I am struck by the first line of the Psalm which was our Responsive Reading, "To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul."
The whole idea of "lifting up the soul" intrigues me, especially on the first Sunday in Lent. Since Lent is a penitential season, a time to repent, a time to focus on verses such as Mark 1: 15, "Repent - the Kingdom of God is at hand," the idea of lifting up the soul may sound strange.
After all, Christians have given Lent a bad name. In addition to superficial observances of Lent - giving up spinach and prune juice instead of prejudice and gossip - Lent has another potential downside. For many it is a "downer" of a time - penitence and self-denial don't seem very uplifting.
When I was a boy, I was told, "Baptists don't do Lent." No one knew why. I suspect that it was an anti-Catholic thing which I pray we are over. It was the old argument, "whatever they do, we don't!" - a curiously convoluted, twisted and unhealthy way to decide on religious practices.
Whatever the reason for "not doing Lent," I think it is a great loss for any Christian not to prepare for Good Friday and Easter. Every spring the baseball players prepare for the season with spring training; every spring ordinary people do "spring cleaning." So why shouldn't Christians prepare for the most important events in Jesus' ministry - what he did for us on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, what he did for us on Golgotha's cross and at the empty tomb?
If it helps you, think of Lent as a kind of Christian spring training and spring cleaning!
Part of the preparation is penitence, repenting from sin. Repenting is not a "downer." When one works through repentance to forgiveness, nothing is more uplifting than the feelings of reconciliation, freedom, health, power, and refreshment.
Our texts today suggest that we can work through our sense of sin and come to something wonderfully uplifting - God's special kind of remembering and forgetting. This Godly remembering and forgetting makes Psalm 25 a psalm for the season.
The remembering and forgetting cluster around a deep sense of sin. (Psalm 15: 7) God is asked to remember not (that is, to forget) both the past sins of youth and the present transgressions as well (v. 11).
The word "remember" occurs three times in vv. 6-7 (translated as "be mindful" in v. 6).
God is asked:
(1) to remember his mercy and steadfast love
(2) to remember not one's sins
(3) to remember the person ("remember me")
(John H. Hayes, Preaching Through the Christian Year - B [Valley Forge, Pennsylvania] 1993, p. 139)
The person who wrote Psalm 25 was clearly interested in memory. Not only does he frequently mention remembering and forgetting, he or she actually fashions the Psalm as an acrostic. The first line begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the second line with the second letter, and so on right through the alphabet, possibly as an aid to remembering its sequence of verses. (Not all the letters are included; perhaps the copyist was drowsy!)
THINGS FOR GOD TO REMEMBER
Psalm 25 gives three things for God to remember or not remember.
A. Remember to love and be merciful
God is asked to remember his mercy and steadfast love.
The idea that God may need to have his memory jogged may strike you as odd, but remember that in the story of the flood in Genesis 9, God places his bow in the clouds to remember his covenant, never again to destroy all flesh with water. "When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." (v. 14-16)
The psalmist wants more than restraint from a great and destructive flood. He or she wants mercy and steadfast love, the heart of the covenant with God.
This is a great place to begin. We prefer that before God turn his eye on us with all our sins and shortcomings, he remember first that he is a God of mercy and steadfast love.
When we are in trouble, when the dark side of our spirits has taken control, God is still steadfast in his love for us. This is a steady love, this covenant love, this love of the agreement God will not break no matter what we do.
B. Remember not my sins
God is asked not to remember one's sins, both the sins of one's youth and the current transgressions.
It is virtually impossible for us not to remember something. If you are instructed not to remember what a purple camel looks like, you will not be able to get the ridiculous image from your consciousness. But the Psalmist believed the Almighty was capable of not remembering our past sins.
Past sins haunt us, even when we know we are forgiven. The consequences often linger with us. Paul wrote about "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead." (Philippians 3: 13)
I recall one of the first services in which I took part as your associate pastor at the church's Eutaw Place location. I had just begun to lead the responsive reading when I noticed that a college friend had come in. He was then a student at the University of Maryland Dental School and had threatened to show for a service just to check up on me. There he was grinning away at me. What was he thinking about? Why was he grinning? It was not a friendly smile; it was more of a "gotcha" smirk. Just then in the reading we hit Philippians 3: 13. I looked him right in the eye and read, "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead..."
There are some things in all our lives for which we ought to repent, for which we ought to be forgiven, and which we should forget as much as possible. Were Paul composing in today's language, I suspect he might have written, "Get over it! Get on with it!"
C. Remember Me
God is asked to remember the person ("remember me").
