The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

Fifteen years ago, President Reagan and others marked the anniversary of the fatal flight of the Challenger spacecraft, promising that "we will never forget." But of course we have, haven’t we? Because we always do. Because we are sinners, and that’s what sin is -- to forget.

"The gravest sin for a Jew is to forget, to forget what he represents," said Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish scholar and teacher of the last century. "Our greatest problem," he added, "is not how to continue, but how to return."

And so it is for Christians. And for all human beings.

We fail to remember who we are, because we fail to remember whose we are. That’s what the prophet Micah is driving at as he calls us to return, to remember who we are: "My people," asks the Lord, "what have I done to you? Answer me. Do you not remember that I brought you out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery? Do you not remember that I don’t give a whit for gallons of ram’s blood or rivers of oil or bronze plaques by the thousands? Do you not remember that I care only for your hearts, for justice and mercy and a simple walk with you? Do you not remember that?"

But of course they didn’t. Because the world forgets. And we forget.

How many times have we promised, "We will never forget"? And not just about things like Challenger. That was a significant event, and we would do well to remember it. But it wasn’t nearly as important as other things we forget.

It’s easy to forget, isn’t it? It’s easy to forget that nothing that will happen at what’s called "the Super Bowl" today is really very important. In a matter of weeks, perhaps in a matter of days, it will all evaporate. I can’t even remember who played in last year’s game. It’s easy to forget what isn’t important.

But it’s easy to forget what is important as well, because we are forgetting creatures. Despite the holiday two weeks ago, how well do we remember that just forty years ago the blood of children ran in the streets. Not in the streets of Gaza or the West Bank, but in our streets. How well do we recall that those children and Martin Luther King, Jr. paid in blood for our forgetting, for our forgetting that what God requires of us is that we "act justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with him"?

And how easy it is, despite the Fourth of July, to forget that our nation itself has been bought, time and again, with the fortunes and sacred honor of our Founding Fathers and with the blood and sweat of hundreds of thousands of other men, women, and children! Even September 11 has begun to fade, and how well do we remember, even now, those who have given their lives in Afghanistan in the past few months?

How easy it is for us to forget, to forget the substance, if not the words, of President Kennedy’s call to us to "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." How easy it is to forget all the other great contributions and sacrifices of people that I now forget, and cannot bring to mind, regardless of effort, even now as I make this list.

Sadly, there is more. I not only forget all these important national events and people; I forget more basic and important things than that. I forget who I am, and I forget whose I am. We forget, don’t we? We forget that we did not make ourselves, but that it is God who made us. We forget that it was not our arms and great strength that provided this wonderful world and this rich land for us, all these fine houses, and all our cattle and gold and silver and IRAs and money market accounts. We forget that it was not we ourselves who provided all this great wealth for us, but it was God who gave it to us and who, when he placed us in this magnificent garden, said to us, "Be fruitful and increase and fill the earth, and be responsible for it, because you are my steward, and I will hold you accountable for how you rule it."

We forget, don’t we, that we are not our own, but that we belong to God. We forget that it is the poor who are blessed and who will inherit the earth. We forget that we have been bought with a price, redeemed from our forgetfulness by the blood of Christ, who loves us despite our forgetfulness.

"We preach Christ crucified, the foolishness and weakness of God," St. Paul reminds us, as he reminded those earlier Christians in Corinth. "The wisdom of God is foolishness to the world, and the strength of God is weakness to the world, but the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength, and the way of God is not the way of the world, and the way of the world is not the way of God." And that’s important to remember...

...because that is why it is the poor who inherit the kingdom of God.

The weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength, and that is why it is not the proud and the powerful and the rich and the wise of the world who will see God and inherit his kingdom, but "those who are at the ends of their ropes." That’s how Eugene Peterson translates "the poor in spirit." It’s those at the ends of their ropes, and the meek and the merciful, and those who hunger and thirst, not for roast beef and good brandy, but for righteousness, those who remember that there is no rope of our own left to cling to, those who remember that there is nothing in ourselves of which to boast, those who remember that we are a dependent people, those who remember whose they are, and who depend upon God, who will see God and inherit his kingdom.

Thanks be to God for his Church, poor and weak though she is. The Church is a wonderful mystery. It does some important things, sometimes. Sometimes even in the Name of Christ, although sometimes, I fear, we do them boasting only of ourselves. Throughout the centuries the Church has built schools for children and universities for the advancement of knowledge. Sometimes it has sheltered the homeless and visited the sick and the lonely and those in prison. These, and others, are important things the Church has done.

But there is one thing the Church does that is more important, more godly, than all these. It is the most important thing the Church does. Above all else, the most important thing the Church does is to gather day after day and week after week to remember, to tell and hear the story of God and to call the world to remember that we are not our own.

Week after week, day after day, the Church gathers to help the world remember that we are accountable to God for the garden he has placed us in, to help us remember that we have been redeemed by a God who is foolish enough to pour out his life for us so that we might live.

"Jews demand signs, Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ nailed to a cross," St. Paul reminds us, as does our worship this morning.

