Psalm 42 "Remembering Our Future" Scott Hoezee

Most politicians aim their election campaigns at the future. Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to lift America's spirits out of the doldrums of the Depression with the theme song "Happy Days Are Here Again," hoping in this way to point people to the better future which an FDR administration could bring. John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign song was "High Hopes," again pointing people forward. More recently Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign pummeled us with that phrase "A Bridge to the 21^st Century."

Sometimes, though, it is the past that solidifies a politician's position. The best recent example of that is Slobodan Milosevic. For decades while Tito ruled Yugoslavia the key precept was "brotherhood and unity." Whether or not the multiple ethnic groups that made up Yugoslavia really did gel into such unity did not matter--the iron hand of Tito insisted that everyone at least act as though they were all one big happy people. To help foster that goal, Tito imposed a ban on speaking in public about inter-ethnic tensions. Discussion of that potentially explosive topic was reserved only for the highest party officials.

But in 1987 Milosevic broke that rule. As a group of Serbs complained that some Yugoslav soldiers had been pushing them around, Milosevic declared, "No one will dare to beat you again." Thus began Mr. Milosevic's slow but sure consolidation of power, climaxing on June 28, 1989, when he traveled to Gazimestan, an ancient battlefield where on June 28, 1389, the Turks defeated the Serbs, thus ushering in 500 years of Ottoman rule in Yugoslavia. By linking 1989 to 1389, Milosevic re-established Serbian ethnic identity. Milosevic made that ancient memory seem so real, it may as well have happened six days earlier instead of 600 years. And by his invoking of that memory, Milosevic set into motion everything which led to all those ethnic cleansings which climaxed this spring in horrors that numb the mind. Memory is powerful. When it is used for good, it is wonderful. When it is manipulated for evil, it can be horrible.

Psalm 42 is a remarkable psalm of lament in large part because of the prominent role memory plays in this poem. On this morning in which we again celebrate Christianity's premiere sacrament of memory, I would like us to focus for a few moments on the role of memory not just in Psalm 42 but in the larger Christian experience.

Like most psalms of lament, so also Psalm 42 displays that curious combination of lamenting God's absence in a prayer that is nevertheless addressed to that same God. There is no doubting that this psalmist feels distant from God. But it's not as though he has concluded there just is no God. No matter how desperate the Bible's psalms of lament get--and here and there the language of lament is frightfully dark--even so you never find a psalmist who arrives at some form of agnosticism much less atheism.

Why God seems so far away, why God is not doing something to rescue the psalmist from his woes, why even the most ardent of prayers are failing to be answered--all such mysteries are what drive the psalms of lament. But the only reason these questions are acute in the first place is because of the bedrock belief that at the bright center of the cosmos there is a God of love, grace, holiness, and beauty. The psalms of lament get written at those points of disconnect between who Israel knows God to be and those harsh situations in which none of those divine qualities seems to be making any difference. You would never write a psalm of lament if you did not believe in a good, holy, and just God to begin with.

So also in Psalm 42: this psalmist is panting to find God the way an animal pants in the heat of summer. But like a deer in the midst of a drought, so this psalmist cannot find the water he needs to save his life. Tears, salty tears, are the only libation he can find, but saltwater only increases one's thirst. Meanwhile the world sometimes exploits the tragedies of believers by taunting them with the sneering question, "Well, where's your wonderful God now?! Can't even you now see how hollow all religion is? Give it up!"

So by the time you get to verse 5 the page of the Bible is wet with the psalmist's tears and the air is echoing with the world's taunts. But it is just here where the role of memory begins to assume a curiously high profile. At the nadir, the lowest ebb, of this psalmist's pain, he says something utterly arresting: in verse 6 he bawls out his depression but then says, "Therefore, I will remember you."

Somehow this simple act of remembrance flashes a few shafts of light across the verses of this dark psalm. The psalmist mentions a few places in his life where God was more visibly active and more personally present. And it helps. It doesn't solve everything--following verse 6 there are still plenty of bitter words of complaint here. Following verse 6's recalling of better times nothing is different yet everything is changed.

Some hope sneaks back into this poem. There is greater confidence that at some point the psalmist will yet again be able to sing to God. In fact, the memory of God's past actions prompts the psalmist to declare that there can be no other resting place for his hope than God alone. And because of who God is, a fitting song of praise will eventually again pass the psalmist's lips. Not today yet. Maybe not tomorrow, either. Perhaps not even next week or next month. But someday, some way he will yet praise the God to whom even these bitter, tear-drenched stanzas are addressed.

Years ago I saw a bumper sticker which featured the picture of a telescope along with the words, "If you see God, tell him I'm looking for him." This psalmist would appreciate that. But in this psalm, as in so much of our experience, you can't always find God with the

"telescope approach." Sometimes we try to scrutinize our present circumstances to see if we can locate precisely where God is, hoping we can zero in on him the way a telescope zeroes in on a star. But it doesn't always work that way.

