| Scriptures: | Psalm 47 Ecclesiasticus 44:1-15 |
Remembrance of Things Past, as you probably know, is the title of a seven-volume novel by Marcel Proust. OK, I want some real honesty now. Is there anyone in this room who has actually read all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past? Let’s see some hands, hmmmm. You notice that my hand didn’t go up. While it’s usually regarded as one of the literary masterpieces of the 20th century, it’s also among the least read on any list of literary masterpieces. And anyone claiming to have actually read the whole thing is usually accused of some sort of intellectual snobbery.
The book is a deep, introspective look at the forces and people that shaped one particular man’s life, and therefore it can be universalized to all of us – which is what makes it a literary masterpiece. The key point of the novel – and it’s a paradoxical one – is that we have to remember in order to live in the here-and-now world and to shape our futures. That key point is one important reason why the church places so much emphasis on its history.
Proust took the title of his massive novel from Shakespeare’s 30th Sonnet, which describes the journey of remembering (and which I like because of its alliteration):
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste.
Things sought and not found, and things found that are filled with wisdom which change one forever. This is both the joy and the burden of remembering.
If you do try to wade through the lengthy psychological prose of Remembrance of Things Past, you get two kinds of impressions. One is insight into what does make up this complex thing we call human nature. The other is a realization that too much “remembrance of things past” leads to stagnation and a denial of the present. Proust himself spent most of the latter part of his life in a cork-lined study to shut out street noises. There have been several psychological studies of him. Malcolm Cowley, for example, writing about Proust, says, “…he shut himself off from friendships, public life, the world in general, spending most of his time in bed in a room hermetically sealed to prevent drafts….. Here in seclusion he was trying to recapture and preserve his past in the moment before it vanished, like a mollusk making its shell before it dies.”
What a miserable picture of a man! If this is what remembering the past does to someone, let us have done with it. On the other hand, we are historical creatures. Whether as an individual, as a family, as a church, or as a nation we have a past that conditions our present, so that it is not so much a matter of remembering our past as it is how this remembering takes place.
Two weeks ago we talked about Ascension Day, which takes place 40 days after Easter and is the precursor for Pentecost, which we celebrated last week. Ascension Day is the remembrance by the church of Christ’s last decisive act for the sake of the world, and so it becomes for Christians something much akin to Memorial Day for Americans. So, with both of these times of remembering, how do we remember? And to what purpose?
It is no accident that most eulogies at funerals tend to concentrate on the good parts of a person’s life rather than the negative. There’s a lot of wisdom in the folk adage, “don’t speak bad of the dead”. Even if we’ve had our problems with the recent “dearly departed”, most often we’d like to remember, say, that while they may have been a drunk when sober they were kind to children. While this may appear to be selective remembering, it is actually quite useful, for it helps us to focus on those parts of life which are beneficial for ourselves and others.
The book that we read from this morning, Ecclesiasticus, is actually in that non-canonical literature called the Apocrypha, and it has this one particularly famous passage that begins “Let us now sing the praise of famous men, our ancestors in their generations” (sorry about the non-inclusive language; even in the New Revised Standard Version of the bible, that’s the way it’s translated). It is important to praise the famous – whether honored or nameless – this passage is saying, so that the community is able to know from where it gets its good qualities. The emphasis is not so much on the people themselves who are being praised as on what they have left as a will and testament for the present, so that the climax of this passage reads, “Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name lives on generation after generation. The assembly declares their wisdom, and the congregation proclaims their praise.“
Of course, we cannot remember just the good and heroic or there would be no way of comparing this with what we want to avoid. A dark play, like King Lear, say, or many a Tennessee Williams drama that shows the seamier side of life, puts into perspective for us the other kinds of dramas that deal with tragic heroes and glorious conquests. Put in dogmatic terms: without evil, how would we know what is the good? If Adam had not fallen, and we still lived in Eden, would we have any idea that we were living in a paradise?
Now put this in terms of Memorial Day. I think we need to question why we remember past wars. Do we do it to glorify dead heroes, or should we do it to try to learn from the past about how to avoid future wars? There’s a movie from the early 1960s called “The Americanization of Emily” (which was actually Julie Andrews first starring role before “The Sound of Music”), that presents this unique idea: it is not generals and statesmen who perpetuate war, but rather it is our raising monuments to dead soldiers and glorifying battlefield heroics that makes war into a virtue instead of an evil. This movie does not just say that war is evil; in fact, it says just the opposite: that war places cowards into situations that force them to be brave. It is our making war into a virtue that is deplorable. Now, this is a very difficult idea for anyone who has lost someone dear in a war to accept, and in fact when Charlie Madison (played by James Garner) first says these things to Emily’s mother, who pretends her husband is alive even though she knows he was killed, it shatters her. Yet, it is through this seemingly cruel assertion that Emily’s mother is able finally to accept the truth about her husband and the way in which she has made war into a false virtue.
