little more excited than actually needed, for each new task in front of me. I am someone who is always open to start a new adventure, new approach, new possibility, new challenge. One wise member in my first congregation, who supported me in a very heart-felt way, came to my office one day (It was close to the day of my covenanting), and showed me the picture in this card,

 
and said, “When I first found this card in the store, it immediately reminded me of you, Ha Na. 'Come, come, come. Here. Look at that! I see an amazing thing there. Let’s go, and see,” always ready to move to where the new Sun rises up above the new horizon. New concepts, new knowledge always filled me quickly, my inquisitive mind, while my emotions were much slower to reach the surface of my consciousness, and notify me that they exist too. 

Lately, I’ve begun to more fully understand how my whole being is composed. Not just by getting older, but more importantly by experience, I begin to rediscover how deeply my birth culture is imbedded in my soul, something I devalued, because I didn’t like it and, later, I “disidentified” with it. Korean culture has meant ‘the patriarchy’ to me for a long time, and it still does. If you take an X-ray of Korea, the picture you get is the patriarchy, its backbone in black and white. These days, though, I have just begun to develop a new appreciation of the treasures in my culture. I have become the “master", like in today’s Gospel reading, who brings the “treasure", out of Korean culture and sees "what is new and what is old." What is old, very old, is that my Korean culture is a profoundly emotion-based culture. The root of all our speeches, the root of all our actions, the root of righteousness, benevolence, propriety, and intellect (those four primary virtues of our traditional religions) are emotions: joy (like blissful happiness), anger, deep grief/sorrow, and pleasure. The religions teach that the mind-state before these root emotions arise from within is Benevolence - the ground of love. 

The act of remembering is spiritual, because it involves our deep emotions. We understand ourselves through emotions. We understand others through emotions. Emotions are the root of our true knowledge. 

As we get older, we appreciate things more. We know that nothing happens by coincidence; everything, every matter is in the delicate, interconnected web of relations. Through life experience, we also learn how we can better appreciate the treasures of life, how to welcome them better, how to manage them, like relationships, friendships, traditions (which are more splendid than gold.) Then, as we mature, we begin to see that the treasures are not always abundant. We lose them. We lose friends. We lose loved ones. Then, because of our understanding that our losses are not always replaced, when we lose one, it can affect our happiness entirely, and sweep away our joy. We grieve. We are heart-broken. We know we can’t go back to where we originally were, where it seemed everyone was happy, where all was better, than … now. 

When we remember, we remember our emotions. What we knew by heart. What we felt at that time. It’s natural to remember both happy moments, and hurting ones. Sometimes we may not be sure what to remember, what not to remember, what to forget and what not to forget. They are not just remembered, they are not just forgotten. When we grieve, we rollercoaster between the temptations of amnesia and nostalgia. 

Here, I don’t want to suggest to you that we should move away from nostalgia and amnesia, that we should depart from “remembering too much” or “remembering too little”. My hope is to ponder the questions together, in this Advent season: what will we remember? What will we forget? If our grief is a long-term affliction, if we can’t go back to Eden, the original state of being able to be happy without worries, if we can’t just bring back our lost treasures to the present, with a magic wand, what would be the spirituality of remembering and the gifts of forgetting we need to learn? If we are facing our Giants right now, like trauma, oppression, injustice, how will we harness remembrance to help us be resilient, therefore revolutionary, transforming the act of remembering to be both a personal and political ceremony?  

Because God is the “remembering God”, we are remembered. Our wilderness is remembered. Our communion is remembered. Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” remembering his death, proclaiming his resurrection, awaiting his coming in glory. It is remembering that makes possible proclaiming and waiting. Therefore,

How will we not forget? If we forget, we will invite the myth of self-sufficiency. If we forget, we will erase our memory of the wilderness, and replace it with something other than daily manna, our radical dependence on God.  

At the same time, we need to remember that God forgets, too. In Isaiah 43:18, God says via the poet, (the prophet), 

“Do not remember the former things, 

or consider the things of old.”

Surprising, and interesting! Because God says them to a displaced people in their deep distress, in exile. (Exile is a troubled time of turmoil with an unsorted mix of remembering and of forgetting, of remembering too little or too much.) God speaks, “Do not remember!” Do not cling to the past. Because if you cling excessively to the past, you will miss the newness being enacted before your very eyes! 

God continues, 

“I am about to do a new thing; 

Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I make a way in the wilderness

and rivers in the desert. 

The wild animals will honour me, 

The jackals and the ostriches, 

For I give water in the wilderness, 

rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, 

the people whom I formed for myself

so that they might declare my praise.” (43:19-21)

In this proclamation, God is telling the desperate people who remember too much, too long, too well, “Not to remember”. That is God's love shout to God’s people to not miss the newness She is about to perform among them. 

In this second week of Advent, what will we remember? What will we forget? How will we remember and how will we forget, as the people of God, as a communal task facing forward to the future, taking a bold departure both from nostalgia and amnesia? How will we face our own giant contradictions and crisis? How will we face the future?

In this Advent time, let us ponder God’s call to remember and to forget. Open the treasure, and ask yourself… What is new? What is old?