Rev. Kathleen McShane
November 26, 2017
On the Other Side of Ruin: Everything has a crack in it. That’s how the light gets in. Jeremiah 31:31-34 Last spring, I had a chance to hear Ruby Bridges speak. Ruby Bridges is 63 now, and she was the little girl in this painting by Norman Rockwell. She was the first black student to attend William Frantz public school in New Orleans. Until then that school had been fully segregated—reserved for only white students. In 1960, that little girl put on her best dress on a Monday morning and walked bravely across a solid color line, to launch this country’s civil rights movement. Ruby was six years old on the day federal marshals walked with her past an angry crowd and into the doors of a school that did not want her to come. When I saw her last year, she told the story of how her parents had volunteered to have her, along with maybe a hundred other black children, take an intelligence test to see if she ‘qualified’ to participate in de-segregating Louisiana’s schools. Ruby did well on the test. She wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but neighbors and friends came to the house to congratulate her parents on how smart she was. No one explained to Ruby what was about to happen; she was too young to understand. But a six-year-old does what the rest of us do when there are gaps in our information. She filled them in. She figured out that passing the test meant that she was so smart, she was going to skip right from kindergarten to college. And so when the federal marshals came to the front door and took her into a strange building that was full of angry-looking adults, she wasn’t so afraid. She thought this must be what college looks like. And then white families held their children out of school for weeks in protest, so there were no other kids around. So it was just what she expected: she was the one child among lots of college-aged adults. It took her a long time, she said, to realize that other children also went to school there. Every day Ruby walked through ugliness, hatred, angry demonstrators to get to school. But what Ruby Bridges talks about now is the kindness of the people who helped her be brave through those dark, scary days. Her parents, federal police agents. A teacher named Barbara Henry, who remembers that Ruby’s only classmates were the federal marshals who stood by the door. Miss Henry taught Ruby to read; she was also her gym teacher and music teacher. They sang ‘Davy Crockett’. They did jumping jacks together, pretended to jump rope. When the other children came back to school, Ruby remembers a little boy saying to her, “My mom told me I can’t play with you.” That boy told her the truth, she said, and something opened up inside of her. She realized that she wouldn’t have disobeyed that kind of instruction from her parents either. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Ruby Bridges had still been angry all these years later. How could you not be bitter about people hating you for going to school when you were six years old? But when she speaks publicly now, it’s not the awful moments that Ruby Bridges speaks about. It seems like she’s put those moments away. Forgotten them, even. Let them go.
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That passage we read this morning from Jeremiah is also about what we remember…and what we forget. Like the other prophets we’ve talked about in the last couple of weeks—Isaiah, Ezekiel— Jeremiah lived at the time of the Exile. Israel had been conquered and the people forced out of their homeland. They lost everything that had made them proud. The cultural markers that had given them their identity. Sixty years they spent in Babylon, and they had a lot to think about and remember. Sometimes—maybe most often—with regret. They remembered the times they had made bad choices, flirted with other gods, ignored the practices of a disciplined, faithful life. Would things have been different if they had been more obedient? Their teachers had always told them that if they were good, faithful people, God would bless them, make sure they were taken care of. But now, clearly, this covenant thing wasn’t working. How did they wind up like this? Whose promise had been broken first? Was it God’s fault? Theirs? Blaming someone doesn’t fix things, but it does help us feel like there is an order to the universe. And then Jeremiah brought a new word, a different vision. You’re right, God said; this isn’t working. You have not become the people I hoped you might be. So let’s start over. I will make a new covenant with you. Instead of writing it on stone tablets, I’ll put my law inside of you—write it on your hearts. It’s simple: I will be your God, and you will be my people. You won’t need an elaborate curriculum to learn about God. You’ll know me firsthand, every one of you. It won’t matter how smart and educated you are, or how simple or even distractable. You will find me, right inside of you. Whoever you are, whatever you have done before, I will wipe the slate clean. I’ll forget every act of betrayal and disobedience. We will start again. Wait. It sounds like the God of Israel, the One who knows everything, was choosing to forget whole swaths of history. Really? That whole golden calf incident, completely forgotten? Wandering away and worshiping foreign