You know how you get.......

God knows how we get, so God tells us to remember......Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.

If I were to summarize the volumes that have been written about this commandment, few authors and historians would focus on the word remember.  Theologians to lawmakers to your grandmother have weighed in on what it means to be holy.  A few groups are focused on which day constitutes the Sabbath.  But few focus on the word remember.

And yet it is so easy to forget.  The pressures of this world, the very minutia of staying afloat from grocery shopping to laundry to home maintenance can overwhelm the best intentioned of schedules.  Add in a little leisure plus the necessary hours of sleep and you begin to understand that sustaining a day set apart for Sabbath requires some discipline.  If your life is like mine, post-it notes keep me from losing things down a rabbit's hole.  Perhaps we need an extra bright, extra large post-it that says simply  Remember!

But of course, divine commands to remember point to more than simply managing a calendar and making choices.  A great deal of the biblical story is a process of remembering........remember when you were slave in Egypt......remember when the Lord provided bread in the desert.........remember when David danced before the ark.........remember the meal Jesus shared.   Remembering in this way brings us back to our origins, to those moments in our history when we were formed, our character shaped, our values established.  The prophets are continually sending us back to those formative moments in our relationship with the Divine, and calling on us to remember.

But it is even deeper than that.  This kind of remembering is intended to actually bring us back - to take us back into that moment when it happened for the first time.  We become a part of that first instant - we are tasting freedom from Pharoah for the first time, we are eating bread with the disciples around a table.  It is a kind of remembering where time falls away and we are one across the eons.

Remember the Sabbath?  The day when God saw that all was very good and God rested?  It was the day set apart for human creatures to pause, to catch their breath, to be restored and refreshed....and to remember the Creator God who gave all of this to them as a gift.  Do you remember the first intentions for Sabbath?  How it was gift and not obligation?  How it was designed for you, God's beloved human?

Perhaps now we can grasp the power of the word 'holy'.   Sabbath is a moment to re-connect with the Holy One, the source of life, the giver of blessings.  Sabbath is not a negotiated benefit from the HR department; it is a gift of the divine so that all God's creatures might return to those moments when all of creation was 'very good' and rest was possible. The act of remembering is as important as what is or is not done on that day.  This day of rest is to be sacred - not infringed upon by the day to day drudge,  the 24x7, 365 work of slaves.  You need it.  God knows you need it.

....because you know how you get when you drink not love.

You are my beloved

Sunday we will "remember our baptisms;" this should be a good and pleasant thing to do.

But why do it?

Why remember a moment that most of us slept through when we were splashed with water and claimed to be a child of God?

Why remember that once our name was presented to God and we were called one of God's 'beloved' ones?

Why remember that moment when water and a Word of grace, forgiveness and hope combined to put to death our old selves and join us to Christ's kingdom?

Why remember the parents who brought us, the fellowship of believers that welcomed us and the pastor who prayed for us?  Because the rest of life in this world is too often without praise, without forgiveness, without mercy.

Too often someone attempts to convince us that we have little or no worth in the big scheme of things.
 Too often darkness appears to swallow all the light in our world.

That's exactly when we turn to that moment when God claimed us, called us beloved, joined us to the resurrected one and before all the world called us worthy.  Some days, our baptism is the only thing we have left to which to cling. 

Come celebrate your baptism with us this Sunday, beloved of God.

Remembering

It wasn't until my husband died that I began to understood the purpose of those memoriam on the obit page in the newspaper.  Memoriams usually have a picture, include the dates of birth and death, and have a message to the deceased.  I always wondered, "Who are these for?  Why do folks pay to have these printed?"

So the remembering will continue.  As long as the lost one is remembered, their life retains value and substance.  As long as some one remembers, the lost one is not lost forever. 

Remembering a loved one lost also keeps us mindful of the frailty of human life, gone sometimes in seconds.  In those moments we are reminded that life is not a contest but a gift.

You honor the fallen by remembering them.  Pray for them by name.  Remember them to the loved ones left behind, then live life full of compassion and generosity and grace. 

"Almighty God, look with pity upon the sorrows of our neighbors for whom we pray.  Remember them Lord, in mercy; nourish them with patience; comfort  them with a sense of your goodness; look upon them with grace; and give them peace."  Amen    (adapted from the Book of Common Prayer)

So to remember

Today in chapel a small cairn was built - a tower of stones - a small example of the stone pillars built by the people of the Bible.  Of course, stone towers are a part of many cultures including Native American.  They are built to mark a spot and to remember an event or a person.

"Remembering" is one element in the richness of faith.  It is an activity which calls to mind so richly as to make that event or person present again.  So when you 'remember' your friend's phone number, you also bring into your presence the fullness of who your friend is, and what that friend means to you.  We remember God's covenants.  God remembers God's people.  We remember Jesus' gift of wine and bread; God remembers the promises of forgiveness made by Jesus.

The gift of the act of remembering is this:  we do not fly through the minutes and hours of this day, but in each act of remembering we are connected to our past, our friends, our hopes, our sorrows, our dreams.  This moment then becomes a thread in a larger living.  Our lives are richer through these connections which help us avoid losing our way.

Take a moment and remember....and be blessed.   AMEN