7/5/20 “The Holy Act of Remembering” by Nancy E. Petty
I Corinthians 11:23-25
On this 4th of July, in the year 2020, I want to talk about the holy act of remembering. On three different occasions in recent weeks, I have been invited by the universe to think about the theme of remembering. While reading an article titled, A Christian Call for Reparations in Sojourners, I read this statement: “In faith communities, reparation must begin with anamnestic truth-telling. Anamnesis means ‘memorial sacrifice.’ Its origins are in Jesus’ words, ‘Do this in memory of me.” This is not a passive process but one in which Christians enter into the sacrifice. It is about being accountable to the past in the very present.”
Several day after reading that article, I listened to our guest preacher last Sunday talk about “remembering as God remembers.” While it was not the main point of his sermon, nor did he explicitly unpack what he meant by that phrase, nevertheless it caught my attention. “Remembering as God remembers.”
Third, this past week I listened to an interview on FaceBook in which our friend Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili talks about the history of the Christian faith, and specifically the history of the Evangelical Baptist Church in Georgia, and where his own faith journey and ministry intersects with that history. At one point in the interview, Malkhaz gets up from his chair and walks over to a bookcase in his home that is covered by a curtain. He pulls the curtain back, steps up on a bench and reaches to the highest shelf. He gently lifts a book from the shelf and turns back to the interviewer holding a badly charred book. This is what he says next, holding the burnt Bible in one hand and pulling at his long beard with the other, he searches his mind:
Which year was it? 2001
He continues:
They burnt our books. They burnt our Bibles. 17,000 copies of them.
This one we pulled out of the fire.
It was that radical group that had been active since the 1990s with support of the government and had been harassing all the minority religious groups. Their ravaging ended in 2003. The attack on our church was one of their last assaults.
Then the Rose Revolution happened and the religious violence which was orchestrated by the government was over.
[Holding that burnt Bible in his hands, he said] I used to keep it on the altar of our church as a reminder that religious rights weren’t safeguarded in this country and that there was no freedom of religious beliefs. Now it’s kind of a relic which I keep in my library.
His words pierced my heart: “I used to keep it on the altar of our church as a reminder…”
In the convergence of reading and hearing these calls to remembrance, I began thinking about the holy act of remembering. Here on this 4th of July, in the year 2020, it seems to me that we have some remembering to do. And in our current context it is not a remembering of history as whites have recorded it that needs to be front and center. It is the “holy act of remembering” that Frederick Douglass confronts us with in his question, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” This 4th of July, as white people, we are being asked to remember that our Independence Day as a nation was not a day of freedom and liberation for all who lived in America. The words of that celebrated document, the Declaration of Independence, fell way short of its own aim to declare that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In the year of our Lord, 2020, we must engage the holy act of remembering—and truth-telling—that the high ideals on which this nation was founded, have not, thus far, been realized in that we still have not endowed black Americans, Native Americans, brown Americans certain unalienable Rights, among them Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
On this 4th of July, 2020, the holy act of remembering requires us to remember that 244 years later Native Americans and black and brown Americans are still not free in this country. They are not free of forced labor as they disproportionally sit in our for profit prison complexes and are required to labor without compensation. They are not free of income inequality. They are not free of poverty. They are not free from voter suppression. They are not free from being quarantined to live on land whose water and soil is poisoned and polluted by the empire of big corporations who value money over human lives.
If we are to engage in the holy act of remembering we must remember America’s history, beginning with 246 years of chattel slavery, followed by Congressional mismanagement of the Freedman’s Savings Bank which left 61,144 depositors with losses of nearly $3 million in 1874. We must remember the violent massacre decimating Tulsa’s Greenwood District in 1921—a population of 10,000 that thrived as the epicenter of African American business and culture, commonly referred to as “Black Wall Street.” And we must remember the discriminatory policies throughout the 20th century including the Jim Crow Era’s “Black Codes” strictly limiting opportunity in many southern states, the GI bill, the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act’s exemption of domestic agricultural and service occupations, and redlining. Wealth was taken from these communities before it had the opportunity to grow. (1) In 2016 blacks earned 65% as much as whites. Today, there are 140 million poor and low-income people in this country–one of, if not, the richest country in the world—and black, brown and indigenous people make up a disproportion number of those living in poverty.
