A God who Remembers

I love the Old Testament narrative because, if we dare to let them, they have a way of slowly tearing into and unraveling our nice, tidy, dogmatic theology. All of our omni- and meta- words struggle to make it to the end of story, which refuses closure, begs for constant return, and dares for a truly new encounter with a fresh revelatory word at each reading, each rendering. Narrative refuses to be succumb to our attempts to own or control it. Our power crumbles before it's power to reshape our lives and to give us new eyes to see ourselves, our world, and our God.

Of course, this is also one of the reasons that we relegate the biblical narratives to children's literature. We prefer to spend our time reading what we think are easy to mine theological gems and propositional statements from the Paul's attempts to provide a systematic "pattern" for the church to follow. (Of course, even this is a faulty assumption, as Paul's letters were really a witness to the way communities must continue to struggle with the grand narrative of what God has done in light of the community's own experience in the world. But, reading Paul's letters as narrative is another topic for another day.)

That is one of the things I love about teaching Genesis. The stories in Genesis have this nasty habit of sweeping our presumptive legs right out from under us. We come to the end of a terrifying story like the binding or near sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 (a tale that's been quite sanitized in the NT) and hear God's messenger say these words: "Now I know that you fear God." "Now I know." This is a startling phrase that confounds our glib assertions that God is all-knowing. Abraham is not alone in this test. Both God and Abraham learn something through this ordeal, they are both changed. (The implications of this ordeal on Isaac and Sarah are another startling conversation for a different time. Let the reader know that their presence and absence in this story, along with the important voices that sensitive readers like Phyllis Trible try to give them, are not being ignored.)

Narrative continues to confound our control, critique our comfortability. But that's what makes it powerful, indispensable, vital to our faith. As Walter Brueggemann continually reminds us, if we are going to be Christians, the only God we've got is the God in the text. And we only discover this God by humbly and willingly bringing our lives into story.

So, today I'm thinking about the double-edged sword of a God who remembers. I've been thinking about this in light of a fabulous little essay called "A God who Remembers" by Elie Wiesel at NPR's "This I Believe." This is an important little phrase is carries with it a great deal of hope, but stained with a despairing possibility.

"Then God remembered." The words jump off of the pages as gospel, good news to those who hear. Don't they inspire something in you? Imagine just two cases that stand near the beginning of Israel's confessional testimony. The first is actually in the primordial history, before Israel was a blip on the radar screen. Genesis 7 ends with an ambivalent editorial note, at best, as the narrator says, "Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. And the waters swelled on the earth for one hundred and fifty days." The final line causes the dissonant score of chaos to begin to play in our minds, as we remember tohu wabohu, the formless void, which God had to take to create the world in Genesis 1. We are left with Noah and his family all alone, and we wonder were God is. The narrator doesn't tell us, he leaves us to wonder, to struggle with the question of God's absence. But, then comes that gospel word, "But God remembered Noah" (8:1).

Or, consider this example from Israel's (what shall we call it?) gestational period. Israel finds itself, like Noah, bobbing up and down in a chaotic sea, where things wreak of death more than life. They find themselves in captivity in Egypt, far from the land that was promised to Abraham so long ago. They were not just exiles from the promised land, but slaves to the man, to Pharaoh, to a forgetful people whose memories of Joseph were short-lived. "The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out." (Strange that it seems that their own memory is short. They don't seem to know to whom they should be crying.) "Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them" (Ex 2:23-5). Out of the depths of their despair, out of the hopelessness of slavery, out from under the thumb of a tyranical oppressor, God remembered. Gospel.

My struggle is that this remembering isn't nice and tidy. It is a sweet and sour gospel, a Thai food gospel that somehow manages to hit every spot on the palate. The sweet reminder that God is a God who remembers comes laced with the sour reminder that God just might forget or, at the very least, that something could slip out of God's mind or that God might get side tracked for a while. It took a long floating journey for God to remember Noah, a desperate cry for help for God to "[take] notice" of Israel. That's the power of narrative. It won't be easily conformed to our rose-tinted desires.

But, in spite of that bleak possibility of God's "forgetting", the storytellers make a daring and bold a assertion that this God, the God these stories, is a God who remembers. Or, as Wiesel concludes, "After all, God is God because he remembers." And we discover, just as Noah and Israel discovered, that when God remembers, gospel happens.

O give thanks to Yahweh, for he is good: for his steadfast love endures forever....
It is he who remembered us in our low estate: for his steadfast love endures forever...
O give thanks to the god of heaven: for his steadfast love endures forever. (Ps. 136:1, 23, 26)