Memory Loss

“We will never forget you” was the promise of the Governor-General to the families of victims at the MH17 Memorial Service in Melbourne on Thursday. A generous and ambitious promise indeed.

In this week, of all weeks, we promise to remember.

It was this week, a century ago, that the First World War began for Australia. Our memory of that fluctuates between grieving and glorifying, as memory so often does. It was this week almost seven decades ago that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the memory of that is fraught with grief and attempts to understand the context and meaning of such an extraordinary action in our very different world.

Despite the promise of Peter Cosgrove and the momentous events of war in our recent history, we are, in fact, a culture of selective memory, of forgetting. We have decided to forget that two other planes fell to earth in the week following the MH17 disaster – in North Africa and Taiwan.

It has been simpler to forget the ongoing disaster in Syria, now that the focus has turned to Gaza. As the crisis grows in northern Iraq for Christians and other minorities, have we forgotten the invasion by western nations ten years ago which destabilised the entire region?

Since Cato first debated Julius Caesar, politicians have counted on us forgetting and have invested considerable efforts in us doing so. (I am sure that Senators Abetz and Brandis are hoping for our quick and complete memory loss after some unfortunate interviews this week!)

At the heart of the Christian story is the exhortation to remember.

When we break the bread and lift the cup, remember me. When we pray for the Spirit to stir the water of baptism, we remember how God has moved from the dawn of creation to create and bless. We remember the stories of Sarah and Abraham, Rebekah and Isaac, Leah and Rachel and Esau and Jacob so that we can better understand how God speaks and acts in the world from the beginning.

Remembering is not just liturgical, or the telling of stories. Remembering is to take the story on board and make it our own. To remember is to see ourselves in God’s story, a God who says to us “How can I ever forget you?” [Isaiah 49.15]

Remembering is to see our lives transformed by a God who refuses to forget us.

When we call attention to acts of injustice in the world, we are remembering our God of justice. When we pray for healing, we are remembering Jesus who acted to heal and restore. When we struggle to forgive our enemies, or even our neighbour, we are remembering, with the Spirit’s urging, a God who loves us and calls us to do likewise for those least likely.

Remembering is not memory, it is participation. When we remember, we engage in the action of God in the world.

Remembering is to call attention to Syria when our world wants us to forget; it is to speak up for children forgotten in Iraq, Manus Island, Nauru, Gaza and South Sudan, when no one else thinks they are worth the media space.

Real remembering is not just to honour the dead, but to seek to ensure through our speech, prayer, worship and action that we will never again drop an atomic bomb, that we will never believe killing innocent people is “justified”, or that imprisoning children is politically expedient.

We remember and proclaim a holy God of wondrous love, of extraordinary forgiveness, of incomparable justice.

In world where we are encouraged to delete our memory as easily as our browser history, God calls us to remember. Tell the promise of God, live out God’s forgiveness, and hope in the promise of a God who never forgets his creation.