“Remember, you were once in Egyptian bondage…” (Deut 5:15)

“Do this in remembrance of me…” (Luke 22:19)

Remembrance evokes the partner senses of gratitude and humility. In turn, the journey before indicates the direction of the journey ahead.

I am writing this on Ash Wednesday (2019), the day on the liturgical calendar that marks the beginning of the season of Lent, a period of reflection, penitence, and, traditionally, fasting. During Lent, one prepares for the joyous Good News of Easter. In many respects, Lent resembles the Jewish autumn holiday of Succoth, the “Feast of Booths,” which is also a period during which Jews contemplate Israel’s wilderness wandering and the transitory nature of life. Because it occurs in autumn, it also has associations with the harvest.

The Common Revised Lectionary offers Deuteronomy 26:1-11, a text dealing with the offering of first-fruits, and therefore a Succoth text, as one of the readings for the first Sunday in Lent this year. It describes the procedure for the offering, including a confession that recalls God’s relationship with Israel’s ancestors. Finally, it cites this memory as the basis for the worshipper to share the bounty of the first fruits with Levites and immigrants (KJV, “sojourners”) and, on a second occasion (the so-called “poor tithe,” vv. 12-15). It transposes the negative prohibition against wanting the property of others and utilizing opportunities to acquire it into a positive injunction of liberality in giving to the needy. It shares elements with Deuteronomy 14:22-29, which calls for the Israelites to be generous to the disenfranchised widows, orphans, Levites, and migrants because, to do so, is to actively commemorate the freedom God gave them in the Exodus.  The experience of slavery and suffering in their own past should motivate them to extend liberty to others, to liberate others as God had liberated them.

The confession prescribed in Deuteronomy 26 recalls that the land that produced the fruit of the sacrifice had come to the Israelite farmer as a gift fulfilling God’s promise to the patriarchs (3), that his ancestors had sojourned in Egypt where they grew to become a nation “great, mighty, and numerous” (v 5), that the Egyptians had enslaved them (v 6), and that in response to their cries for help, God had delivered them and brought them into the Promised Land, “flowing with milk and honey”) (vv 7-9). Finally, the worshipper confesses “And, see, I now bring the first fruit of the ground that you, YHWH, have given me” (v 10).

Whenever human beings reflect profoundly on their lives – who they are and how they came to this moment in their lives, they will do well to consider, not just the span of their own lives, but also the lives of their ancestors. All of us reach today because of the lives lived before us – the sacrifices, the decisions, the leaps of faith, the failures and errors. Christian believers rightly remember Israel’s patriarchs and freed slaves alongside the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They look back on their own lives and detect the moments when God called or delivered or enlivened them. One might say that such turns in life simply represent the happenstance of life, but one can respond that belief that a personal God guides and directs is no more difficult than believing that God does not guide and direct. To believe that the physical world was bound on its own to be, that such a world was bound on its own to produce life, and that such life was bound on its own to evolve into sentient, self-conscious, moral beings is easily as incredible as believing that a personal, loving Deity created, called, delivered, and directed all that is.

Imagine awakening in your car on a back road somewhere unfamiliar on an overcast, starless, moonless night. With no memory of where you have come from, and with no landmarks or signs in sight, you cannot know where you are or the direction you should go to find home again.

As was true of the ancient Israelite, we can reflect on the wondrous course of our lives, remembering the gifts we have received, not least the gift of life; the people whose faithfulness, courage, and decency prepared the way for our lives; and the moments when, through the eyes of faith, we can discern God’s hand. Inevitably, this remembering will evoke the partner senses of gratitude and humility. Unfortunately, an age that vaunts individual accomplishment and self-esteem places little value on these virtues.

Lent calls upon believers to pause for reflection on who we are and how we came to this moment.  When we do, the panorama of creation and the story of God’s relationship with God’s people opens before us. We see ourselves as part of a purpose grander than ourselves. Furthermore, this moment when we take account of the past behind us provides us with a vantage point from which we can see the direction in which to journey forward. We see the direction, not necessarily the whole path. Clearly, however, as it did for the ancient Israelites, humble gratitude motivates us to share the bounty God has given us with others.

Several years ago I saw a documentary on PBS about a man who had suffered an extremely high fever during an illness. He recovered from the illness, but the fever had damaged significant portions of the part of his brain that makes and stores new memories.  He could remember, for example, that he was married, but not that his wife had visited him yesterday. He was an accomplished pianist, but had the almost daily experience of coming upon the piano in the commons area of the memory care facility where he lived and “discovering” that he knew how to play it. Because he could not remember yesterday, he was condemned to live in an unbounded present, with no means to pursue a direction for his life.