Scripture text: Nehemiah 9:16-31 (Appointed for Tuesday, August 25)
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Spanish philosopher George Santayana once famously wrote. It’s a popular quote that acknowledges the great dangers of forgetting our history. We can forget who we are. We can forget where we came from. We can forget what we’re capable of.
The latter statement is, of course, part of the reason it’s appealing to forget. Every people, ourselves included, has dark chapters in their past. Even a cursory glance over American history reveals very quickly the scourge of slavery, the genocide of the Native American population, the internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, My Lai, and a whole host of other events that put to question our self-perception as the “greatest nation” in the history of the world. As individuals also, we find numerous occasions in our own lives that we’ve come to regret: failed relationships, surrender to vices, and other times when we were not at our best. So the temptation to forget is always present. We don’t want to remember the ugly parts. We want to forget.
I’m sure for the people of ancient Israel that desire to forget was no less real. They too had their ugly chapters, times when they turned their back on who they truly were and what they were to do. Time and again, they became apostates, turned to other gods, rejected Yahweh, and often suffered dramatic consequences for it.
The story of Nehemiah occurs late in the Old Testament. Well after many of those consequences I just mentioned have come to pass. The people have been conquered by numerous empires. The kingdom of Israel no longer exists. It is occupied territory, a portion of the great Empire of Persia in the 5th century before Christ. The people of God are under the rule of Artaxerxes, king of Persia (and son of Xerxes, the “villain” of the Greek histories of the Battle of Thermopylae and Hollywood depictions thereof.)
Nehemiah was the Jewish cup-bearer of the king, a position of some importance. Upon learning of troubles back home in Jerusalem, Nehemiah convinces the king to send him back there to rebuild the city after decades of neglect. After accomplishing this feat, he returns to the side of his king, only to learn later that the people in Jerusalem have once again turned their back on God. So Nehemiah once again sets out to put things right. The lengthy confession we have as our text today is the result of his efforts.
It’s not necessarily a fun read. It’s a long laundry list of sins that the people have committed, not just recently, but over their long history. Time and again, they admit to having turned their back on God, turned their backs on one another, and “done what is evil in the sight of the Lord.”
And while it might be easy for us to point fingers and laugh at their constant and consistent failures, are we so different? Our society isn’t exactly reveling in its virtue right now, with ugly expressions of racism, sexism, and other social vices not only becoming acceptable again, but commonplace. Like the ancient Israelites, we’ve forgotten what we’re capable of and fallen into age-old traps of sin.
But there’s another piece to remembering our past and that’s the recognition of God’s presence in the midst of it all. Note the parallelisms in what the Israelites confess. We did this terrible thing, but God did this wondrous thing. Time and again, despite the sin and failure of God’s people, God himself comes through. God proves faithful. God proves merciful. God proves forgiving. If we humans are consistent in our sin and failure, then God proves all the more consistent in his love and grace.
Being human means dealing with sin. We screw up…all the time. Sometimes we even enjoy it, or at least we do until the consequences of it come calling. We, both collectively and individually, are more than capable of doing evil. Yet God responds to our mistakes with compassion and mercy. He sent Christ to die for our sins, to take upon himself the real punishment that we’ve deserved. He died because we screw up, but because he died, God looks upon us not with anger or disgust, but instead with mercy and forgiveness. Time and again, as we fail, God forgives.
And that’s worth remembering.
P.S. Just as I finished writing this, I saw news reports of a shooting where a news crew was murdered on air. Our evils continue. Lord, have mercy.
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