Remember What God Has Done

A clergy colleague of mine tells a story about a lunch he shared with a friend. During the meal, his friend treated him to an animated re-telling of a sermon by a guest preacher at his church. The guest preacher’s sermon was based on the Book of Exodus, the great epic of Israel’s escape from servitude in Egypt.  At dramatic intervals throughout the sermon, he said, the preacher posed this question like a rhythmic refrain, “What do you do when you don’t know what to do?” It went something like this:

The Egyptians are hounds at the Hebrews’ heels! Galloping horses are gaining on them, hundreds of chariots are bearing down. What do you do when you don’t know what to do? To their left are high mountains. There are high mountains are on their right. They are hemmed in on every side. What do you do when you don’t know what to do? The Red Sea looms ahead of them. They can’t wade across it. They can’t swim across it. They have no boats, so they can’t sail across it. There’s no time to build a bridge. What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

And so it went, until the preacher stopped and addressed the congregation. "We know that place, don’t we?”, he said. “The place where you are ‘damned if you do’ and ‘damned if you don’t.’ We know what it’s like to be caught between a rock and a hard place, between Pharaoh and the mountains and the Sea. the place where we don’t know what to do. So, what do you do when you don’t know what to do?"

Of course, as I was listening to this story, I realized that this is our question these days. A question some of us are asking at First Church as one pastor is leaving, and the congregation is discerning the future of the other. This is the question we’re asking as we traverse some unfamiliar territory—an unexpected farewell, a listening process, so many different emotions. How could we not feel a little bit stuck between Pharaoh, the mountains, and the deep blue Sea?

Things could be a lot worse, of course! There’s nothing here to compare with Pharaoh murderously breathing down our necks, even if we do feel at times mildly oppressed by the circumstances we find ourselves in. But in our confusion about the present and our anxiety about the future, between our own little rock and hard place, the question that arises for us is the same: What do we do when we don’t know what to do?

I was very interested in hearing the preacher’s answer to this question. Unfortunately, the person who was re-telling the sermon didn’t remember much about that part. My clergy colleague said that he begged him to think, to try to call it up. He was secretly hoping to preach a  similar sermon, and he really needed this information!

“Well,” his friend finally replied, finishing his salad, “I think he said something like, ‘Remember how you got where you are. Remember how you got there.’"

For the people caught between Pharaoh, the mountains, and the Sea, to remember how they got there meant remembering that God had established a covenant with them long before. It meant to remember that God had never abandoned them even when they were unfaithful to that covenant. It meant to remember that God had led them out of captivity in Egypt and had given them a hopeful vision of a promised land. That’s how they got to where they were. God had led them there.

Finding yourself on shaky ground between a rock and a hard place is no accident. That’s where you’re bound to end up when you’re following God’s call. And the lesson, my colleague observed, is this—the same God who called you there will call you out of there. God will see you through to the next place.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do? You remember. You remember the mercy God has always shown you. You remember that God is faithful. You remember that God’s love for you endures forever and ever and ever. You remember that you belong to God, and God to you. You stop and you remember God.

I was getting my hair cut a couple of weeks ago, and the young woman who was haphazardly hacking away at my tresses was carrying on an excited conversation with a co-worker, about the tattoos that she, Brianna, and her delicious new boyfriend, Jimmy, were planning to get that week to seal their undying love. They wanted there to be no doubt about their belonging to one another. She then described the romantic artwork they had in mind—a fancy rendition of their two names, intertwined with a red rose and encircled by something else I can’t remember at the moment.

What I do remember is the proposed anatomical location for the tattoos. Modesty prevents me from disclosing it in here.  But when she said it, I remember thinking, “She can’t be serious!” But of course she was; and by now, if all has gone according to plan, “Jimmy”, “Brianna”, and a big red rose have been permanently inscribed in living color in delicate places where the sun doesn’t shine. And all anyone can hope for now is that they don’t break up. Ever.

In the first reading today, the long-suffering Hebrew people wonder out loud if God has left them. It is not a rhetorical question.  Even a cursory glance at the hardships of their long exile suggests that God might indeed have abandoned them. But God seems stung by their question. Really hurt that they could even raise it. “Forget you? How could I forget you? Can a mother forget her nursing child? Can she forsake the child of her womb?”

“Well, yes, she can,” we might reply. “Let’s not get all romantic about this, Lord. The world is full of children whose mothers have forgotten and forsaken them in one way or another. Fathers too.”

