Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from October 3, 2004

“A Remembering Faith”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Lamentations 1:1-6

2 Timothy 1:1-14

Luke 17:5-10

I went to visit my friend Al* this week.  He has Alzheimer’s disease.  As I walked to his room, the hallway was filled with people who, some would say, are just like him.  And yet Al is Al, a unique and unrepeatable human being who I knew before the cruel thief of memory and meaning made him, at least on the surface, so much like the others.

Every time I visit, I bring a donut from Allie’s, a glazed cruller.  Al introduced me to Allie’s donuts when I first moved to Rhode Island.  On Friday mornings, which was and remains sermon writing day, I would often hear his beat-up old Honda roar down the half-mile driveway by our house about 6:00 in the morning.  A half hour later, I would hear the screen door open and I would know that my breakfast had arrived.  Al always said inspiration was contingent on a full stomach.

 It is hard to reconcile the man I sat down beside on Wednesday with my donut-delivering friend.  These days he cannot dress or feed himself; he is easily frightened and always confused.  It is painful to remember that this is the same man who, up until 5 years ago, worked circles around Renee and me cutting, splitting and stacking the six cords of wood we would use each winter to heat our respective homes.  This is the man who, at 70, single-handedly dismantled and shipped his 1901 Mors to England so he and his wife of 50 years could be part of the Brighton run.

His dancing blue eyes are now somehow vacant.  He occasionally reminisces about the past.  When he remembers growing up in Paris, he speaks perfect French.  Occasionally,  he remembers Pat and Renee as if they were friends from his past like Paris.  I treasure those conversations because I know one day he will not talk at all. 

If I change the name and the face and the relationship, it is a truth that many of you know only too well. We all have spent time repeating, crying, and thinking about “remembering”.  Much of what anchors us in this life is memory.  It is how we know who we are. It’s how we know where we came from, regardless of where we end up.  Without memory we are rootless somehow. 

And just as Al will occasionally converse in French, he also can sing every childhood hymn he ever learned, and never miss a word:  “The Old Rugged Cross”, “In the Garden”, “What a Friend We Have In Jesus”, Christmas carols, and “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”.  He belts them out with gusto, and while scientists are busy creating their theories about which parts of the brain hold what capacities, I prefer to think that Al and his friends in the Alzheimer’s Care Unit are connecting to the traditions of their faith in a way that feeds their spirits.  It’s how they remember their faith.

Faith and remembrance are woven strands of a single cloth.  Remembrance gives rise to tradition.  It’s how we honor what we value about the past, what we have learned from one another.  It’s our human attempt to gather up the holiness of a moment and make it available for the future.  When Yahweh’s people were in exile after the fall of Jerusalem, they remembered the city and its glory.  The book of Lamentations is the corporate grieving of a people displaced by war and driven from their land.  The text tells us, “Jerusalem remembers, in the day of her affliction and wandering, all the precious things that were hers in days of old.”  There is sadness and comfort in the remembering.  As Paul writes to Timothy, a young leader in the church, he urges him to remember the faith of his mother and grandmother, Lois and Eunice.  Because it lived in them, and Timothy was witness to it, because Paul laid hands on Timothy and anointed him for the work, Paul said he should remember and rekindle the gift of faith. 

Like Timothy, most of us learned at least some of what we know about faith by being with people, who at least some of the time, were able to live like the believers they claimed to be.

Maren Tirabassi is a UCC pastor and writer.  In a meditation titled, “Do This in Remembrance of Me” she writes, “Holiness is about what we remember, what we remember as a community, what we remember for one another and on behalf of one another, what we remember for children, and what we remember for those who once shared a story of faith with us.”  Ours is a remembering faith. 

But it isn’t remembering simply to preserve the past, as if the past has some sacred value in and of itself.  Jaraslov Pelikan of Yale Divinity School, writing on the history of Christian Doctrine wrote:  “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living" (The Vindication of Tradition, Yale Press).  The past has no intrinsic value; it is alive to the extent that it connects us with the vital threads of our faith, to the extent that it makes us alive.  In that way tradition is holy.  I think it’s what Paul meant when he told Timothy to guard the treasure entrusted to him.  It’s a truth the religious groups often forget.

