Wednesday, September
13, 2017
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Dedicate to me
every firstborn among the Israelites. The first offspring to be born, of both
humans and animals, belongs to me.” So
Moses said to the people, “This is a day to remember forever—the day you left
Egypt, the place of your slavery. Today
the Lord has brought you out by the power of his mighty hand….“On the
seventh day you must explain to your children, ‘I am celebrating what the Lord did
for me when I left Egypt.’ This annual
festival will be a visible sign to you, like a mark branded on your hand or
your forehead. Let it remind you always to recite this teaching of the Lord:
‘With a strong hand, the Lord rescued
you from Egypt.’ So observe the decree
of this festival at the appointed time each year. Exodus 13:1-3, 8-10(NLT)
With each
passing year it becomes more difficult to keep the past alive. Memory is a fading thing. This is why we RE-member; we put back together that which has been DIS-membered from us (no
matter how imperceptibly or how dramatically). We regather our sense of that moment in time when
things changed.
Some things
need to be kept alive. For a nation at
war, there needs to be a recalling of why we do what we do – why we continue to
send our sons and daughters into harm’s way.
Because once purpose
fails in our memory, once reasoning is put aside in favor of action, that which
remains becomes grotesquely horrid, a caricature of what was once a noble
quest, and now a thing filled only with the carnage of blood and future victims
of PTSD. War becomes our reason for war.
Like
Israel, we are to remember the place of our slavery. When we remember why we embarked upon a bloody course of fighting, we can
re-focus on where the
goal is, and when
enough will be enough. We remember to
keep our direction sure and our course to our objective of peace straight.
This is
what a memorial is supposed to teach, how things went wrong, and how it was put
right. In so doing we teach our young ones
who were born into the chaos we now experience – those who have no memory of
why the chaos began – that chaos is not our target; our target is an end to
chaos.
Another
memorial was created to teach how things went wrong. We call it by many names: the
Supper, Communion, Ordinance, Sacrament, Eucharist and more.
There are not many moving parts…a bit of bread, a sip of wine. But as the simplicity of the 9/11 memorial begs
a storehouse of nightmarish memories 16 years ago, the Lord’s Table envisions
the war of the ages begun in Eden. It is
the covering of blood over the sin of our species. It is the event of the cross where we RE-member; it is where the
broken members of our spiritual being are knit back together, so we are once
more whole and fitted parts of our Creator’s body.
This then
is the target we revere and to which honor affixes expending the price – peace in
a world gone mad with the lust of anger, lust and killing.
Truly, let
us remember our loss, and justly, let us push for the restoration of what is
holy and right.
For You Today
And the
highest cost is certainly that of forgetting!
You chew on
that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!
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