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Viewed from the world, the church must appear as a band of deserters when it forsakes encampment in an existence where all else is intent on solidarity and total union.

–Ernst Käsemann, The Wandering People of God.

Title: To Never Forget.
Date: August 12, 2007
Texts: Psalm 50:1-8, 22-23; Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12:32-40

What does it mean to live as strangers and foreigners on earth? Strangers and foreigners…

Hebrews 11 shows us what faithfulness looks like by reminding us of our ancestors who were strangers and foreigners. There’s Abraham and Isaac and Jacob who lived in tents, awaiting the promises of God. Then the author of Hebrews gives us one of my favorite passages in Scripture:

All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and welcomed them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland… As it is, they desire a better country, a heavenly one.

To have faith, to hope, is somehow to look like these strangers and foreigners. But how? What makes us look like they do? What makes us strangers and aliens in the land where we find ourselves?

I don’t think the answer is that we should all start dressing funny. It’s like those youth groups that all wear the same bright color shirt so they can stick out in crowds. I don’t think that’s the kind of strangeness Hebrews’ is talking about.

Nor do I think it’s the way you can tell if the young people traveling in Europe are from the United States. Most wear New Balance running shoes. I realized that when I was riding around on the EuroRail, or walking around Prague—if I saw someone wearing New Balance shoes, it was also probably the case that they would be speaking English… Like me. I knew I was a foreigner among foreigners by looking at our shoes.

That’s not the foreignness that is called faithfulness in Hebrews. If only it was as easy as buying the right kind of shoes! It has nothing to do with that kind of sticking out. But it has everything to do with memory, with a way of refusing to forget and refusing to let others forget. And this way of remembering, this way of refusing to forget, has everything to do with hope. And it guards us from making hope cheap.

Hope is a kind of remembering, but one that makes us strange, foreign, maladjusted, misfits, out of step. Here’s what I mean. The best way to help us see how the hope I’m talking about makes us maladjusted and strange is to compare it with optimism—which is cheap hope.

Optimism is a way of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. When things seem bad, we can take heart because we’re confident that it will get better. Optimism is a belief in some sort of sovereign spirit at work in the world that is guiding things to make everything turn out all right, a spirit of progress. There’s also an attitude that goes along with optimism that says we shouldn’t dwell on the troubles of the past and the present, because we need to get busy working towards a better future. Optimism makes forgetfulness easy. And without paying attention to (holding onto) the past, optimists put themselves at the mercy of the people in power who say, “Trust me, forget about the past, things will be different now. Let’s move on.”

But all of that isn’t the same thing as the sort of hope in Hebrews 11—because that kind of hope makes us strangers by calling us to a kind of remembering. Our hope never forgets. It’s a hope that lives without the illusions about how terrible things really are. It’s a kind of hope that doesn’t flinch or pretend.

This kind of hope is about being a remembering people, who through our unflinching memory make ourselves strangers and foreigners, outsiders, to optimistic solutions to our problems. It’s a hope that makes clear that our homeland is not the same as those who try to keep this world running smoothly. This hope isn’t interested in smoothing out the surfaces, the rough spots; it’s not interested in oiling the machine; it’s not interested in efficient solutions.

This is a hope that takes remembering the forgotten as primary, and that’s why we are misfits. It’s a kind of hope that never forgets, no matter how inconvenient the memory may be, despite everyone’s call to put the troubles of society behind us so we can pave a new way into the promises of the future.

For example, this is a kind of memory doesn’t let people get away with saying silly things about this land as “ours” to protect from outsiders. Because it’s a memory that reminds people what they want to forget: that it’s only theirs because some people were really good at killing Native Americans—it’s founded upon injustice and violence, the land belongs to us because of a genocide, for some reason deemed acceptable.

As I thought about this kind of hope that doesn’t forget, I realized that I had to read again a book that I haven’t read since High School: Elie Wiesel’s Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). I know. It probably sounds crazy… What does that have anything to do with hope? Well, it keeps us from cheap hope, forgetful optimism, comfortable memory.

If you haven’t read it, it’s a memoir of a Hungarian Jew who was taken from his home as a young boy, and put to work and suffer in that infamous Nazi concentration camp: Auschwitz. The entire book is a battle against forgetfulness. Wiesel published the book over a decade after his experiences at Auschwitz as a way to remember that which he was tempted to forget. The entire memoir is a struggle to remember, despite the pain and agony that comes with such difficult memories.