A young rabbi found a serious problem in his new congregation. During the Friday service, half the congregation stood for the prayers and half remained seated, and each side shouted at the other, insisting that theirs was the true tradition. Nothing the rabbi said or did moved toward solving the impasse. 

Finally, in desperation, the young rabbi sought out the synagogue's 99-year-old founder.  He met the old rabbi in the nursing home and poured out his troubles. 

“So tell me,” he pleaded, “was it the tradition for the congregation to stand during the prayers?” 

“No,” answered the old rabbi. 

“Ah,” responded the younger man, “then, it was the tradition to sit during the prayers?” 

“No,” answered the old rabbi. 

“Well,” the young rabbi responded, “what we have is complete chaos!  Half the people stand and shout, and the other half sit and scream.” 

“Ah,” said the old man, “THAT was the tradition.”

There are traditions and memories that can make us dead and traditions and memories that can make us alive. It is true in family life, in marriage or partnership, in business, in church life and more.  We hold onto old grudges, nurse ancient wounds, keep old divisions alive, draw our lines in the sand and hold our positions even though they choke the life from our marriages, family relationships and churches.

Some wry preacher once commented that epitaph of the church would be, “but we’ve always done it that way”.  It’s one way that memory can kill us, holding on the past in ways that keep us from the mission of the moment.  The church was never intended to be a museum of tribute to the past, but a vital mission community grounded in its living tradition of knowing life in Jesus Christ through revelation of Scriptures, the sacraments and growth in community life.

To the extent that tradition keeps us connected with eternal truths, they are of value.  When they become ends in themselves they are dead. 

Maren Tirabassi, who I mentioned earlier, tells of meeting with seminarians, clergy associations and lay leaders and asking them to bring something “holy” from their churches.  That’s all the direction she gives.

“Occasionally, someone brings a chalice or an heirloom bible, but more frequently, the question about what is really holy in their churches has led to a wide variety of offered objects.  These are a few of my favorite fragments of holiness—the key to the ladies parlor, chalk from a Sunday school blackboard, a pot from the pot luck, a photograph of youth group members serving supper to homeless folk, a rubbing from a gravestone, a little bottle of water from the baptism font, the angel costume from the Christmas pageant, shards of glass from ‘that weird worship the seminarian did with the scripture about who throws the first stone’, a jar of grape jelly for a shut-in made of leftover Eucharist, the organists’ slippers, the mimeograph  machine ‘we might have a use for some day’, the gift-certificate for a massage given to the preacher the Monday after Easter, mortgage ashes, or a bulb from an Easter Lily that just won’t die.”  

These things are holy because they point beyond themselves to something that cannot be held in our hands. They remind us that we are more than the sum of our parts, that perfect love casts out fear, that music is often the prayer of the spirit, rest is a gift to the soul, resurrection is always the promise, and God is bigger than our best and fanciest box.  I recently learned that communion doesn’t happen only with cubes of bread and thimbles of grape juice.  It happens on odd Wednesday afternoons and occasional Sundays.  Five minutes after I am gone, Al may not remember who I am or that I was even there, but for those moments when he smiles a far away smile munching on a glazed cruller that connects him to something from his past, it seems to me that the ground is holy and that God is in our midst.

Sometimes we know as the moment is unfolding; sometimes the moment passes before we realize it and we can only name it in retrospect.  That’s how traditions are born.  If we can touch something of holiness one time, perhaps so again when we do the same thing with the same hope.  It’s what Jesus had in mind when he told his disciples to remember him in the breaking of the bread and the moment was holy.  2000 years later we break bread and remember and this moment is holy. 

We remember every place where we have broken bread, those around us who have shared the meal.  We remember, sitting in this place, those who sat here before us and remembered for us and with us.

And the moment is holy.

Today, we break bread and remember that people of faith around the world gather to do the same, and just for a moment, there is more that makes us the same than makes us different.

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you.  Amen.

*Not his real name