For God to remember us is for God to see us first through the eyes of steadfast love and second with a memory free of past sins. After those moves he can look on us and delight in us.
The most poignant "remember me" in the Christian scriptures comes near the end of Holy Week, on Good Friday, when a dying thief turns to Jesus and says, "Remember me when you come into your kingdom." (Luke 23: 42)
To this "remember me," our Lord says, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23: 43)
But there is another "remember me," we must mention. On the night in which our Lord was betrayed, he took the bread and gave thanks, and broke it and gave it to his disciples saying, "Do this in remembrance of me." (I Corinthians 11: 24)
WHAT WE CAN REMEMBER
Here's a suggestion for a Lenten action. During the time between now and Holy Week, make a list of great texts and commit them to memory.
Two wonderful ladies who were a part of our church for many years, Mrs. Mary Swanson and her sister-in-law, Miss Grace Swanson, used to live on the street where Ann Carico and the Cumbies now live. One Sunday while riding with us to church, they told me that they had decided to commit to memory large chunks of scripture.
"We're getting older now," they explained, "and if we can no longer read the Bible, we want to be able to say parts of it which are especially precious to us."
Let me offer some suggestions for your Lenten memory work:
"No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure." (I Corinthians 10: 13)
"I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed or of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me." (Philippians 4: 11b-13)
"Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." (John 16: 33)
"I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8: 38-39)
I would be interested in hearing what some of your choices are. You may want to stay with verses like these, verses of comfort. Or you may be at a point where you need verses of challenge, which stir you up to love and good works, like II Timothy 1: 6:
"I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you...for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline."
"Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."
(Romans 13: 14) For those who want a traditional Lenten list of sins of the flesh to give up, you may prefer the King James Version which speaks of making "no provisions for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof." That can be lust for too much food or refer to sexual appetites.
WHAT JESUS REMEMBERED
I would like to close with a few comments about what I think Jesus remembered throughout his ministry, something he never forgot no matter what.
To prepare Jesus for his ministry God said at the outset, "This is my beloved son, with you I am well pleased." (Mark 1: 11b)
To prepare us for the Lenten journey, we need to hear something similar, namely, that we are God's beloved children. And so we are! Listen to I John 3:
"See what love the Father has given us,
that we should be called children of God;
and that is what we are...
Beloved, we are God's children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.
What we do know is this:
when he is revealed, we shall be like him,
for we will see him as he is.
And all who have this hope in him purify themselves
just as he is pure." (I John 3: 1a, 2-3)
I love that passage and commend it to you for these forty days of Lent. It says so many important things:
- God's love is a gift. That's a good thing, because we surely could not earn his love because we are such "nice people!"
- We are God's children now, just as we are "without one plea."
- As good as it is now to be God's loved child, things are going to get better, although we do not yet know how much better.
- What we do know is that we will be like Jesus, God's beloved son.
- We know that one day we will see him, and that this hope brings the purity of Jesus to us.
The kind of love God gave Jesus when he said, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased," is the kind of love he gives to us, when the Bible says, "See what love the Father has given us,
that we should be called children of God;
and that is what we are...
Beloved, we are God's children now..."
And this kind of love is "the model of good parenting. These are the words every child wants to hear from their parent(s). For Jesus, these words are both the assurance that God loves him and the foundation for his ministry, his death and resurrection. The importance of love and acceptance for us humans is critical. In this text from Mark we can see that it was also important for the human Jesus." (Susan Langhauser, Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. VIII, No. 3, p. 22)
The parent who blesses the child creates a blessed child. In turn the blessed child who becomes a parent is empowered to bless his or her child. This transmission of blessing from generation to generation is the model for the kind of posterity we want our church to have.
We sing in our dedication of offerings about the One who from our mother's arms has blessed us on our way. (Martin Rinkart, "Now Thank We All Our God," Baptist Hymnal, Wesley L. Forbis, editor [Nashville: Convention Press] 1991, No. 638). We who have been blessed one way are now to bless the children of this church family. May such a heritage of blessing from generation to generation, from our ancestors to our posterity, ever be a part of Woodbrook church, in this room and in the sanctuary to come.
Jesus remembered, "This is my beloved son..."
throughout his ministry
during the temptations
when the great throngs followed him
when the fickle crowd deserted him
when he stood on the Mount of the Transfiguration
when he entered from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem in triumph
when he hung in agony on Mount Calvary outside the city wall on a Roman cross....
Jesus remembered, "This is my beloved son..."
For Lent and for always, in whatever circumstances you encounter, may we never forget and ever remember that we are God's beloved children in whom he delights.