To stick with the astronomy analogy for a moment, some of you know that when stargazing, the best way to see some stars is to not look directly at them. Because of the way our eyes are designed, faint objects can be seen best when you look askance from them. Look just to the side of a dim star and you will suddenly see it in your peripheral vision.

Maybe faith is like that, too. It seems to have been the case for the writer of Psalm 42. Unable to locate God in the present moment of crisis and pain, he instead glances into the past. Not only was the psalmist able then to see God in the past, but somehow it energized his hope in the present moment, too. By looking just to the side of his current circumstances God appeared in the "peripheral vision" of his soul once more. A simple act of remembering turns this psalm around--transforms this poem from an ode to despair into a statement of bold faith and audacious hope.

How does this work, I wonder? What's the mechanism that can take a distant memory of something God once did and use it to re-tool the present? It is finally a mystery how God's Spirit can use the past to give us hope for the future. Yet it happens.

We don't always know just where to "find" God in any given present moment, particularly moments of great pain or uncertainty. We don't always know what God is "up to" or why he is failing to answer our prayers--only the truly arrogant or impious would ever dare to claim they always know what God is doing and why. Often we just don't know. But perhaps the recovery of our hope doesn't depend on making sense of the present moment. Maybe in life's darker, deeper valleys it is our memories of who God is and what he has done that can pump a little air back into our deflated balloon of hope.

And not just our individual memories, not just what God did for you in 1969 when he led you to your wonderful spouse or how in 1981 prayers for the healing of your son were answered. Those memories are important too and can properly be invoked by any of us who have such inspiring events to recall.

But it's not just those individual memories to which we cling as Christians. We also cling to our collective memory as the Body of Christ on earth. Ultimately we cling to the memories that cluster around this holy table--the memory of what Jesus did on the cross as Scripture's "great cloud of witnesses" brings it to us. For the dearest thing that Christians along the ages have done is to break bread and share wine in remembrance of Jesus.

Christians have made these sacred gestures not only in brightly lit sanctuaries like this one, not only in soaring Gothic cathedrals or in the splendor of Saint Peter's basilica in Rome. Christians have also furtively shared these elements together in catacombs and prison cells, on the run from communists in China and on sinking ships out in the Atlantic. Christians have shared the body and blood of Jesus not only while organs played fugues by Bach but also while air raid sirens cut the air outside the church with their shrill warnings of Nazi bombers over London.

Again and again, often in dark circumstances where they could no more see God on the move than could the poet of Psalm 42, Christians have remembered Jesus--they've glanced to the side of the present darkness to recall that past event once for all accomplished on the cross. And as they've done so, they have again and again discovered that Jesus is no mere memory--he's here, he's alive!

And so our sisters and brothers in the faith, like we ourselves here this morning, take, eat, drink, remember and believe and so in this way have essentially said, as we say again today, that we can yet trust this God in whom we have placed our faith. We can yet hope in him and we can yet know that his is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. After all, just recall what he pulled off at the cross and empty tomb!

Whether or not some of you can sing the doxology right now with as much gusto as you can remember singing it in the past, the promise is that you will yet do so. And today, as you approach this table, if you can say only that the cross is all you have to go on because right now you just can't see how anything else makes sense, that's OK. Psalm 42 validates what you're going through as an experience well-known to good people of the faith.

No, this is not hocus-pocus, not magic. Even as this psalmist still gave voice to bitter disappointment even after verse 6's bold act of memory, so this morning you may well remember Jesus in this sacrament and yet still have to bite your lip as you walk through the narthex before sobbing again as you drive down Franklin. Or maybe you will remember Jesus through the bread and the wine this morning and yet still feel under-appreciated at work tomorrow or still feel lonely as you channel-surf by yourself in the apartment tonight. As for the psalmist, so for some of us: perhaps nothing will be different after this morning's service and yet maybe by grace everything will be changed. Perhaps by grace we can find a bit more hope in our souls than before, knowing a bit more firmly than earlier this week that we are never alone. If so, then perhaps we can sing even our laments in hope.

But whoever you are, whether there is today a spring in your step or a lump in your throat, whether times of spiritual growth are today's reality or yesterday's memory, you are called to this table this morning to take and to remember and, through that, to believe. As you do so, you discover this is no mere memorial of a dead hero but it is an encounter with a living Lord. And if in the end you, like the psalmist, find your face wet with tears, let that water remind you of your baptism as deep calls to deep in the roar of God's cleansing floods, mysteriously catching up all of us in a love that will not let us go. Because when we remember Jesus by his Holy Spirit, then we are reminded that we will yet praise him, our Savior and our God. Amen.