Memory And Hope

For An Older Couple, Both Widowed

The Bible contains many themes, but two of them that pervade both the Old and New Testaments are memory and hope. The Israelites were constantly reminded by their leaders and their religious rituals to keep uppermost in their minds the fact that God had saved them, had made them a nation, had bestowed on them through Abraham and Sarah a special covenantal love. This memory was recalled time and time again as Israel wandered through the centuries, as a way of calling a people back into that special relationship with God.
But they were not allowed to remain comfortable with memory alone. In fact, the prophets recalled these memories specially to engender hope that the nation could once again know the goodness of the Lord. Memory that they had been blessed, and hope that once again the hand of the Lord would rest upon them.
The early church, too, called forth memory and hope. The apostles, fresh from companionship with Jesus, recalled his physical presence before the ascension in order to gather strength and spread the gospel. And this memory compelled them to hope that once again they might enjoy that same union with him that they had had before his death. Memory gave them strength; hope gave them wings.
So it is with us today. Occasions such as your wedding are pivots upon which our memories and our hopes converge

and turn together. You two bring the memories of your years together as well as some still fairly fresh memories of those decades before you knew one another. You bring the remembrance of your happy first marriages, families raised, your own children married, and grandchildren born. But you are not the only ones who bring memory to this occasion. We, your family and friends, bring them as well. We bring memories of you as children or teenagers, as our brother and sister, our parents and the spouses of our parents. And today those memories all come together for us.
We are not quite certain what to do with those memories, for they are dear to us still. We are not ready to discard them and yet we are loath to cling to them too closely, lest they hold us back from participating in your future.
Fortunately, we can look to the Bible for help. It is the biblical word that gives us permission to cherish those memories and to use them. For as the stories of the Israelites and the early church show us, God gives us our memories as a lasting treasure. They are dear to us as well as to God, for God is active in them. But God wants us to use them as a springboard into the future, as a surety against the divine promise: Lo, I am with you always.
You see, God never permits us to stand still in the present. Though we carry the past with us, we are always poised on the brink of tomorrow. We are always asked to be prepared for change, for that is the great and joyful surprise given us in creation. We are constantly called out of the comforts of what is the same into the challenge of what is new. And as we participate in new relationships, new opportunities, new events, we become co--creators with God, called to make something out of the surprise of life.
Perhaps this is the essence of grace: that we are never condemned to living on memory alone but are given the chance to transform our memory into living hope through the great promise inherent in our changing world. We are given the opportunity to take risks. We are challenged to embrace the world with joy.

So tonight we bring all our memories with us, and we present them as a gift to you: a gift that propels us into hope. It is a hope that out of the beauty and pain of your past, out of the uniqueness of this moment, God can fashion something new and good and lasting for our future as well as for yours. It is not only a hope that you will find deepest satisfaction in one another, but that this ungainly group that is now your new family - all of us with you tonight - that we will share in that happiness, that we will support you as husband and wife, that we will find great promise in your marriage. It is a hope that we can bring the best of ourselves to your relationship, that with God's help we can fashion out of what once seemed a static world something dynamic and filled with grace.
The psalmist says blessed are those who trust in the Lord. Tonight, as our memory and our hope converge in this celebration, we pray that together they meld into that kind of trust which allows God's blessings to shower down upon you and your marriage. May you love one another, may we love you, as Christ first loved us all. Amen.

Deborah D. Steed is associate pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Loveland, Ohio.