gods—entirely wiped clean? Lies, betrayals, intentional sins, crimes—just deleted? Is that even possible? Could God really forget? The Israelites’ religion had always had rituals of forgiveness in it—no one ever expected humans to live up to every expectation—but this was different. God wasn’t offering just to forgive this time around. God was offering to forget, to erase every memory of brokenness in his relationship with the people he loved. God offers amnesia. Selective amnesia—but amnesia none the less. In a most extraordinary way, God chooses to recognize his people and remember love for them, and to forget the things they’ve done to push that love away. That is a startling, so not-like-us, thing to do. And, truth be told, it’s enough to make us slightly uncomfortable. Memory is central to who we are. That’s what makes dementia and Alzheimer’s disease so terrifying. If we lose our memory, will we be ourselves? Without our memories, what do we have left? And if we don’t hang on to our memories of difficult things, wrongs that have been done, how will we make sure that justice gets done? In these last several weeks, as so many women have come forward to speak about sexual harassment and assault that happened years ago, I’ve been grateful for their memories, the courage they’ve found to speak about things that many of us
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have locked away into some closet with the word ‘shame’ written across it. I want us to go back and address the root causes of the racism that persists in this country, that surfaces now in our education system, our prisons, our courts. I think about how much safer people in the United States felt, years after 9-11, when Osama Bin Laden was tracked down to a compound in Pakistan and killed along with his family. Isn’t it our duty as human beings to remember, and to put things right? And yet…there are things I wish I could forget. Minor slights, injuries I remember and hold onto—even the ones that probably weren’t intended to hurt me. Unkind things I've said over the years to the people I love most in the world, out of anger or hurt feelings. The times I could have done more, and didn’t. It would be wonderful to forget all those things; to start our lives and our relationships over as often as we need to. I heard a story once about a family reunion. One uncle was in the far stages of dementia, living in a long-term care facility, and he wasn’t able to come. His daughter brought his greeting: "Tell my family that although I don’t remember them, I still love them.” Lovely, isn’t it? Every difficult moment washed away in a graceful sort of amnesia, that clears away everything but what is essential. I wish I could live that serenely, love that unconditionally. But that kind of undiscriminating tenderness is so beyond human, so not what we are inclined to do by choice. It’s a mix, isn’t it? There are some wrongs we never want to forget. Some we wish we could and can’t. We are only human. God, apparently, is something different. It turns out that God isn’t some cosmic counter of wrongs. God forgets. I think Jeremiah was saying that even knowing we have failed terribly at what we promised to do, God doesn’t give up on us. That in response to our infidelity, God chooses to see us as faithful. That in the face of sin and brokenness and real wretchedness—the same thing we see when we look around at a ruined-looking world—God is willing to give up taking notes and keeping count. When Israel was casting about for who to blame for the mess they were in, God did what Israel could not. God forgot the things that should have been enough to cut off the flow of his love. This, apparently, is the divine way, the way of a loving God. The God in whose image we are created. That thought can put us a little off-balance. If God forgets, who will put everything right at the end of time? Who’s going to take care of judgment, if God has forgotten all the terrible things that have happened along the way? Punish the people who we are sure deserve to be condemned? I don't know. We are only human. Next Sunday is the beginning of Advent, a season of waiting in darkness for the coming of Christmas. It’s also the first Sunday of a new year on the liturgical calendar, which means this is the last Sunday of the old year. So it makes sense for us to use this moment to think about what we want to remember from this last year and carry into the new year with us, and what we want to leave behind. Shall we do that only-human thing—keep track of this year’s wrongs, file them
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carefully so that we can make sure they get addressed? Or are there some things we can let ourselves forget, so that we might forgive and start again? Let someone else start again? What would God do? I’m pretty sure God will do what God has already done with us—with me, with you. Forgive. Maybe even forget. Say to us, “Let’s start again.” I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how it all will work out in the end, and I don’t understand how God can be so big-hearted. I’m a little in awe. But I’m grateful. Grateful for a summons to be transformed into something more than ‘only human’. Grateful to be swept up in the reach of God’s selective, loving amnesia.
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