It’s so easy to forget what the Cross really was, and is. It’s like a person who buys an old table at a garage sale. It’s just an old table that has been painted over a half dozen times, something cheap to use to get some things off the floor in the basement, until, one day, the new owner decides to see what’s underneath all the paint. And as he strips off all the coatings that have been laid on the wood over the years, he discovers a jewel, a finely crafted table of exquisite woods inlaid as a work of art, with lovely colors and fine grains. Beneath all the junk he finds a gem of great price, not just a shelf to be used for storing more junk in his basement, but a treasure to be used for living.

Mark Twain once said that a classic is a book which people praise but don’t read. So it is with the Cross. We praise it, and we use it, but we forget that it was once used for us. We have cheapened the Cross over the centuries, unintentionally perhaps, but nonetheless seriously. Gilding it with silver and gold to pin on our clothing or hang on our walls, we come to think of it as jewelry or furniture, forgetting what it is in God’s story, a place of pain and death and love, and a means of grace.

Beneath all the jewelry is the reality of the Cross, the reality we gather today to remember.

Clarence Jordon was a New Testament Greek scholar of the mid-twentieth century, a bright and capable Southern Baptist who passed up big-church pulpits in the 1940s in order to establish, to the horror of his friends and the KKK, a multi-racial community for the purpose of doing justice and loving mercy in southern Georgia. He called the community Koinonia, and there with his family of blacks and whites, he farmed and wrote. Perhaps his most famous books are The Cotton Patch Gospels, his translations of the Gospels into south Georgia English. But his greatest achievement was possibly his Fund for Humanity, an interest-free loan program for the poor which he started with Millard Fuller and which, after Jordan’s death, Fuller transformed into Habitat for Humanity, which seeks to do justice and love mercy by building good low-cost houses which are sold to low-income families with no-interest mortgages.

At some point, Jordon was invited by a seminary friend to speak at the dedication of a massive new church building. Before the dedication service, the friend took Jordon through the expensive new building, happily gesturing toward the cushioned pews, the beautiful stained-glass windows, and the powerful organ. After touring the impressive family life center, the pastor took Jordon outside and pointed with pride to the large cross that seemed almost to touch the clouds. He beamed at it and said to Jordon, "Clarence, I want you to know that the cross you see here, with all its state-of-the-art lighting, cost us over $15,000."

Jordon smiled, and he looked at the pastor and said, "Friend, you know what. Ya’ll been cheated." "What?!" the pastor replied. Jordon repeated himself. "I said, ya’ll been cheated." "How is that?" asked the astonished pastor. Jordon looked at him and said, "It used to be a Christian could get one of those for free."

What Jordon was talking about, of course, was the real Cross, the one Jesus died on, the one we come here today to remember, the Cross of justice and mercy and love, the one Jesus invites us to pick up and follow him with.

"Christians should always remember," as someone else has reminded us, "that Jesus did not die gloriously on a cross of gold on an altar between two candlesticks, but shamefully and painfully nailed to a tree on a hill between two thieves." That is a story of foolishness and shame and weakness to the world, but through the grace of God it is the story of wisdom and power. It is a story first reported by Paul and the apostles two thousand years ago and, every day since then, a story faithfully recalled and remembered by the Church and lived by its saints.

About twenty years ago, on a snowy January afternoon, an Air Florida plane lost power on takeoff from Washington National Airport and crashed into the Potomac River. There were a number of survivors, all of them in the icy waters. Rescue equipment arrived quickly, including a helicopter with a rope that was lowered to an unknown man who was treading water. The man reached for the rope, and then he handed it to the person next to him in the water. The helicopter took that person to safety. The helicopter then lowered the rope a second time to the same man, and again he gave it to another survivor. Three more times the helicopter returned, five times in all, and each time the man passed the rope on to another person who was then rescued.

When the helicopter returned a sixth time, the man was gone, buried in the waters of the Potomac, buried in the waters of his baptism, in the waters of life, eternal life. And whether that was his first baptism or his second -- because we don’t know who the man was, or what creed he professed -- no one has greater love than that, said Jesus.

"Blessed are you when you are at the end of your rope," said Jesus; "with less of you, there is more of God and his rule." Neither a god of miraculous signs nor a god of reason was able to provide strength and life for that man as he swam his way in the Potomac that day, but the God of mercy and love, the God of the Cross.

And "blessed are you when you care." That’s the way Peterson translates "mercy." "Blessed are you when you care; at the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you’ll find yourselves cared for." Like the little boy who cared for his sister.

His sister faced certain death unless she received a blood transfusion. His blood was a good match with hers. The doctors had tried to find an adult whose blood was suitable, but without success. Finally, as the girl's condition grew more desperate, they decided to ask the little boy if he would be the donor.

The doctor carefully and patiently explained the procedure to the little boy, and explained how his blood would make his sister healthier, and maybe save her life The boy thought about it for a while. He considered the needles and the blood and then said, "Yes, I'll do it for my sister."

The day for the transfusion came, and the little boy climbed up onto the table. And as the tubes were sending his healthy blood into his sister, he turned to the doctor and asked, "Will I begin to die soon?" No one has greater love than that, said Jesus.

It was neither a god of miraculous signs nor a a god of reason who stood with that little boy that day, but the God of mercy and love, the God of the Cross, the God of life, the God whose story we remember today and seek to live.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.