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Sermon
Summary Please press the play button below to hear the sermon (mp3 file).
SERMON TRANSCRIPT:
The reading this morning is from Deuteronomy 4: 9-12. Only be careful and watch yourselves closely so you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them. Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb when He said to me, “Assemble the people before me to hear my words so that they may learn to revere me as long as they live in the land and may teach them to their children. You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while it blazed with fire to the very heavens with black clouds and deep darkness. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form. There was only a voice. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. That’s a good scripture for today. For Memorial Day weekend, the scripture says Remember, remember what happened at Horeb and other things. And here’s the background for this, this is Moses speaking for God to the people of Israel. And he’s telling them, “Remember what happened and this is what happened, Horeb was the place where they gathered and Mount Cyni was the place where Moses went up to encounter God. And he said that you looked up there and you couldn’t see God but you saw flame and fire and then there was also the deep blackness and clouds and you couldn’t quite see what was going on, but you could hear, and what you heard was a voice. And he said, remember what you heard and pass it on to the next generation. And this is where Moses had gone up and he heard the word of God and God said, “Teach my children this, don’t have any other Gods before me.” Don’t worship the stuff of this earth. Worship the stuff of heaven. He said you will have no other Gods before me and I want you to honor a Sabbath day and keep it holy to God and be a holy people unto God and honor your father and mother and to teach each other. And by the way, don’t steal and kill and commit adultery but keep yourselves pure. And teach this to your children. So that is what they were supposed to remember. The odd thing is, they don’t quite remember where this happened. This happened over 3,000 years ago was this event at Mount Sinai, but they don’t quite know where Mount Sinai is. They weren’t very good back then at putting up signs in English so that we could read it that says this way to Mount Sinai. There’s a traditional place that’s been identified as Mount Sinai and it’s a huge majestic mountain down the very southern part of the peninsula where they wandered for 40 years. There’s a big monastery up there and it’s just supposed to be really cool. I’ve never gone up there to see it, but I hope one of these days to be able to do that. But there’s another place, they wondered if maybe they were farther north as they wandered around. The reason they wonder that is that I have a friend who’s an archeologist in Israel. And he says they went out and they were looking for signs of the travels because a great big group of people will leave some evidence of their passing, you know. Bones and camp fires and things like that and he said the only thing that they have really found out in this forest, they found this kind of a smallish mountain, it’s nothing very big, nothing very grand at all, this little mountain kind of thing. It’s not nearly as big as the traditional Mount Sinai, but around this little mountain they found something. They found twelve standing stones. What they do is they take these big slabs of sandstone and they would stand them up on end and if you read the bible that’s one of the things they did at the end of their time around Mount Sinai. God said, “Remember.” And they would raise themselves up an alter, these standing stones and around this little mountain out in the middle of nowhere are these twelve standing stones that have been up a long time. And, I don’t know, maybe that’s where it happened, but it’s the “what happened there” that’s more important than even where it happened. Remember. Now that’s a good scripture for Memorial Day, the very word of this weekend means remember things. Memorial Day started as a time of remembering the soldiers who fought and who died in the battle between the states in the American Civil War. And as years went by and the people who knew the people who died during the Civil War evolved into people who knew people who served in all these other wars that have been piling up in all the decades since, up through this last week when a friend of a family in church here a 20-year-old young man his service was held just north of here because this 20-year-old died in Iraq about 2 weeks ago. And they remember. So Memorial Day eventually grew from just the Civil War to all these other wars and then it kind of became a time to honor veterans in general. And then it came to be a time when people would clean up cemeteries. And as I grew up one of the things they called this weekend was Decoration Day. And you would go out and you would clean up the cemetery from the winter stuff, and the leaves and the weeds and you would make the gravesite of those that you remembered look nice and you would throw out last year’s plastic flowers that were now all faded