Saturday, January 18, 2014
Excruciating Sweetness of Remembering
I've conducted far too many funerals over the past twelve and a half months here in our Mitfordesque community. I agreed at the outset of last year to serve as supply preacher for the aged Methodist church in the community and her handful of aging members, but I failed to anticipate the connection between the median age and the inevitability of standing all too frequently graveside with Psalm 23 and John 14 and 1 Corinthians 15 in hand. However, I confess there is a double-edged reality to my predicament. On the one hand, I embrace these events as open doorways to exercise once-in-a-lifetime ministry on behalf of the Christ. On the remaining hand, such moments induce the unavoidable pain of encountering my own mortality and that of those I have loved dearly and lost or soon will. There is an excruciating sweetness in remembering, like tasting the most longed for delicacy in the presence of a cavity exposed tooth. But remembering, in and of itself, is the clearest evidence of real life. Because I remember, they lived. And because I remember them I too live. "When you remember me, it means you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart. For as long as you remember me, I am never lost" (F. Buechner ). 'Father, grant that I may live in such a way that those who met me and knew me might choose to remember me. And in doing so, may that memory both validate my existence and honor you as Lord of Life and Memory.'
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The statement in Isaiah 45:7 that God creates evil should not be misunderstood. As Kidner pointed out, "The Hebrew word (for evil) is too general a term to suggest that God is the author of wickedness...Some see here an attack upon Zoroastrian dualism, with its rival gods of good and evil; these verses are also equally opposed to polytheism, the target of most of the invective in these chapters."[12] When God speaks of his creating evil here, he is speaking of the disasters and calamities that he brings upon the enemies of his purpose. "This cannot mean that God creates moral evil, but it refers to the judgments God sends into history. He is speaking of the distress and disaster which men experience from God as a consequence of their sin (See Amos 3:6)."[13]
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