Psalm 42 "The Inevitable Past" Scott Hoezee

Tomorrow night on New Year's Eve, people everywhere will alternate between two opposite yet related activities: they will look back on the year gone by and they will look ahead to the new year that will dawn at midnight. The look back on 2001 will summon up memories both good and bad about a past we cannot change. On this particular New Year's Eve, most of us will likely find our personal and family memories intertwined with national events in ways not always the case. This year watching that big ball drop in Times Square will conjure up memories of another time this past year when all eyes were fixed on New York City, albeit on a spot some fifty blocks south of Times Square.

So we'll look back on events we cannot change. "Only the past is inevitable," someone once said. And so we will also look ahead to events we hope we can influence as 2002 unfolds. There will be goals we will set for ourselves, maybe one of those proverbial "New Year's Resolutions" or some other thing that we hope will come to pass. Some of us will look forward to the birth of a child, a wedding, a landmark anniversary or birthday. There is a vast amount about the new year that we cannot foresee, and maybe that introduces a bit of fear. So what we will mostly concentrate on where 2002 is concerned are the good things we have planned--the things we don't fear but look forward to with joy.

Of course, the ironic fact is that no matter how much we may find in the past to lament--no matter how many past events we wish we could change or prevent from ever having happened in the first place--the fact is that the past provides a stable foundation for our existence precisely by virtue of its being inevitably unchangeable. We would not have a future to look forward to if we didn't have a reliable past to look back on--a past that will not suddenly change on us some day. We need the past to stay the way it is. That's one of the tragedies of Alzheimer's Disease, of course: even a person's inability to remember the past drains both the present moment and the future of vitality and substance.

In one of his many memorable clinical vignettes, neurologist Oliver Sacks tells us about Jimmie, a man whose memory somehow became a sieve. Jimmie remains forever stuck thinking it's 1945. Harry Truman is president, the war just ended, and this ex-sailor believes he has his whole future to look forward to. Sacks reports that Jimmie is a very nice, affable fellow with whom you can have a good conversation about this or that. But if you leave the room after visiting with him for two hours and then return a short while later, he will greet you as if for the first time. Now, of course, that is simply tragic all by itself, but even more interesting is Dr. Sacks' observation as to the overall effect that this temporal vacuum has on Jimmie: he has no joy. Jimmie is joyless in that he is confined to an ever-changing, yet finally meaningless, present moment. With nothing new ever to look back on and so with nothing ever to look forward to, joy is simply impossible.

Curiously, there is one time when Jimmie displays something akin to joy after all; one moment when the vacant look on his face is replaced with something that Sacks can describe only as a look of completeness and of hushed calmness. This happens whenever Jimmie takes communion in chapel. Sacks once lamented to one of the Catholic nuns who runs Jimmie's nursing home that Jimmie had lost his very soul due to the disease in his brain. The sister reacted with outrage! Because once a person saw Jimmie caught up fully and meaningfully in taking holy communion, there could be no doubt that God was managing to minister to Jimmie's soul even so. Sacks could not disagree, even though there is no good neurological explanation for the change that comes over Jimmie at Christ's table.

The past, and our accurate memory of it, lends substance to the present and to the future. Our being properly influenced by the past opens up the possibility of joy. The writer of Psalm 42 understood that pretty well. This psalm appears to have been written from a kind of personal "ground zero." Things had fallen apart for the psalmist in quite spectacular and devastating ways--so much so that God himself seemed to have gone off duty and so was unavailable. His present moment was bleak, his future looked bleaker still. His neighbors made things worse by taunting the psalmist with a question he himself could not answer: "Where is your God?" If only he knew.

There are other psalms in the Bible that report similar taunts from non-believers. Psalm 115 is one such poem where some people sneer at the Israelites and say, "Where is your God?" In that case, the psalmist replies with confidence, "Our God is in heaven where he does whatever he pleases!" In the face of pagan cultures whose gods were visible on wooden totem poles or in golden statues, Psalm 115's author displays a quiet confidence that the physical invisibility of Yahweh was a plus, not a minus, and so that particular psalmist was able to go so far as to poke a little fun of the people who worshiped objects that had been manufactured by their own hands.

But you don't find any such confidence in Psalm 42. If this psalmist knew where to go and meet with God, he would not only have a smart answer to throw back at his rotten neighbors but he himself would high-tail it over to that spot so that he could receive some much-needed divine mercy and grace. But he doesn't know. So he is silent in the face of those who taunted him. He is flooded with salty tears of lament once his neighbors finally leave him alone. He doesn't know where God is when Psalm 42 opens and he doesn't really locate God by the time this psalm ends, either.

Nevertheless, you would hardly call Psalm 42 a singularly dark poem. The word "hope" manages to ring out loud and clear in verses 5 and 11. Singing songs of praise in the present moment is impossible, and doesn't happen in this psalm, yet promises of a future rendition of the doxology are very firm. What creates these rays of light in an otherwise dark psalm? Is it that God swoops in and knocks those lousy neighbors flat? No. Is it that God knocks on this man's front door to explain everything to him? No. Is it that God beams down healing and restoration? No. No, it's nothing like that but something far more sublime: the psalmist remembers. He remembers other times in the past when God did minister to him. He recalls past moments when his sense of God's love and grace was rock-solid. He re-lives in his memory worship services where the singing had been so lusty and the sense of God's presence had been so real.

