Bible Study

Sunday

6th July 2003

Memory: Exile, Lament & the Discipline of Remembering

Readings:

Isaiah 51: 1-2
Psalm 42 – 43.
Isaiah 54: 1–13.

Thank you Carolyn, for your introduction, thank you Alasdair for choosing this rich and powerful theme of exile, and thank you for inviting me to address it.

We launch into our Bible Studies by looking at Psalm 42, for this is where we must begin – with loss, with absence, with yearning, with thirst and with tears.

The exact circumstances of this psalm are not known for sure, but it certainly fits our exile theme, for all the echoes are here. The writer seems to be displaced, living in alien territory and far removed from Jerusalem, its temple and its worship. It seems to be a bleak and inhospitable terrain, surroundings deeply unconducive to faith, where hope must struggle against the odds. Where once the psalmist was accustomed to voices raised in anthems of praise, now there are only the insistent, threatening, persistent voices of scorn: Verse 3:

‘Where is your God?”

Verse 10:

‘As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, “Where is your God?”’

These are the voices that mock: where is this God of yours who once pledged steadfast love and protection? Of course there are other, more hopeful, themes struggling to be heard here. The summons to faith and to hope is always there in the background, doggedly countering the whispers of doubt, desperately resisting the murmurs that question God.

‘Why are you cast down O my soul, why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God: for I shall again praise him, my hope and my God.’

Three times this refrain is repeated, in 42:5, 42:11 and again 43:5. But it’s a struggle. Like a drowning man gasping for air, every desperate thrust towards the surface is countered by the fierce downward-pull of the deep, as despair tugs relentlessly against hope.

The images of water in this psalm are powerful and subtle. It begins with a parched soul longing for flowing streams, but finding only salty tears to slake his thirst. Then this desperate seeker finds water, but rather than refreshing streams or even bitter tears, it’s the violent, deathly waters of chaos and destruction, the deep. It may well be significant that one likely setting of this psalm is the place that was to be known later as Caesarea Philippi, a place where the springs of the River Jordan cascade down in torrents from the slopes of Hermon and Mizar. This water is not life-giving but life-threatening.

‘Deep calls to deep at the thunder of the cataracts, all your waves and your billows have gone over me.’

Once again the psalmist’s spirit surges as he clutches at faith, gasping for God:

‘By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.’

But the pull of despair is relentless. Picturing himself engulfed by the flood, and perhaps prompted by the rocky landscape that surrounds him, the psalmist cries out,

‘I say to God, my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’

And note well: it is in this situation of threat and deep anxiety and insecurity that memory kicks in.

The psalmist looks back wistfully and recalls better times, as one does when the future seems bleak and uncertain. Verse 4:

‘These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.’

In testing times memories surface like flotsam and jetsam.

‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.’

We remembered Zion, we remembered our songs, for we could not sing here. (Psalm 137)

This then is the place of exile, as from the depths of this psalm there emerge images and themes that resonate with displacement: absence and loss and threatening, chaotic upheaval. And in the midst of it all a floundering faith searches for a rock, while the voices mutter, “Where is your God?”

Indeed we might go further and say that this is the place of the cross, the Good Friday scenario: forsaken-ness, hopelessness, and the taunting voices: “Where is your God now?”

And it’s the place where memories cling like mist.

Furthermore, if we’re honest, it’s a place where we increasingly find ourselves today.

It’s the place of the Church set in the spiritually dry and arid waste-land of 21st century Britain. Increasingly exiled from power and influence and prestige we thirst after God, and we suspect that there are others out there thirsting for God too – but they’re not finding much in what we offer. They don’t even ask “where is your God?” any more. And we’re pestered by the memories of what once was, of what we once were.

Not only is it the place of the Church but sometimes – too often perhaps – it’s the place of ministry. We long for the refreshing streams of abundant, fruitful ministry; we long to see life spring up from our labours – and instead there’s only the deep. The chaotic, life-sapping billows of busy-ness, and stress, and anxiety.

It’s in such a time of exile that we need memories. Indeed this is a discipline to which exiles are called, the careful discipline of remembering, and I would suggest that there are two kinds of memory.

To begin with there are memories of what we might call our stories. Like the psalmist who looks back with affection and perhaps a touch of nostalgia to the good old days, we need that kind of remembering too. Yes, I know we’re meant to be forward looking. Yes, I know it’s the future that counts. I know we must not be held back by the past, but none of that is a reason for not cherishing and treasuring the past, our stories. After all they’re a crucial part of our identities. If the Jews hadn’t taken time in exile to remember and re-tell their story we wouldn’t have much of a Bible.

Recently I spent a day with a church that was trying to discern its way forward, and we spent a part of the day just remembering: drawing out people’s early recollections of the church, key figures from the past that had made an impression on them. As we remembered certain distinct features of this church started to emerge: ways God had been at work in it in the past, and what happened then was that these became clues to the church’s identity, and they became pointers to the future.