Another name for this struggle to remember and remind others about the suffering is witness, to bear witness. And that’s how Wiesel thinks of himself, as a witness—as he says in the preface, “[I am] a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory” (viii). “For in the end, it is all about memory… To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time” (xv).

Elie Wiesel thinks about his witness as a weapon in a battle against the enemies of life. He remembers and reminds us as a way to prevent the victims of injustice from being erased, or killed a second time, as he puts it.

There’s a deeply moving passage towards the beginning of the book where Wiesel takes his stand against forgetting. This is what he says (p. 34):

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long         night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed         into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire     to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my     dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God                 Himself.
Never.”

To never forget. Wiesel will never let us forget what happened to the Jews. What happened to the Jews—that’s putting it far too nicely… Wiesel won’t let us forget about those who murdered thousands, and the rest of the world that closed their eyes.

Whenever people talk about the wonders of our modern civilization, the achievements of human advancements, the progress of society, how good we have it, our glorious plans for the future of humankind—there’s Elie Wiesel, an old man scared with memories, making himself a foreigner to all this talk, a stranger, by stubbornly refusing to forget what we, with the wonders of technology and patriotic persuasion, are capable of doing.

Remembering is a form of resistance. To never forget is a way to make ourselves strange, to make ourselves foreigners, to sustain a different kind of imagination. Memory is a thorn in the side of power, and an annoying thistle in our socks as we try to walk around comfortably.

There’s a way that God is kind of like Elie Wiesel. God is the one who never forgets. God has that same kind of inconvenient memory, a thorn in our side as we try to make things comfortable and sustainable for the future. It’s God, in Isaiah, who won’t let us forget that we have blood on our hands. Isaiah 1:15,

When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even if you offer many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

What an ungrateful thing for God to say. In Isaiah, God goes on and on about how the people offer him sacrifices of rams, bulls, goats, and lambs. And how the people faithfully go about their pious business of doing religious things, like offering incense, observing Sabbath and other holy days. But then God says scandalous and offensive things like in verse 13,

I cannot endure your solemn assemblies.

And in verse 14,

Your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.

Why? Why won’t God let the people go along with their lives, doing the things that they were taught to do in order to be good people, decent people, religious people? Why won’t God accept it all as good enough? Why can’t God be a little more appreciative of all these good things? Why can’t God be a bit more optimistic about the way these sacrifices and religious practices might probably pay off in the end, and create a people who can stand up against injustice? Why can’t God put a little trust in the work of the people, as they organize society?

It’s because God makes Godself a foreigner to us by never forgetting the inconvenient realities of our society—God doesn’t forget the conveniently forgotten. And God won’t let us forget either. Isaiah 1:16-17

Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourself clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

God won’t let us forget what happens where we don’t like to look, the inconvenient places. There are no shortcuts to the homeland where we belong, the homeland Hebrews holds before us, where justice is for everyone, even those who don’t have the power or energy to make enough noise for us to pay attention to them.

(pause)

But what does this all mean for us? I think it means that we must make it our job as Christians to never forget because that’s the way God is. And this makes us strangers because we can’t always be as optimistic and enthusiastic about worldly structures that want us to believe that we are at home. We always point out the forgotten stories and the forgotten people. We remind Americans, for example, that despite all the good stories of pilgrims searching for religious freedom, there are also important ones that we forget—like the colonial terrorists that enslaved Africans and the ones that wiped out Native American civilizations.

But this kind of memory is also the difficult work of hope. It’s the beginning of hope, a hope that isn’t cheap, a hope that takes seriously the evils we are capable of. Hope is a task, a difficult struggle, to wait with those who don’t have hope, and learn what justice means for them and from them.

Maybe that means sharing a meal with the janitor where you work, or at least to get to know their name, and maybe the names of their children. Or, the people who harvest the food we eat, or wash our dishes at restaurants. I’m sure you can think of more people that I’m forgetting.

But we do this not for the sake of charity, even though that’s good too—we get to know the forgotten people and stories because they begin to help us feel what Hebrews wants us to realize: that we are strangers and foreigners in this place. The peace and comfort we experience here, can’t be final, it can’t be complete, because it isn’t experienced by everyone. And, sometimes, tragically, our peace comes at others’ expense.

But our homeland, the one Hebrews 11 offers us as our hope, the one we see in the distance, has a place for the forgotten—they will be the blessed. And maybe our hope, if it’s not going to be cheap, should be to start being agents of God’s blessing for the forgotten. We will be strangers and foreigners on this earth as long as the forgotten are made aliens by the ways of this world.