Remembering the VIsion

Remembering the Vision
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
November 4, 2007
Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4; 11-12; Luke 19:1-10

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
The oracle that the prophet Habakkuk saw.
O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous-- therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint. Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring.
To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Luke 19:1-10
He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.""

I. BEGINNING

Halloween is a curious time of year. And it's not just the fact that people are dressing up in all kinds of crazy costumes or that children are going door to door extorting chocolate from their neighbors on the threat of trickery.

No, Halloween is a curious time of year because as a holiday it has roots in a sensibility that very few modern Americans have any more: a remembrance and reverence for the dead.

Two thousand years ago the Celts had a pagan festival called the Samhain (pron. SAU-ehn) that was the Celtic new year that began on or around November 1. Among the many traditions associated with this holiday was the belief that this holiday was one of the "thin places" where the barrier between this world and the next was transparent and it was often believed that living and dead could be in communion around this time.

In the ninth century, the Church established November 1 as "All Saints Day" and the following day as "All Souls Day". Whether the timing of the feast has anything to do with Samhain is open to debate, but these feast days celebrated the memories of the saints and of all those who had died. It is fair to say that All Saints Day, or "All Hallows Day" as it was referred to earlier, and the Samhain probably had equal influence on the practices associated with All Hallows' Eve, or Hallowe'en. Because the whole idea of ghosts and tombstones and skeletons are vestiges of these earlier festivals.

II. ALL SAINTS DAY

But it seems odd that we should have a holiday dedicated to celebrating the memory of the dead in a country that likes to pretend death isn't real .

We're not particularly good at dealing with death in our culture. We ignore it or we euphemize our way around it. We don't have funerals anymore, we have memorial services. People aren't buried in coffins laid in graves they're buried in caskets placed in plots. And worst of all, they don't die, they pass away. Even when they die as a result of the operation of the law, we talk about capital punishment not the death penalty.

And so perhaps it is no surprise that a couple of days associated with remembrance of the dead has turned away from that kind of observation and turned into a masquerade party where you can dress up like your favorite superhero. Another day of fantasy as opposed to the embracing of the reality of death.

On Friday on the quad, there was a celebration of the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos --Day of the Dead. To most Americans that sounds unnecessarily ghoulish or morbid, like the title of a zombie movie. It is not in our habit to talk much about the dead or their being among us.

III. REMEMBERING THE DEAD

For us as Christians, remembering the dead is an essential part of our Christian faith. And yet, we're so bad at it. Can any of us here name all eight of our great-grandparents ? I can remember four or five of the family names, but fail when I try to recall all the first names. And that was a mere three generations ago. Our memories are short.

German theologian Jürgen Moltmann said that when we suppress and deny the reality of death we distort the reality of life. We think of death as something that is apart from our experience--something that happens outside of the context of our lives.

But perhaps more powerfully, he noted that when we no longer perceive the presence of the dead, we fail to recognize the injustices of the dead . We develop an amnesia about past injustices.

IV. HABAKKUK'S COMPLAINT

For we often think that only the living matter. Injustice now is where we should focus our energies. And yet, the words of tonight's Old Testament lesson do not allow us to do that.

Listen again to some of those words from the prophet Habakkuk:

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous-- therefore judgment comes forth perverted.

Anything familiar about Habakkuk's complaint? It sounds awfully familiar. Do we have any reason to believe that the injustices that Habakkuk is complaining about were redressed? Do we imagine that corruption and violence and strife were all eradicated within Habakkuk's lifetime? No, they were not. And his grievance--as the grievances of all those who have died--are still in need of redress.

Perhaps we like to think that people are in a 'better place' and that the injustices they have suffered have been made up for by their entrance into that alternate plane of being. Yet, this is not the Gospel message. Moltmann writes:

In dying, Christ became the brother of the dying, In death, he became the brother of the dead, In his resurrection--as the One risen--he embraces the dead and the living, and takes them with him on his way to the consummation of God's kingdom. If I understand it rightly, this means that the dead are dead and not yet risen, but they are already 'in Christ' and are with him on the way to his future. (New Creation, p. 105)

The dead are still before us. We all await the consummation of the kingdom and of the resurrection for all of us. That is, we who live are not separated from the dead. For we are united with them by our own mortaility, our own death. And we are united with them by love.

We are not free to ignore the injustices of the dead as though they no longer mattered. This is the motivation behind those who want to remember the Armenian genocide or to remember the Holocaust, or the suffering of Native Americans. Injustices are not eliminated by the deaths of those who suffered.

This is not a call for bearing grudges of course. This is not saying that we need to keep score, they way they do in some parts of the world where everyone in Group A can tell you all the ways the ancestors of Group B did their ancestors wrong.

No, rather, this is an affirmation that the objections of Habakkuk should ring in our ears. They should challenge us not to forget the injustices of the past. They should remind us of our solidarity not only with all the living but with the dead as well.

