God in Our Memory

After all these years, it is still difficult for me to speak about God. That may seem strange to you. I’ve been doing it for so long. But part of it is the mystery of the subject.

Part of it is the training I received as a child, never to speak lightly of God. When I was young, I had it drilled into my head, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” I still flinch when I hear people say, “Jesus Christ!” – and they’re using it as a way to emphasize their words.

I know … I know … I know … people say, “I didn’t mean anything by it” … but that’s just the point in my mind. When you say the name of God or Christ, you are supposed to mean something by it. So I cannot speak lightly of God …

Part of the reason it’s difficult for me to speak about God, is that I want to be appropriate and sensitive toward the people hearing my words. What does that person believe? Where are they at spiritually and emotionally? Is this a person running toward God … or running away from God?

Some people are searching for God ... some people are trying to get away from God … and to be honest … sometimes I can’t tell the difference.

Part of it is the enormous number of disguises people use to keep you from knowing what they’re really thinking.

For instance, I see someone reading the Bible. And I say, “Great!” … they’re searching for God. But I really don’t know. Maybe they’re searching scripture to find support for some prejudice or hatred they’ve held for years, just looking to reinforce the rightness of their disdain or oppression of people who are different from their “in” group. I don’t know ...

Sometimes it’s possible, a person doesn’t know, him or herself, whether they’re running toward God or away from God. They have a restlessness, an uneasiness, a feeling of incompleteness … but they don’t know what to do with it … they may not even have a name for it. It’s vague or uncertain … a hollowness … a longing they can’t even name.

It happens … people not knowing if they’re running toward God … or away from God.

I do know this … people do try and get away from God.

In today’s Psalm reading, the author writes, “Where shall I run from your Spirit? Where can I hide from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I descend to hell and make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and fly to the outermost parts of the sea, you’re there. If I say to the darkness, hide me! The darkness is as light to you.”

Where can I go? How can I hide?

Think of this …

A man is sleeping on the street or in an alleyway. He covers himself with cardboard to keep warm against the winter air. He begs for money … he steals to feed his drug habit. Day after day, he grows sicker and more addicted.

He had wanted to be a priest but didn’t have the discipline. He tried to be a medical doctor like his father, but he failed the test 3 times – gave up – moved to London – became a street person. He ruined his health. He almost died. He was rescued by a prostitute who called a minister, and the minister helped him to dry out.

And when Francis Thompson dried out, he began to write poems. Perhaps you know this one – The Hound of Heaven … “I fled him down the nights and down the days. I fled him through the arches of the years. I fled him through the labyrinthian ways of my mind. In the midst of tears, I hid from him.”

From whom was Francis running? … God, of course …

But now, let’s look at the other side of that question …

What if someone came to you and said, “I would like to find God. Could you tell me where I may find God?”

What would you say?

You’d probably say, “Don’t ask me where. It’s not a matter of place. You can find God anywhere … anytime. There’s no specific place where God is!”

And that’s true … but it’s not totally true … because everybody needs a place.

Yes … yes … of course … you can worship God anywhere.

But there are special places … certain places, where it may feel God comes close …

When King Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem, he prayed, “God, I know you don’t need this. Even the heavens can’t contain you, much less a house that we build. But we need it, God. We need a place.”

Some of you know I’ve been to Israel on two occasions. The first time was in 1996. And the reason I was able to go was because there was a wealthy man who decided this was an important thing for clergy to experience.

He had seen how ministers can become discouraged or burnt out - working in struggling churches … or where there’s a lot of conflict … or where things are in decline.

He donated enough money so ministers - in groups of 20, with their partners – could go to Israel with every penny paid from door to door - to go the Holy Land … to walk in the footsteps of Jesus in Galilee and then down to Jerusalem – ten days of prayer, bible study, worshiping together - time alone to recover something they may have lost … to find God again in a vital way.

While we were there, we spent some time around the Sea of Galilee. We even had some free time, and I said to our guide, “Could I pay you to take me to see the town of Nain.”

It’s only about six miles southeast of the City of Nazareth.

He said to me, “What do you want to go to Nain for?”

I didn’t want to explain why … or explain to him about what Jesus did when he visited Nain, so I just said, “I don’t know … I’d just like to visit Nain.”

We went to Nain – a little town … maybe two hundred people. It’s a kind of a “nothing” place. At the edge of town, carved in the mountain were some tombs and a large cemetery. There was the ruins of a church – crumbled stones of what had been a little shrine run by Franciscan monks.

