Remembering to LIve Faithfully

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

 Hi. This past weekend was a weekend of Remembrance. We celebrated Memorial Day. Hopefully you got out there and got to a Memorial Day parade. I always appreciate the Memorial Day parades because my experience is there's a little bit more music and a little less politicians, and that's good by me in terms of a ratio.

But Memorial Day is a chance for us to remember, to remember the sacrifice given by so many men and women to give us the freedom that we have. And so that's helpful. That remembering isn't just to look into the past, but that remembering is as is helpful and informs us on how to live faithfully now and into the future.

The second part of Remembrance this past weekend is that for the church calendar, it was Pentecost. And Pentecost is a story in Acts written by Luke in which God gives the church the spirit. Now Pentecost originally was and still is a celebration for the Jewish people that happened 50 days after Passover.

And they would come and they would offer the first fruits of their crop to celebrate, and they would come to Jerusalem because the Jews were dispersed all over the region. So people from every country and different native tongues would come together to celebrate. To look back at what God has given them and to, with a sense of thanks look forward to saying this is who we are as a people. Now, what goes on in Acts two as Peter talks about is that what God has done here is something unique. What he has done is that in the same way God gave the people of Israel the 10 Commandments to guide them as their people. Now, God has given the spirit.

Jesus promised us, Hey, I'm going away. Don't be afraid. You're not gonna be alone. I'm going to send my spirit to empower you, to guide you, to unite you. And so this is what happens in the story of Pentecost in Acts. The church receives the spirit. It's incredible and wonderful. And what's incredible about it is that all these different native languages hear their own native language.

Together. If you've ever been perhaps maybe to the subway in New York City, you'll hear all these different languages from around the world. And so the story of Pentecost that's incredible is that God's spirit allows them to all hear each other in their own native tongue. And so the spirit is a spirit of unity, drawing people together.

And so the church celebrates Pentecost, not just to remember what has happened, but to help us live faithfully forward. And I think this is true for all memory in our life, and that the purpose of remembering isn't just to look back, but the purpose of remembering is to help us live faithfully now. And so today what I wanna offer you is I want to offer you two things to avoid and two things that I think remembering is helpful for us.

So two things to avoid. One is nostalgia. And two is what I would call rolling around in the past. So nostalgia is actually an editing of the past. It's when we look back and we say, Hey, remember this time and wasn't this time wonderful. A famous picture of it within the scriptures is Israel, after being freed from slavery in Egypt, just having a hard time in the desert, and they say, remember when we were slaves in Israel?

Do you remember how great that was? That's what nostalgia is. Nostalgia is looking back. It's deleting the hard things. Maybe it's ignoring the pain and unfortunate nature of others that was happening in that same timeframe and wishing, oh, if we could only return back to this point, everything. Would be wonderful.

The challenge with that kind of remembering is it's false. The past never was as perfect as you remember it. And if even if it was really good for you, it may not have been great for someone else. So this idea that we can return, that we can make something great again, well it wasn't really that great in the first place.

We are a people that have to enter the present and look towards the future. Reminding ourselves about what needs to be done now and next in order to live faithfully. The second trap of remembering is rolling around in it. That's the woulda, shoulda, coulda. Maybe if I had, wouldn't well think about my life.

It had gone this way. We wanna avoid that too because the past has happened. There's nothing we can change about it, and when we roll around in it, It disconnects us from our present and prevents us from moving forward in the future. And so that's not helpful either. So remembering is meant to help us live faithfully now, and if we are living in nostalgia or rolling around the past, living in the prison of the past, as I like to say, it disconnects us and it's not helpful.

But there's two ways that I think remembering can really empower us. One is that we get to remember who we are. So for the church, it's remembering who God is, what God has done in the person of Christ, how God has lived, died, ascended, and how Jesus has then offered the spirit, offering the spirit to the church to unite the church.

To be a people that live faithfully in the midst of the brokenness of the world, that love their neighbor and reflect a message of hope. That's what the church is supposed to do. And when we take a day like Pentecost and we remind ourselves who that is, we're we remind ourselves, Hey, we're united.

We're not alone. God has given us the spirit to empower us to love the world, so it informs our identity. My brother, who lives out of town often comes in over Memorial Day weekend and I look forward to seeing him. And just recently we were hanging out and we were talking about a family gathering that we have up in New Hampshire, and it'll be different this year because my grandmother, who has always been the center of it, the matriarch of our family has dementia, so she's now living in a nursing home, and so she won't be there in the way that she always was.

And as we were recounting all the different times that we've had together, we weren't talking about it in such a way where we were looking to go back to the past. We were recounting it with a sense of gratitude, how it has shaped us as people, how it has informed our parenting, how we value relationships because of that time, and that's healthy and helpful remembering. When we look back to remind ourselves who we are. Because in that identity, we then are empowered to live in the now and into the future. The second part of remembering that I think is particularly helpful is helping us know what now, what's next? How do I live now in this moment? So remembering in this way is looking back and learning.

Learning the good, learning the bad. You know, when I think about thing that I've learned from the past, I've learned that if you have to go to the bathroom, perhaps you should do that opposed to getting in line for chicken nuggets. See, when I was in elementary school, chicken nuggets were a big deal, and I raced to the front of the line, and as I was sitting there waiting for the cafeteria doors to open, I had this moment where I realized, oh my gosh, I have to go to the bathroom.

I thought, no, no, no. I can make it. You can make it Kyle. Well, there was a delay in the line. I finally get to the cashier. I'm about to pay, and I can feel my pants getting wet. That's a lesson learned. If you have to go to the bathroom, don't get in line for chicken nuggets. You should go to the bathroom.

But you know what? We also learned other things. We learned that we're stronger than we perhaps think we are because we can overcome things. And then there are other lessons that we learn from history that teach us and tell us, Hey, these people have been neglected. We haven't recognized the strength of women's leadership.

And so this time should be informed by us encouraging that, fostering it. And so this is the way we can look back and learn the good, learn the bad, and choose to live differently. I hope you had a chance to remember this weekend. To remember the sacrifice that was offered Memorial Day weekend, a chance to remember how God has empowered the church with the spirit, to be a people that live faithfully in the world, to choose hope and to love our neighbor.

And I hope this week as you find yourself taking moments to remember that you wouldn't get caught in the prison of the past. You wouldn't roll around in nostalgia. And you wouldn't roll around in the would've, should've, could'ves, but instead you'd remember the past in order to remind yourself who you are, what you've traveled through, how you've grown, who you can be and what you have to offer, and that that would inform you and you would live now in a way in which you choose to be present.

You choose to offer hope, and you choose to love the world. Have a great week, so good to always be with you.