V. REMEMBERING THE VISION

There is one other thing we are called to remember. After Habakkuk recites his complaint, he continues :

I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint. Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.

As Christians, we are called not only to remember the past, but to remember the future. Part of this entails remembering the future of the past. That is, those who died, who have gone down to their rest before us, likewise had hopes for the future. We are not the future of the past, the future is something we all have hope in.

God reminds Habakkuk what that hope is:

"There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay."

It is a vision of a day when there will be perfect peace and justice. When death will be no more, when sorrow and sighing shall be no more. When we shall dwell with God and be God's people. This is a vision that gives hope to us for the future, and challenges us to remember the injustices of the past, to remain faithful and in solidarity with those who have died, who hoped no less fully for that day than we do.

But our remembrance of that vision is not simply a passive thing: it requires boldness. Habakkuk writes:

Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it.

The vision is not simply to be remembered. But to be proclaimed, boldly. The phrase "So that a runner may read it" means, that the letters are so large, that someone running by--a courier--can read it. "Put it on a billboard" would be a modern way to say it.

Remembrance in the Christian context is never passive, anyway. Remembrance is not an intellectual activity--an act of cognition. It is of recreation, re-enactment. When Jesus said of the Lord's Supper "Do this in remembrance of me"--he did not mean 'browse through old photo albums of me when we did this.' He meant, relive it--renew it. When we remember the dead we remember the hopes of the dead, and of the vision for the future. And that is the reality that we live into.

And so we live lives that remember this vision and through our remembrance of the vision, live out that vision for the world.

VI. END

Remembrance is a key element of our Christian faith. In the Eucharist which we are about to celebrate, we remember the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. We remember the shadow of the cross: the betrayal, the denial, the ultimate injustice of the crucifixion of the righteous one.

We likewise remember that the Crucified One was the one who declared solidarity with us through sharing in our death. And through death took on to himself the death of all, uniting the living and the dead. And in whose resurrection provided the hope for our eventual resurrection on that great and wondrous day.

And in the Eucharist, we remember not only the past, but the future, the feast at the heavenly banquet, when we feast in celebration of the restoration of all things.

For, All Saints Day is ultimately about remembrance.

Remembrance of those who have died. Remembrance of those who have yet to be born. Remembrance of the Christ who unites us with all those who have gone before, and all those who will come after. The Christ in whom we see the vision of hope and peace. The Christ whom we encounter in our midst and whom we embody for the world through our remembrance.

