Remembering the Future

This shall be a day of remembrance for you.

This is the word of the Lord spoken to Moses about the Passover meal, when it was first shared amongst the people of Israel as they prepared to flee the clutches of Pharaoh. The story was held and told at Passover as the reminder to the people who came after – a reminder of God’s presence, God’s promise and God’s redemption.

This story was told to Jews in exile – first to those in Egypt and then to those in Babylon, and then across millennia, in the synagogues of Europe and Russia, in the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi death camps, in the freedom of the new Israel and once again through much of the world today.

This story echoes and resonates in our lives and faith. This hope and promise are inherent to our hope, as we find our way in the world. We look back for this moment to find our way forward. Even in desperation, dressed to run, God is with us.
Remembering God’s promise is less difficult when times are good, when blessings are easily counted. But this story is to be remembered each and every year – in drought and flooding rain. God is with us.

What an extraordinary act of hope! To declare, when the evidence seems scant, that God is with us.

We cannot simply cut this story out and paste it into our lives and culture, nevertheless, the task of remembering is critical to how we make our next steps. As we consider how to speak of Christ in our community, how to articulate justice in these times, how to be a community of faith in a world of myriad faiths, we turn back to those stories which form us, body and soul.

We remember forward.

We remember that God’s promise does not fail and so the word of promise spoken in hope is hope for us, now.

We are blessed to remember more than the hope of the Passover Meal. We remember that God who challenged and forgave and restored Israel is present now to challenge, forgive and restore.

The God who was present and proclaimed in Jesus still calls us now. The call to love and forgive is no less potent than when Jesus invited those first disciples, and the call to be reconciled before worship is no less rigorous than when Peter and his mates first tried to clarify (and dare I suggest minimise) it. [check out Matthew 18.15-35]

Remembering Jesus is about tomorrow as much as yesterday. Remembering Jesus is about looking forward to what God will say in and through – and to us – today and tomorrow.

Has the world ever needed the confronting wonder of forgiveness more than now? Have we ever needed reconciliation in greater quantities than now? Remember bread broken and wine shared in hope that the God who created and recreated the world through Christ is as present now as when the story was first made real.