If we accept that what we remember is not as important as how we remember it, we can take a fresh look at the meaning of Memorial Day. It is an opportunity to look back on what we have learned – not simply to glorify the dead, but to take the lessons they have offered us and apply them to the living.
When we look at the church and the members who have served within it, as we did two weeks ago with the Layperson of the Year Award, the same yardstick applies – not so much what we remember as how we remember it. We can remember the faith and trustworthiness of those who were here before and gloriously sing “Faith of our fathers (and mothers)”, or, as in this morning’s middle hymn, “Life of ages, richly poured…Flowing in the prophet’s word…..” But we also need to remember and learn from the mistakes of the past. The church as an institution has certainly made mistakes – it has made mistakes by becoming a part of society and thus being conditioned by prevailing attitudes. The church has made – and continues to make – mistakes about the relationship between science and religion; most of the world just finds it ludicrously laughable that some parts of the church would still want to hold to a concept like “scientific creationism”. The church has made mistakes about human relationships and the nature of human sexuality; our future generations will look back at the homophobia rampant in some parts of the church today and be appalled. By remembering these parts of church life along with the strong faith of our forebears, we can more clearly see what our future actions need to be and more healthfully understand our relationship to the present.
And here is where Ascension Day comes into the picture. For the meaning of ascension is essentially found in the remembrance of the Christian community about the Christ. As I said two weeks ago, the event that Ascension Day commemorates isn’t treated very seriously by most Protestant churches today, for it’s difficult to accept literally or explain rationally. Do the words, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight,” mean that Jesus was the first astronaut with God providing the rocket propulsion? Putting it this absurd way almost robs the event of any meaning. But again, let’s apply our yardstick: it is not what was remembered but how it was remembered.
Bishop John Robinson, best known for his book Honest to God, has written in an Ascension Day sermon that the ascension is not a movement in space like the astronaut’s, nor is it a movement in time, such as the 40 day period suggests. So, the early Christians used this image – this picture in their minds – of Christ going up into heaven in order to affirm their belief and remembrance about him that Christ has ascendancy over the world. His death and resurrection is not just about you and me – that we, too, will die and be resurrected – but also his ascension is Christ’s claim for control over the whole world. To quote Bishop Robinson again, “The doctrine of the Ascension is the assertion of the absolute sovereignty of Jesus Christ over every part of this universe, the crowning of the Cross, the manifest triumph of his way of love over every other force in the world.”
The ascension, therefore, is the culmination of the church’s thinking about the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection. Here we meet what Bishop Robinson calls “the Ascension truth, that Jesus is not only living but Lord…..” What this means for the church can be illustrated by a church in South India where a cross has been placed before a window through which one can see the world, and on the cross are the words, “I Am Not Here”. The doctrine of the Ascension has been called the most political of all Christian doctrines, because what it means is that there is no sphere which Christ does not control; and therefore, there is no sphere in which Christians should not be involved.
What was remembered by the church – the ascending of Christ into heaven – was not as important as how it was remembered – as a means of testifying to Christ’s ascendancy over the whole world. This is made plain in the words spoken immediately afterwards by the two white-robed figures: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” While we are here on this earth, our eyes should be on this earth – on its need for redemption and our work within all the spheres of action and power this world has to offer.
The final two lines of Shakespeare’s 30th Sonnet, from which Proust took his novel’s title (and which are always the most important lines in any Sonnet), bring us back to how we should remember in a most lyrical way:
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
“All losses are restored” – that’s the Christian’s Easter hope – the glory that is given to us on the day of Ascension. It is likewise the hope that we celebrate on tomorrow’s Memorial Day.
When we do our own “remembrance of things past” – whether our individual pasts or our family genealogies or our history as a nation or our tradition as a church – it should be done both with a sense of gratitude and with an examining spirit. We can remember what others have done, not for their sake alone, but also to guide us in present and future actions. We can – and we should – spend time meditating on the past; but we can’t let this become a preoccupation, for we are living in what Paul Tillich calls “the eternal now”. Our relationship to eternity has to do most especially with the lives we are now living – the decisions we now make. By recognizing Christ as “not only living but Lord” we can respond to what has been done for us by Him and by Christians of all times, and then we can go on from there to live our lives fully and in the world.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
May 30, 2010