Exhortation, First of Lent

So what? So what if Jeroboam made golden calves and worshiped them at Dan and Bethel? So what if the house of Jeroboam was destroyed by Baasha, and the house of Baasha destroyed by Zimri, and Zimri destroyed by Omri, and the house of Omri destroyed by Jehu? What does this ancient history have to do with me, with us? You all have to get up every morning and go to work; you mothers have kids to feed and mountains of clothes to wash; you students have a regular round of papers and tests and quizzes and other papers. So what?

That�s a fair question. One answer is that the stories of Kings have lessons for us. Kings is full of real-life parables about obedience and disobedience and their consequences. Discerning the lesson is often difficult, and we shouldn�t assume too quickly that we know what the lesson is. The fact that Yahweh didn�t allow Elijah to starve during a famine does not mean that no believers ever starve. They obviously do. Yet, difficulties notwithstanding, we should learn lessons from the stories of Kings. These things, Paul says, were written for ourinstruction.

But I want to suggest that another, and perhaps more important, reason for persevering in the study of Kings has to do with communal memory. Memory shapes who we are, both as individuals and as communities, because memory binds together who we were in the past with who we are in the present. Families share collective memories around the dinner table, and those memories are a large part of what makes the Atwoods a different family from the Bauers or the Boumas. Congregations have communal memories, and the church as a whole has a communal memory.

One of the great evils of the modern church is her communal amnesia. Many Protestants act as if the church began in 1517, or perhaps in the 1640s. Evangelical memory often cannot extend beyond the mid-twentieth century, if it can extend that far. But the whole history of the church is part of our history, and the history recorded in Scripture is the essential part of our history. Paul said to Christians at Corinth that �our fathers�Ewere baptized and fed and rebelled in the wilderness. Jeroboam and Baasha and Zimri and Omri and Ahab and Jehu are all part of our story, the story of the church. Memory shapes our sense of who we are; it is no accident that the communal amnesia of the modern church produces churches without purpose or direction, churches that trim their sails to every wind of doctrine.

Memory binds our past with our present, but in Scripture, memory of the past gives us confidence to move into the future. As we reflect on how Yahweh�s prophet entered into the history of Ahab, we are encouraged that He will not leave us in our darkness and sin, that He will not allow the lamp of Israel to go out.

Moses exhorted Israel, �Remember the days of old, consider the years of all generations. Ask your father, and he will inform you, your elders, and they will tell you.�EForgetfulness is ingratitude, and it is a great sin. Worship is history class, where we are renewed in our communal memory and where we confess our forgetfulness.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, February 13, 2005 at 08:15 AM

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