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*Remembering the Vision* Rev. Mark Schaefer Kay Spiritual Life Center November 4, 2007 Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4; 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4; 11-12; Luke 19:1-10 Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 The oracle that the prophet Habakkuk saw. O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous-- therefore judgment comes forth perverted. I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint. Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith. 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring. To this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Luke 19:1-10 He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost."" I. BEGINNING Halloween is a curious time of year. And it's not just the fact that people are dressing up in all kinds of crazy costumes or that children are going door to door extorting chocolate from their neighbors on the threat of trickery. No, Halloween is a curious time of year because as a holiday it has roots in a sensibility that very few modern Americans have any more: a remembrance and reverence for the dead. Two thousand years ago the Celts had a pagan festival called the Samhain (pron. SAU-ehn) that was the Celtic new year that began on or around November 1. Among the many traditions associated with this holiday was the belief that this holiday was one of the "thin places" where the barrier between this world and the next was transparent and it was often believed that living and dead could be in communion around this time. In the ninth century, the Church established November 1 as "All Saints Day" and the following day as "All Souls Day". Whether the timing of the feast has anything to do with Samhain is open to debate, but these feast days celebrated the memories of the saints and of all those who had died. It is fair to say that All Saints Day, or "All Hallows Day" as it was referred to earlier, and the Samhain probably had equal influence on the practices associated with All Hallows' Eve, or Hallowe'en. Because the whole idea of ghosts and tombstones and skeletons are vestiges of these earlier festivals. II. ALL SAINTS DAY But it seems odd that we should have a holiday dedicated to celebrating the memory of the dead in a country that likes to pretend death isn't real . We're not particularly good at dealing with death in our culture. We ignore it or we euphemize our way around it. We don't have funerals anymore, we have memorial services. People aren't buried in coffins laid in graves they're buried in caskets placed in plots. And worst of all, they don't die, they pass away. Even when they die as a result of the operation of the law, we talk about capital punishment not the death penalty. And so perhaps it is no surprise that a couple of days associated with remembrance of the dead has turned away from that kind of observation and turned into a masquerade party where you can dress up like your favorite superhero. Another day of fantasy as opposed to the embracing of the reality of death. On Friday on the quad, there was a celebration of the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos --Day of the Dead. To most Americans that sounds unnecessarily ghoulish or morbid, like the title of a zombie movie. It is not in our habit to talk much about the dead or their being among us. III. REMEMBERING THE DEAD For us as Christians, remembering the dead is an essential part of our Christian faith. And yet, we're so bad at it. Can any of us here name all eight of our great-grandparents ? I can remember four or five of the family names, but fail when I try to recall all the first names. And that was a mere three generations ago. Our memories are short. German theologian Jürgen Moltmann said that when we suppress and deny the reality of death we distort the reality of life. We think of death as something that is apart from our experience--something that happens outside of the context of our lives. But perhaps more powerfully, he noted that when we no longer perceive the presence of the dead, we fail to recognize the injustices of the dead . We develop an amnesia about past injustices. IV. HABAKKUK'S COMPLAINT For we often think that only the living matter. Injustice now is where we should focus our energies. And yet, the words of tonight's Old Testament lesson do not allow us to do that. Listen again to some of those words from the prophet Habakkuk: O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous-- therefore judgment comes forth perverted. Anything familiar about Habakkuk's complaint? It sounds awfully familiar. Do we have any reason to believe that the injustices that Habakkuk is complaining about were redressed? Do we imagine that corruption and violence and strife were all eradicated within Habakkuk's lifetime? No, they were not. And his grievance--as the grievances of all those who have died--are still in need of redress. Perhaps we like to think that people are in a 'better place' and that the injustices they have suffered have been made up for by their entrance into that alternate plane of being. Yet, this is not the Gospel message. Moltmann writes: In dying, Christ became the brother of the dying, In death, he became the brother of the dead, In his resurrection--as the One risen--he embraces the dead and the living, and takes them with him on his way to the consummation of God's kingdom. If I understand it rightly, this means that the dead are dead and not yet risen, but they are already 'in Christ' and are with him on the way to his future. (New Creation, p. 105) The dead are still before us. We all await the consummation of the kingdom and of the resurrection for all of us. That is, we who live are not separated from the dead. For we are united with them by our own mortaility, our own death. And we are united with them by love. We are not free to ignore the injustices of the dead as though they no longer mattered. This is the motivation behind those who want to remember the Armenian genocide or to remember the Holocaust, or the suffering of Native Americans. Injustices are not eliminated by the deaths of those who suffered. This is not a call for bearing grudges of course. This is not saying that we need to keep score, they way they do in some parts of the world where everyone in Group A can tell you all the ways the ancestors of Group B did their ancestors wrong. No, rather, this is an affirmation that the objections of Habakkuk should ring in our ears. They should challenge us not to forget the injustices of the past. They should remind us of our solidarity not only with all the living but with the dead as well. V. REMEMBERING THE VISION There is one other thing we are called to remember. After Habakkuk recites his complaint, he continues : I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint. Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith. As Christians, we are called not only to remember the past, but to remember the future. Part of this entails remembering the future of the past. That is, those who died, who have gone down to their rest before us, likewise had hopes for the future. We are not the future of the past, the future is something we all have hope in. God reminds Habakkuk what that hope is: "There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay." It is a vision of a day when there will be perfect peace and justice. When death will be no more, when sorrow and sighing shall be no more. When we shall dwell with God and be God's people. This is a vision that gives hope to us for the future, and challenges us to remember the injustices of the past, to remain faithful and in solidarity with those who have died, who hoped no less fully for that day than we do. But our remembrance of that vision is not simply a passive thing: it requires boldness. Habakkuk writes: Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. The vision is not simply to be remembered. But to be proclaimed, boldly. The phrase "So that a runner may read it" means, that the letters are so large, that someone running by--a courier--can read it. "Put it on a billboard" would be a modern way to say it. Remembrance in the Christian context is never passive, anyway. Remembrance is not an intellectual activity--an act of cognition. It is of recreation, re-enactment. When Jesus said of the Lord's Supper "Do this in remembrance of me"--he did not mean 'browse through old photo albums of me when we did this.' He meant, relive it--renew it. When we remember the dead we remember the hopes of the dead, and of the vision for the future. And that is the reality that we live into. And so we live lives that remember this vision and through our remembrance of the vision, live out that vision for the world. VI. END Remembrance is a key element of our Christian faith. In the Eucharist which we are about to celebrate, we remember the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. We remember the shadow of the cross: the betrayal, the denial, the ultimate injustice of the crucifixion of the righteous one. We likewise remember that the Crucified One was the one who declared solidarity with us through sharing in our death. And through death took on to himself the death of all, uniting the living and the dead. And in whose resurrection provided the hope for our eventual resurrection on that great and wondrous day. And in the Eucharist, we remember not only the past, but the future, the feast at the heavenly banquet, when we feast in celebration of the restoration of all things. For, All Saints Day is ultimately about remembrance. Remembrance of those who have died. Remembrance of those who have yet to be born. Remembrance of the Christ who unites us with all those who have gone before, and all those who will come after. The Christ in whom we see the vision of hope and peace. The Christ whom we encounter in our midst and whom we embody for the world through our remembrance. Back to Sermons page Back to AU UMC Home Copyright © 2007. Mark A. Schaefer. No part of this text may be reproduced or otherwise disseminated without the express written consent of the author.

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