“Moving house.”
Now that is a phrase that causes the heart to skip a beat.
“Moving house.”
We have been moving house lately and I keep finding things with memories attached to them.
In our shed I found an old tea saucer that I had used to hold my keys and spare change when I lived with homeless men in addiction recovery in Washington DC. I left there to get married and begin my studies for the priesthood. When I left I took that old saucer with me. When I found it last week memories just poured over me.
So many of the objects in our lives carry memories and stories.
We visit somebody and this piece of furniture came from someone, this piece of china is an heirloom from the mother’s side of the family, or this glass came from a trip to a far off land.
Some of our houses are rather crowded with memory laden signs of life.
I suspect most of us know a packrat, or perhaps we are one of those people whose homes are stacked and crammed with outward and visible signs, thick with history.
Every once in a while you read of folks who are buried under an avalanche of memories and are trapped and doomed.
I wander around lower end antique stores and admire all the objects whose memories are now forgotten, the lives they adorned have moved on.
How do we remember?
Who do we remember?
When will the last living memory of me be forgotten and discarded on the back shelf of a second hand store?
Organ donors actually live on in the life of others for a time.
Veterans are remembered, celebrated, memorialized for a time.
But even the greatest monuments are overgrown, eroded and washed away.
Who will remember me?
How will I live on?
Memory always seems to take a living physical presence to carry it on through time.
The Sadducees.
They were a fellowship within Judaism who did not believe in any kind of afterlife, or resurrection. They represented an ancient tradition within Judaism perhaps the oldest.
Their belief is that we only live on in the names and memories of our children and our children’s children.
They thought the resurrection was silly so they made fun of it and asked about a woman who had seven husbands, who were all brothers and who all died. Who would she be married to when she rose from the dead?
In making fun of the resurrection, they were denying it.
But, their real concern was how do we live on if at all?
Jesus’ response is that there is no such thing as death.
Why?
Because God remembers, and what God remembers lives.
God remembers. God will not forget us.
In the resurrection of Christ God has gone through all those back shelf lower end antique stores and found all those that were forgotten, and they are remembered, and they live.
A dusty old tea cup is pulled out from that old pile. It is rinsed off.
Steaming tea is poured into it, with just enough milk and sugar.
The cup is raised and finds the lips of the one who was forgotten.
The lips blow on the steam and take a small sip… testing.
The lips smile remembering that forgotten favorite cup, no longer abandoned
The chalice in which we find all who were forgotten.
The bread in which we remember how to live.
We are children of that resurrection, we are those who remember, who find those who were forgotten, discarded, worn out.
We rummage and poke around, leaving no one behind.
We remember because God forgets nothing, God forgets no one.
God remembers. Go and do likewise.