CAUGHT BETWEEN MEMORY AND HOPE

SCRIPTURE READING: Isaiah 43:16-21

One of the most memorable bumper stickers I have ever seen advises, “Live in the past, it’s cheaper.” That is not usually the advice we hear, especially when we encounter those events which disrupt or rather interrupt our lives with some crisis. The Greek word for crisis means, not disaster, but turning point. Such a turning point occurred in my life when I met the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen in a college registration line. Yes, in the days in which I was enrolled in college we had to stand in line, we didn’t know what online meant then. When I saw those eyes, my life was changed. Up to that point the only thing that was on my mind was getting through the next eight years of college and graduate school. Those eyes made me think about what it would be like to live with those eyes, and, of course, the rest of her. I eventually married her eyes and all.

Usually when we encounter those turning points, we hear advice like that offered to the captive Jews living in exile in Babylon from the voice of Isaiah. Remember that they had been carried off from their national and spiritual center of Jerusalem when the Babylonian empire was the power in their region. The Babylonians destroyed their center of worship, the Temple, and tore down the walls of the great city, their social and civic pride. Life could not get lower than this. The second Isaiah came on the scene when the Babylonians were waning in their power and God was to liberate the Jews by making “a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Isaiah further advised them, “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old.” That is curious advice in the face of the fact that their whole reason for being was tied up in their remembrance of the exodus from Egypt and their slavery there.

Even farther back in their history was the covenant God made with Abraham that marked them as people special to God. What then did these words mean? Should they forget their past?

What Isaiah meant was that it was Israel’s belief and the prophet’s belief that what had got them to Babylon in the first place was their sin. God was saying don’t remember your sin, I’ve got that covered.

Isaiah went on to say, “I am about to do a new thing.” Now new things are apt to scare us. We don’t necessarily like new things because they are new and unfamiliar and often even scary. What was this new forgiveness, this graciousness of God, going to cost? It was going to cost trust in God’s deliverance of God’s chosen people back to their homeland.

Nothing gets our attention like some crisis in our personal lives or in our family. Sometimes life goes on so smoothly and our attention is focused on matters other than what Isaiah or even Jesus tells us. Then something happens to command our attention. Such a thing happened to our family while we were in Eau Claire.

Some of you know that our oldest son Bruce went as an International Christian Youth Exchangee to the Philippines. For the benefit of those of you who do not know, let me recount the story in short form. All went well for the first year of Bruce’s experience. When his year was up, he wrote to us that he wanted to stay on in the Philippines to go to Silliman University. He wanted to know if we would support him in this endeavor. Before we could form a reply, he called us and asked us if we would support him financially if he bought a restaurant. Knowing Bruce to be an enterprising and responsible young man we said, yes, we would do that. That was alright for awhile. Then, after an interval of six months or so, we tried to contact him by phone and were told that he was no longer at the restaurant. We tried every address at which we knew he had formerly lived. I called the State Department, various consulates in the Philippines, our congressman, and exploited every possibility short of going to the Philippines myself, which I was warned against by the State Department.

The long and the short of this story is that Bruce had dropped out of sight without a word to us. We did not know whether he was dead or alive. This went on for four years. That did get our attention. Our normal life was disrupted by worry and fear of the worst. We had to draw on every resource our faith had to offer. We heard and were comforted by the words of Jesus. We listened to him as never before, just as the voice of God from the clouds called Peter, James and John to do.

We had partners in this watching and waiting, in this fear and trembling too. It was the members of our church who watched, waited, and suffered with us during that dark four year period. You have no idea how much those prayers, the support of First Congregational U.C.C. of Eau Claire, their tears joined with our tears meant to us in that time. We understood what it meant to be a part of the body of Christ.

We, personally, were caught between our memory of Bruce and our hope that he was alright. We were caught between our memory of Jesus’ promises and our hope for release from that nightmare.

For those of you who don’t know, there was a happy ending to the story. After four years Bruce did contact us and he did return to this country. That is another story I will not go into now. Eventually he brought his Philippina wife Emie to this country. They are the parents of two children, Sean and Megan. They now live in Sterling Heights, Michigan. Bruce is working for Bank of America as a manager of a group of computer programmers.

The point of this is to say that we all live in between memory and hope in this life. We live in the now, and it is in this now that we can mediate the love of God to one another. There are a variety of ways we can do this, but I still maintain that the church of Jesus Christ, when we listen to him, we are at our very best at doing that for him and for one another.

Our family’s experience of the grace of God through the church brought us through from a terrible present to new hope. The new life of Jesus’ resurrection became real for us through our friends in Christ. Had we been here in that time, I have no doubt that you would also have been of great comfort and solace to us for such is the nature of the power of the Holy Spirit working through us and the church.

Thanks be to God.

Sermon preached by Reverend Jake Close at First Congregational United Church of Christ, Appleton, Wisconsin on March 25, 2007.