We need to remember. I would dare to suggest that every church needs its keeper of the story. This is a person or persons well-versed in the church’s past who keep the record, holding in memory the church’s life with photographs and displays and memorabilia. Indeed such treasuring of the story is a vital ingredient of lament, just as it is in the lament that is Psalm 42, as the psalmist looks back to former days. Like the psalmist we in the church are enduring massive, painful loss. Something that we have prized and generations have invested their lives in is dying around us, and as with every death there is a degree of denial going on. We do not want to believe it. But one of the ways out of denial is lament – the processing of our grief and fear – and we urgently need to do it. And one of the key ingredients of lament, as is Psalm42, is remembering.

There is however a second kind of memory, a second discipline of remembering that exiles must practice, the hosting of a memory that is far deeper and stronger – and longer. And without this our memories become mere nostalgia, and they constrain us and hold us back. I’m talking here of the memory not our story but God’s story: the great elemental acts of God that lie at the foundation of Israel’s life, and the Church’s life and indeed the life of the world. In all the flux and fray of history this deep, abiding memory of God is one to which exiles are summoned again and again.

We find it in today’s text from Isaiah 51:

‘Look to the rock from which you were cut, and to the quarry from which you were hewn.’

Note once more the imagery of rock, as in Psalm 42. Only here we have not a cry of desperation but a confident summons to look to the God who quarried and fashioned Israel. Exiles are exhorted to look back and to remember and to take heart. Faced this time not with the rocky terrain of Jordan and Hermon but with the ruins of Jerusalem, exiles are commanded to look beyond the rubble and back to the rock from which they were cut. That rock was father Abraham and mother Sarah. Barren, infertile Abraham and Sarah. Like the psalmist they too knew all about absence and yearning. Like him their souls had longed and thirsted for God; like him they had ached to behold the face of God, in their case they yearned to behold the face of God in the face of a child – their child. And from this dry rock of Abraham, the hollow cavity of Sarah’s womb, God had fashioned a house, a dwelling-place – descendents. Isaiah 51:2:

‘Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.’

Hence the summons to song in Isaiah 54:1,

‘Sing, O barren one who did not bear: Burst into song and shout!’

Note carefully here the two memories. There is Psalm 42 with its wistful, nostalgic reminiscing of distant shouts and songs, when the psalmist processed in joyful festival parade in a former time. But to that particular memory is now added the core, foundational memory of Sarah and her exuberant songs and shouts, of this once desolate woman who must enlarge her tent to accommodate all her children.

This is the memory of the God who again and again surprises the world by bringing life to the old, the tired, the barren and the dead. And to such memory we must return again and again. Indeed we do it every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, in the prayer of the Great Thanksgiving when we remember and re-tell the great, core, saving acts of God.

Indeed if we continue through Isaiah 64 we find the writer returning again to such core memory. The psalmist, you will recall, had surveyed the deep and felt threatened and overwhelmed. But Isaiah remembers a God whose love and loyalty banished the deep. Verse 9:

‘This is like the days of Noah to me: Just a I swore that the waters of Noah would never again go over the earth, so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you and will not rebuke you.’

And finally the passage comes to a glorious crescendo in verses 11 to 13, gathering it all up in a stunning juxtaposition of waters and rocks and stones and fertility:

‘O afflicted one, storm tossed, and not comforted, I am about to set your stones in antimony, and lay your foundations with sapphires. I will make your pinnacles of rubies, your gates of jewels, and all your wall of precious stones. All your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the prosperity of your children. `

Thus exiled Israel, storm-tossed and afflicted, is comforted by the Lord of the deep;

And Jerusalem, God’s habitation, hewn from the rock but lately become rubble, is set now in glorious, precious stones.

And the barren woman finds joy in offspring and their prosperity.

Let us just be clear exactly what is being said here in the context of 2nd Isaiah and exile:

Sarah, barren and hopeless is more fertile than strutting, macho, thrusting Babylon.

Exiled Jews, homeless and marginalised, have a jeweled future beside which the lacklustre Empire fades.

And if we remember this, take this memory of God’s story to heart, then what can we say? Let’s push this further if we dare.

Poor, humbled, waning church of our day can become more fertile than great imperial Christendom.

Marginalised, 21st Century people of God can prevail over secularism, and materialism, and consumerism, and post-modernism, and New Age, and globalisation, and all the powers of the day. True, the Church will need to reinvent itself. It will need to be different. But the God of Sarah and Abraham specialises in new life.

Look then to the rock from which you were hewn. Exile requires of us the discipline of right remembering – of our story and God’s story; platting the strands our particular memories into the stronger, longer memory of God’s great, decisive acts.

And in remembering God’s story we recall another day in another time at Caesarea Philippi, when one greater than Abraham or Sarah or the psalmist surveyed the torrents and cataracts of Jordan’s deep. And there he spoke of a rock on which he would build his church, and the gates of Hades would not prevail against it.

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6th July 2003

Memory: Exile, Lament & the Discipline of Remembering

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