America has some honorable virtues that need remembering and brought into the present with laser focus. Virtues like welcoming the immigrant or as Emma Lazarus poetically wrote, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” In recent years, America has struggled to honor this legacy, but the legacy is real – America is America because of the fertile fusion of cultures from every continent. America is the crossroads and crucible of humanity. And because of that, we have so very much potential! America is wildly entrepreneurial, inventive, optimistic and productive. We expect so much of America precisely because we know what she is capable of once we dare to truly be America.
However, this July 4th, as the infectious boil of racial inequality oozes, instead of feasting on hamburgers and hotdogs and apple pie, we need to chew, and swallow, and digest the original sin of American history as we practice the holy act of remembering. For indigenous, black and brown Americans this nation is still not that bright light on a hill. It is still not the place where all are seen as being created equal, all are inherently worthy, all deserve the same justice. It is still not a land where milk and honey flow equally for all and where the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is a God-given right. In remembrance of this July 4th we are faced with the holy act of remembering this part of our nation’s history and our nation’s present.
This is the remembering we do as citizens of this country. But there is another holy act of remembering that we, as people of the Christian faith (as citizens of God’s kin-dom), are invited to reflect upon this weekend. It is the remembrance of the life and death of Jesus who uttered those words, “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, do this in remembrance of me.” Gathered as God’s people we must ask: What is the holy act of remembering when we gather around the table to share the bread and the cup—the very body and blood of Jesus? What is Jesus asking us to remember in these our times?
I don’t believe Jesus is asking us to remember him personally but rather to remember the values and virtues he embodied. When we partake of the bread, he is asking us to remember the bread of justice. When we drink from the cup, he is asking us to remember the cup of grace. When we gather around this table he is asking us to remember that here there is neither rich nor poor, gay or straight or trans or bi, deserving or non-deserving. I believe he is asking us to remember that every person is created in the image of God and reflects God’s imagine in the world. I believe he is asking us to remember that we are formed from the same particles of dust, that our flesh and blood is the same regardless of its color or type.
Many of us were taught in the religion of our youth that Jesus died to redeem us from our sins, that Jesus’ life was demanded by God as penance for our wrongdoing, that Jesus had to die. Well, you may be surprised to hear me say today that I believe at least part of that theology is true. Jesus had to die. Just not for the reasons we have been told. And I believe it is true that Jesus died “for” humankind because he believed in the worth of every human body. But I do not believe Jesus died in our stead, as a substitution for our death. Nor do believe that Jesus died to redeem personal sins or to provide personal salvation. The institutional church would have us believe that Jesus died in our stead. But I think the church has that teaching all wrong. Jesus died to show us the model for how to live a life that lives and dies on the cross of justice love for every human body—each body created in the image of God.
I believe that Jesus came to show us the true cost of life and love and freedom. I believe he is asking us to remember that we are born into this world to be a sacrifice, and sometimes a bodily sacrifice for justice, for compassion, for mercy, for grace, for equality and above all for love. Love—not a cheap love, but a sacrificial love that rises again and again from the dark tombs of death—from the tombs of prejudice and hate and violence and greed. A sacrificial love that rises again and again from the dark tombs of racism and poverty and economic inequality and ecological devastation and the war economy and a perverted nationalism rooted in a false Christian narrative. To “do this in remembrance of me” is the holy act of remembering the past in the very present and standing ready to be accountable for both. To do this in remembrance is to remember that “when you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression.” To do this in remembrance of me” means to sacrifice our privilege so that freedom can ring for one and all.
Like Malkhaz and the burnt Bible what will we put on our altar to remember that as both American citizens and citizens of God’s kin-dom freedom for all will require sacrifice? It is time, like Malkhaz, to pull back the curtain and take our charred history off the shelf and engage in the holy act of remembering for the sake of our national identity; but mostly for our identity as the people of God.
(1) Brookings Institution
