Do This in Remembrance

As a society, we love commemorating important events, celebrating the anniversaries of occasions with remarks, reflections and festivities.  The bigger and rounder the number, the better!

But sometimes we forget that in order to get to the 50^th Anniversary, we have to make it through the 1^st, the 13^th, the 37^th and the 49^th.  Each is special in its own way and deserves no less attention than the others.  Yet the milestone years do help us in those reflections and allow us the time needed to reflect on what has (or has not) happened. 

Unfortunately, we don’t only mark happy events.  National tragedies and other significant events, like the death of a loved one, are also marked with time passing.  The fear of forgetting the event creates sentiments of “Remember the Alamo,” or “Never Forget 9/11.”  As time passes and those directly associated with such events and people pass as well, things are forgotten – not with malicious intent, but the reality of a fast-paced world and other things demanding our attention.  The dates of 6/6 and 12/7 meant a lot to those who lived through World War II and not much to those born in this century.

I starting thinking about this when I realized that 4/4/17 was the 49^th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.  I am sure that next year there will be many commemorative events and speeches, celebrating the awesome work and words of the civil rights icon.  Many will surely comment on the progress our society has made in the area of civil rights for all, while others will lament the lack of advancement since his death – and all of it is true.  But we don’t have to wait a year to recognize the importance of MLK, his work or his legacy that we are all charged with continuing.  We must be vigilant and work against the sin of racism that rears its ugly head as marginalization, prejudice and misuse of power. We don’t need a big, round anniversary to continue to fight the good fight and never let the dream die.

In just over a week, we will commemorate the 1987^th anniversary (give or take a few years, depending on the calendar and the date of Jesus’s birth being used) of the death of Jesus of Nazareth. An itinerant preacher, a brilliant teacher, a man dedicated to serving those pushed to the sides – it sounds like a description of MLK, for which he would be humbled.  Indeed, both men were but to death by a society that didn’t like the message they had to offer, so decided to remove the problem permanently.  The solution did not work in either instance.  In the case of Jesus, the powers and principalities of this world allowed God to act in the most awesome way – by offering us complete redemption though God’s incomparable love.

I hope that Christian’s around the world will remember Jesus’s death with fervor and faithfulness even though this anniversary it is not a nice, round number. The point is that the number doesn’t matter – the message does.  The more powerful and true, the more it will impact ages to come.  And nothing is more powerful than God who loves the Creation so much that God would die for it.  Through Jesus, this is accomplished.  As tragic as the story is, remembering and retelling it empowers us to live into the consequences – both good and bad.  We celebration the triumph over evil and death as we still encounter evil and death in our world.  We carry on Jesus’s ministry by being dedicated to vanquishing evil and death in whatever disguise it wears – like racism.

So we begin our remembrance, retelling the ancient stories and finding our own voices in them.  Because through our actions, we know that this isn’t about what happened all though years ago, but about what is happening now.  And what we can do about it – now.

In Christ,

Rev. Valerie+