“Well,” God says, “okay, but even if parents should forget you, I won’t.”

“How do we know?”, we ask.

“Well, gee, look!”, God exclaims, “I have a tattoo!  Your names are engraved on the palm of my hand. They’ve been there from the start. We belong to each other—how could I forget you?  I remember you. Now, you need to remember me!”

In times of uncertainty, what can deliver us from anxiety to centered peace and praise? Remembrance. What calms our fears and enlarges our hope? What saves us from isolation and increases our solidarity in the community of faith? What do we do when we don’t know what to do? We remember. We remember that God clothes the lilies. We remember that God counts the sparrows. We remember that worry has never added a day to the span of our lives. We remember that God knows what we need.

Lately, we’ve been talking a lot here about “discernment." It’s not just a buzzword, a fancy term for making decisions like we used to, by argument, opinion, and persuasion. Rather it’s a way of being still and listening, of hearing the Spirit speak through one another, through circumstances and conditions, through events and challenges. It’s an attempt to put aside preconceived notions and agendas, to listen for God’s voice, to see God’s pathway opening up before us, and to open our eyes of faith to see God’s will. Discernment is something we are really trying to practice in our current situation, even if imperfectly, learning how it’s done as we go along.

But it will be impossible to discern God’s call to us, God’s leading into the future, unless we also look backward in remembrance. You can’t really do discernment about where God might be taking you tomorrow unless you trust God to take you there, to take you anywhere, in the first place. And that trust arises only in the course of reflection about where you have been together all these years, you and God. It arises when you look back and understand that it is God who has put us in this place, the faithful God, the God in covenant with us, the God who has always done wonders for us and who has wonders yet to perform.

God led us here, by calling me away, and by stirring up in Dan a willingness to have his sense of call tested by all of you. God led us into this, and God will lead us out from here as well, reliably, trustworthily, truly. If, that is, we remember.

There’s a story about a great 19th Scottish minister, William Barclay, who was attending a church meeting at which the chairperson began with prayer: "Almighty and eternal God, always faithful to us in every time and circumstance, whose grace is sufficient for all things…" He went on like that for a while. But when the prayer was over, he turned to the business of the meeting and announced, "Gentleman, the situation in this Church is completely hopeless and nothing can be done."

That committee chairman forgot what to do when you don’t know what to do. He forgot to remember. He forgot to remember the God he had just prayed to. He forgot to remember the God who is always faithful, and whose faithfulness remains even when you are between a rock and a hard place.

That colleague of mine, from whom I’ve borrowed all these stories, regularly reminds his congregation that in the church we profess belief in God, and we really do believe, but we can also sometimes act as if there were no God.  We can talk about discernment all day long, but we often still behave as if God has nothing to disclose to us except what we already think all by ourselves. We say we are listening, but we hear only the conclusions we’ve already come to.

He goes on to observe that we are particularly tempted to what he calls a “functional atheism” when we are between a rock and a hard place. When we are there, it can be hard to remember, but that’s the time when it is all the more important to recall how we got here, to remember the God who got us here, and to call on the God who will not leave us here, but will surely lead us on.

This is an incredibly gifted, faithful congregation. But there is a downside to our embarrassment of riches. We can sometimes think it is enough to be richly gifted. Sooner or later, however, when the Sea is in front of us , the mountains hem us in, and Pharaoh is behind us, it becomes clear that it’s not. It’s not enough. We need to remember how we got here. And it was not by our own efforts, but by the powerful movement of God in our midst.

So what do you do when you don’t know what to do? You begin by remembering what God has done, the God who isn’t done yet, the God who brought us to this place and will not abandon us here. If you are truly going to move into the future in faith, begin by looking backward in remembrance, and what you will see there will inspire your praise, your thanks, your celebration, your wonder, all your discernments, and your humble awe.

Look back and see that you have indeed come this far by faith, leaning on the everlasting arms, and if you remember that, and if you remind each other of that, you will always walk the pilgrim way together into the future, guided securely by the same mysterious and precious hand that led you to now.

Trust God, most dearly beloved church. That’s what you do when you don’t know what to do.

---------
*Some of the stories and ideas of this sermon are borrowed from a sermon by Martin Copenhaver, delivered at the Wellesley Congregational Church in 2004.

• Worship
• About First Church
• Sunday Calendar
• Upcoming Events
• Getting Involved
• Contribute
• Sermons
• EVENT Newsletter