and withered and you would put on sometimes fresh flowers, but sometimes plastic that would maybe last the season and you’d do different things to it. It’s a weekend of remembering all these different things. I call this “a place called remember” because cemeteries are kind of a place like that. The Bible tells us to remember all these different things and I don’t know about you but I’ve had places where when I go there, it’s just like memory buttons get pushed. And you start remembering stuff. Do you have places like that? This Friday night, I went to my family’s farm to help my step-mom open up the pool. It used to be my dad’s job. And as we rode over the little beginning of the prairie out there, it gets real flat in south Whitley County, and the corn’s just barely up, and I could see about a mile away, the buildings kind of rise up over the horizon as we went there. And whenever I go home, it doesn’t matter how much it changes, it’s that weird feeling of I get younger as I drive up the driveway. Do you have places like that? How about the place like your childhood bedroom. Do you have a place like that that you remember? Whenever I go up to the bedroom, I get real young, feeling young, like a little kid, even though the room is totally different now, the room that I shared with my little brother. The cowboy wallpaper is long gone. As well as all the gouged-out parts in the wall where my little brother and I we were sword fighting and we had seen this in a movie where you go to stab somebody and they jump out of the way and they stab the wall. And so we were doing that and those old, old plaster walls make a lovely crunch sound when you do that. And these little gouged holes came in and my parents came up to see what all the noise was and they saw it, then they made some noise and made us stop. And those gouged-out marks in the wall stayed there for as long as we lived in that house and then when we moved away, they patched it all up and they made it into like a guest room, but I walk in there, and it’s all different, but it’s still, wow you kind of feel…. Do you have places like that that just go and trigger a memory? Or maybe it’s a smell. I can smell stuff and then remember. I’ve only been out to play golf once this spring so far and I was out with several friends and we were out on the golf course and we were down wind from this marvelous smell. It was the smell of silage, well fermented, and manure, and a bunch of cows. And I said to one of my friends, “Wow, do you smell that?” and he said, “Yeah, I’m about ready to gag!” And I said, “Aw, you’re a city boy, aren’t you? Farmers say that smells like money.” And to me, it smelled like where I grew up, the family farm. Do you have things like that that will trigger a memory? Remembering stuff is part of what makes us human. We acknowledge the stuff we remember are all those experiences in our past that have kind of piled on to help make us what we are. For good or for not so good. And some people carry along memories that haunt them, and they would rather not remember, but have you every tried not to remember something? It kind of stays with you. There’s some traumatic experiences that people are haunted with that they carry along and if you’re one of those folks that there are memories that are a burden, then I just encourage you to get Godly counsel in knowing how to deal with some of that. Sometimes it’s too much to carry by ourselves and so we need help carrying some of that, but there’s stuff that we bring with us that for good and for ill, all these memories kind of help shape us and form us and make us what we are. I was talking with my wife and she was doing a fundraiser type of thing or giving money to a fundraiser and they were handing out flowers and the flowers look like this. Do you know what those are? Those are forget-me-nots. Do you know what the fundraiser was for? This is the official flower of what group? Alzheimer’s. The forget-me-not for the Alzheimer’s group. And I was telling Pastor Sherri about that this last week. She’s away at a family wedding this weekend, but she was telling me she reminded me of a story that I had forgotten. As soon as she started telling me, I remembered it. Over ten years ago, we were honoring people who had been members here for more than 50 years. And it’s not a real big group of people, but we were honoring all these folks. There was this little old lady named Marie Byerly, and she wasn’t able to be with us because she was in a nursing home that cared for people going through dementia and Alzheimer’s. And Marie’s memory was mostly gone. But Sherry went over there right before that Sunday, and she took her the certificate and she said, “Marie, look, we’re giving certificates to everybody who’s been a member at our church for more than 50 years.” She said, “That includes you!” And she said it was like a little window opened up in Marie and Marie said, “Yeah!” She said, “I’ve been a member there for 50 years!” And then she told some other folks and said, “Look what my church brought me! You know, I’ve been a member there at Huntertown church for 50 years!” And she talked for a couple of minutes to people and then Sherri said it was like the window closed back up. And