Sometimes, as many of us have experienced, memories of the past can make things even more bitter for us. When you are grieving the death of a loved one, sometimes the memory of what a marvelous time you once had with her can make your tears flow in even greater torrents. But not always. Sometimes memories of the past can make us feel better, even in the midst of grief. I well recall a day after my grandfather died when, even before the funeral had taken place, my Dad and his siblings sat around and swapped old stories about their father. A lot of them were humorous tales or simply the memories of really good times. In any event, that period of story-telling carved out a niche of gratitude and laughter in the midst of days that were otherwise filled with a lot of sadness.

If that can happen when remembering a person who really is dead (and so by definition is not coming back), how much more revitalizing is the memory of a God who you believe remains very much alive! That is the experience of this psalmist. God seems absent, off-duty, remote. But he doesn't seem dead. The psalmist cannot for the life of him locate God, but nevertheless already in verse 1 he is able to address God with the pronoun "you." ". . . my soul pants for you, O God." Then in the very next verse he refers to "the living God." God is still out there, is still alive, is still active. And so the memory of God's actions in the past instills hope for the future.

When we close out another year tomorrow, we may feel a bit more disorientation, sadness, and grief than a year ago. Our sense of national security has grown shaky. We are at war because we have been attacked. As we saw this morning, there are those like Rev. Falwell who claim to know exactly where God is and what God is up to in even the most cataclysmic of events, but most of us are far more modest in what we claim to know. Mostly we admit we don't understand how evil can gain the upper hand the way it recently did.

So we feel a bit at sea, disoriented, sad. Death seems more real. Ever since late-September, the New York Times has devoted one whole page each day to those who died on September 11. Every day there are about 14 or so photographs of those who died, along with two or three short paragraphs that briefly sketch what made each person a beloved and unique individual to his or her family and friends. The editors think that it won't be until May or June before they will run out of the names of those many, many victims. If ever there were events we wish we could change, surely that dark Tuesday would be one of them.

But we can't. We need a stable past to anchor our present and future. But that same temporal stability is painful when we confront tragic past events. Yet tonight we come to this table of Jesus again, as we do each year when preparing to turn over the calendar. We don't eat this bread and drink this cup tonight to paper over life's harsher realities. We don't heed Jesus' divine call to come unto him to rest our heavily laden souls because we want to embrace a pie-in-the-sky fantasy that sheers us off from real life in this world.

We don't come to forget, but to remember. We don't come because we have it all together but because we often feel like we and our world are rattling apart. We don't come because we've got God cased such that we can always answer those who cynically sneer, "Where is your God?" but instead we come because we admit that sometimes we don't know where God is. But this we do know: we can remember one time when there was no doubt where God was and what he was doing. It was that time when God the Son hanged on a cross to die. It was that time when God himself confronted the harshest of realities about life in this world by submitting to the harshness of death.

Sometimes, if we are honest, we feel as lost as Jimmie. But perhaps by grace we, like Jimmie, can find a pocket of stillness and a moment of joyful clarity when we meet Jesus at this table. What we encounter in the bread and the wine is the inevitable past of what happened to our Lord on a hill far away and long ago. We cannot go back in time to change that event, or any other. But then, we shouldn't want to change that part of the past. Because by God's Spirit, our hearts are able to travel back to Golgotha, not to change it but to participate in it. "Only the past is inevitable." Or maybe not. Because of what happened on the cross, there is a kind of holy inevitability also to what can happen right now in the present as well. That past inevitably fills our present and even our future with hope.

When we tonight take, eat, drink, remember, and so believe, we find reason to hope again. That doesn't necessarily mean that if you came here tonight as depressed as this psalmist that just coming to this table will instantly lead you to happiness and a burning desire to praise God. But it will assure you that one day you will yet praise God again. That assurance will come because in remembering how far God in Christ went to save us all, you'll know for sure that he won't let you go. He'll hang on to you and so one day bring you back to heartfelt worship. Maybe it won't be tonight or tomorrow or next week. But God is not going to let you go, and one day you'll find cause to rejoice again in that glorious truth.

Last Wednesday there was a very poignant photo on the front page of the newspaper: it showed a Christmas Day communion service being celebrated at ground zero for the firefighters and clean-up crews who were on duty there last Tuesday. When the photo was snapped, one firefighter was just getting ready to pass the common cup to the next man in line. In the background and beneath the men's feet was that sickening blackness and grayness of devastation that we have become altogether too familiar with since September 11. Yet in the midst of the 9-11 devastation that no one can change, those firefighters were remembering another past event that we cannot change: they remembered a crucifixion whose past reality we cannot change but that somehow changes us.

"Therefore, I will remember you," the psalmist whispered. Sometimes that's all we can do. But thanks be to God, that holy remembrance is also enough. Amen.