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| If you would like to read the poem mentioned below and seen above in the photo, then follow this link. |
Memory.
“13 I think it right, as long as I am in this body,[h] to
refresh your memory, 14 since I know that my death[i] will come
soon, as indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me.”
The verse above gave me pause for a couple of reasons.
First, I don’t remember this passage at all. Not only have I read the Bible
through and through, been examined over its content, and have
preached weekly from it for six-plus years, I have no memory of ever reading or
preaching from this text. This is wild because, and here is reason number two
why this 2 Peter text gave me pause—it actually refers back to something that
happens in the Gospels: The Transfiguration.
Why haven’t I ever caught this before? For a moment when it
dawned on me, a feeling similar to what I got when I would listen to my grandpa
tell stories about from his childhood came over me. It was as if I was present
to [not really] Peter, a sage telling about one of the most unbelievable
experiences recorded in our sacred text.
The thing is, he leaves out the exciting details. You
know, the whole Jesus is transfigured into three people; and there is no
Mention of the festival of lights that took place upon that mountain, either. Peter
focuses on the majesty of Christ he experienced in the Majestic Glory of God
declaring, “This is my Son, my Beloved,[j] with whom I am well pleased.”
As the young church waited for the return of Christ, Peter reminded them of his
firsthand experience and wanted to encourage the community to hang on and to
not give up on the promises of Christ. While the false teachers may declare the
coming of Christ will not happen, Peter refreshes the memory of the community
by recounting his firsthand experience of the transfigured Christ.
It is funny to me; this is how Peter remembers the
transfiguration. Especially since he is often the one who is a bit too zealous
for Christ’s sake in the Gospels. Alas, Peter reminds us all that the Good News
is not some myth made up by a few knuckleheads or some old wives' tale. The Good
News is about Jesus revealing what is true about all of us—we are God’s own.
Advent is about waiting. We too, like the community [fake] Peter was writing to, are waiting for the Light to return. Until it does in its fullness, we have what we need now at this moment. While it may not be the "Glory of the Lord," it is like a lamp that will hold off the darkness.
Advent is about waiting. We too, like the community [fake] Peter was writing to, are waiting for the Light to return. Until it does in its fullness, we have what we need now at this moment. While it may not be the "Glory of the Lord," it is like a lamp that will hold off the darkness.
Memory.
Recently I started watching The Office. Tonight, I
watched the episode when Michael Scott meets with his past love interests. As
he does, he is confronted with something many of us do: romanticize our
memories. As Michael insists to each former girlfriend how special they were
together, they reminded him of the parts of their relationship he forgot or didn’t
want to see. Eventually, Michael sees it, and like most of us, when we recognize a
growing edge, begrudgingly accepts the misconception.
So yea, it’s good to remember that life is a mixed bag in
every era and in every decade, and not to allow romanticizing the past ruin
the life you have now.
Finally, I conclude this post that goes beyond the blogging
rules, with a poem. It is titled Memory by David Whyte. It can be found
in its entirety in his book Consolations.
MEMORY
is not just a then, recalled in a now, the past is never just the past, memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a wave form, a then continually becoming other thens, all the while creating a continual but almost untouchable now. But the guru’s urge to live only in the now misunderstands the multilayered inheritance of existence, where all epochs live and breathe in parallels. Whether it be the epochal moment initiated by the appearance of the first hydrogen atoms in the universe or a first glimpse of adulthood perceived in adolescence, memory passes through an individual human life like a building musical waveform, constantly maturing, increasingly virtuosic, often volatile, sometimes overpowering. Every human life holds the power of this immense inherited pulse, holds and then supercharges it, according to the way we inhabit our identities in the untouchable now. Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.
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