she was gone. And I don’t know about what to do about people that are, that their memories are mostly gone and we’ve lost them an inch at a time, because then every once in a while, sometimes it’ll just take a smell, it’ll take a phrase of a song, Amazing Grace, It Is Well With My Soul, a piece of scripture and the window will come up and they’ll remember. But for good or ill, a lot of us carry these things along with us, these memories. Some that we’d like to give back to God and say, you know, I don’t want these any more. And some that we want to go to God and we say, “Wow, thank You for that! I didn’t know what I had when that was all piling up in my life, but, Thank You!” And some that we take to him and we say, “Help us to remember. Help us to remember.” Now there’s something that Jewish folks do that I really like in that they don’t make flowers on graves and stuff like that, they’ll do this. They put stones on the headstones, little stones. And over in Israel there are places where this has been done for so long, there are whole piles of stones, they’re kind of falling off the little family tomb that’s there. And in this country, people come along and they’ll put those stones on there and so what it’s saying is, “I remember”. “I remember you.” Somebody was here that remembered you. And we do kind of the same thing with flowers although you got to throw flowers away every once in a while, even the plastic ones. But these stones, they’ll last a long time. You water these things good and they’ll last a long time. Even 3,000 years they can last. That’s just a way of saying, “I remember.” I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s the Vietnam Memorial Wall where people take stuff and leave it, but people started doing that a little bit more in cemeteries now. They’ll not just leave flowers, but they’ll leave stuff. I was talking with somebody about the local cemetery and they said, yeah, they’ll find toys out there sometimes or fishing lures or golf balls sometimes. The cemetery’s far enough away from the local golf course that we know that nobody had a slice that day and got it over that far. Somebody came along and just put a golf ball there as a way of remembering. I’ve done this at my folks’ grave, to put a few things on there…some rocks and once a piece of chocolate candy I put at my dad’s grave because I think that eventually is what killed him, was his love of chocolate. And I knew the chocolate wasn’t going to last long, the chipmunks were going to get it but I put it there and it was a memory for a bit. To say, “I remember.” You know what? When you know somebody who’s died and there’s a family going through grief and you want to come up along side of them, you know how you never know what to say to folks? Please, don’t try and give a theological rationale for what happened, you know, and that God did this, and God needed somebody and don’t do that. The most helpful things you can say are just two things: one is, “I’m sorry” and the second thing is, “I remember.” And if you can just tell somebody “I remember” and share a memory, even years later, that means a lot to hear somebody say that “I remember.” Somebody in this church who lost a child just after birth told me that they went out to her grave and they noticed over the years somebody has started leaving pennies. And they don’t know who and don’t know how many and for how long, but just over time, this little pile of pennies has developed there. And they are reminded that they are not forgotten. They’re not forgotten. So here’s what we’re going to do to close the service. When
you came in, I hope you were given a stone. And if you didn’t get
one, there’s little baskets for them out there during the closing
song, run out and get one here. These are not so that you can vote for
what you thought of the sermon by slinging it or anything. What we’re
going to do is we’re going to allow this stone to stand for something
for us. And as Heather leads us in a closing song, a song that I’m
going to remember this church by, I’d like for you to bring it up
here and leave it on the prayer rails here, and it might mean, for you
it might be something like, “God this is a memory I don’t
want to carry, I want to give it over to You. Please take it.” For
others, it might be, “God, I remember, help me to remember.”
And you give that to Him, to God. It might be, “Thank You for all
the stuff that’s happened to make me what I am.” And I would
encourage you to have it mean this, “For all that you’re going
to do in my future, God, for all the memories that You’re going
to make, I give You thanks.” And let it stand for that. And, you
know what, we Methodists are really neat and methodical people. The other
two services have come up here and they’ve lined them all up very
neatly in a little line. Our memories are not that neat, just come on
up here and put them wherever you want, may it mean for you whatever you
need for it to mean. A memory to let go of, a memory to cling to, God
thank You for even the bad things that have made me what I am, for all
the good things and the people who have helped make me what I am, thank
You for what You’re going to do for my future.
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