For the tourists, they have little picture post-cards telling you about the time when Jesus came to this town. They claimed to be able to show the house where the widow lived, and which tomb in the cemetery was to be the grave of her son whom Jesus lifted from the stretcher carrying his dead body. It all seemed to cheapen the story. I didn’t buy the card. I didn’t believe those were really the places. It was rather disappointing compared to the wonderful story we find in scripture - the story we read today from the Gospel of Luke.

Jesus goes to the town of Nain and out from the town gates comes a procession, at the head of it – several people carrying a young man on a stretcher … the only son of his widowed mother.

It says, Jesus saw what was going on and he had compassion for her. He says to her, “Do not weep” … and then he goes to the stretcher holding the dead body of her son, and he says, “Young man, I say to you, rise!”

And he does! The dead man is brought back to life! He gives the woman’s only son back to her. And the onlookers are stunned by what’s happened. They’re absolutely scared to death, and they say, “God has visited us!”

Now, here’s the interesting thing. The writer of the Gospel of Luke is the only gospel that tells us this story.

Many of the stories of Jesus are told in all the gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Why don’t they all tell this one? This marvelous story of compassion, love and power of God in the little town of Nain?

You know what I think it is. It’s what Luke records the people as having said, “ God has visited us … God has visited us …”

You’d think you would find the Greek word behind the English phrase “visited us” all through the Bible.

Not so. It’s very rare. The Apostle Paul never uses it. Matthew, Mark, John never use it.

In the Old Testament, you find it in the story of the Exodus when God says to the Israelites, “Now get along children. But I’ll visit you on the way.” It’s said twice.

But the most remarkable occurrence is in the Book of Job.

You know the story … Job has lost his farm and his job. He’s lost his health, his children, his friends – all he has left is an unsympathetic wife who says to him, “Why don’t you curse God and die and get it over with?”

That doesn’t really help the situation …

He’s sitting in misery with sores on his body, emaciated and almost dead, and he prays.

He says in his prayer, “God, I remember when you visited my tent.”

There it is … that word “visited!”

And then he says it again, “Your visit is what keeps me alive.”

This rare word: God visiting.

Could it be, Luke remembered that rare moment – that rare word … and then I remembered. John Donne, the great Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, he said, “the shortest and surest way to God … is through the memory.”

And whenever Scripture speaks of God visiting people, what remains afterward is memory.

You want to know where to find God? … in your memory …

Let me tell you a story.

Some of you may have read Kathleen Norris, one of the most widely read and popular writers in the first half of the 20th century.

She tells about being in New York City when she finished college. She had landed her first job as a writer.

She’s a single young woman in the big city, and she begins to find friends amongst the rather wild and bohemian artistic community. There’s a lot of drinking and all night parties - casual sex and drugs.

She said it was early one morning, and they decided to keep partying – so they went down into Hell’s Kitchen in New York City and went into an old building. There were two armed men at the door, so she knew whatever was going on inside, was against the law. They went in.

She said, “It was a strange collection of people. Everybody was stoned on drugs, in various states of undress, casual sex going on in public … the smell of drugs in the air.”

She said, “I was ill at ease but I didn’t want to leave.”

She went to the women’s washroom, and there she found one of her gang crying in the sink and smearing her cosmetics, and Kathleen asked her, “Why are you crying”

Her friend said, “I don’t know … I just feel like crying.”

Kathleen said, “I feel like crying myself.”

She went back out into the main room, and as she entered the room, she realized what this building used to be … this old building, where they were having these wild parties, had originally been … a church … a church …

For the first time, she said, “I noticed the stained glass windows and all these people out there gyrating and dancing in the place where the pews had been. And some strange person down front, where the Communion Table would have been … doing a strip tease!”

And then Kathleen said, as all of this was dawning upon her, “I was visited. I was visited by my grandmother in South Dakota.”

There’s our word … visited …

She said, “I immediately walked out … I left the building and my friends behind.”

Now she wasn’t really visited by her grandmother … except … she was really visited by her grandmother. She remembered the example of her grandmother’s life and faith.

Kathleen Norris finishes the story like this, “I never would have dreamed when I went to the party, that my life would be so radically changed. I packed up my things, left New York City, and went home to my roots.”

“I remembered,” she said … “I remembered …”

Job said, “God, I remember when you visited my tent.”

The memory of those visits kept Job alive.

If there is anyone … well … I really believe I’m speaking to all of you – if you have an experience of God visiting you … don’t let it slip away … don’t lose it from your memory … press it like a rose between the pages of your mind. Write it on the tablet of your heart. Keep it – the date, the place, the time. Keep it … because the day will come when, in your life, you will pass through the desert or find yourself in the wilderness … far from home … and you will say “Where can I find God … where is God?”

And the answer is clear … remember … remember … you will find God in your memory…