August 21, 2011
God Will Not Forget - Romans 9:1-5, 11:25-36
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadOne of the things that you may have discovered about me, to your chagrin, is that I am prone to forget things from time to time. If it has not happened to you yet, then it will, and if it has, then I’m sorry. If it’s happened twice, then I’m really sorry. I forget things from time to time. I sometimes agree to do something and then forget to do it. I don’t mean any harm. I just simply forget. Approximately 150 of you will walk out these doors today. Do not tell me anything important then, because I will forget. I learned a long time ago not to make any promises in that line (though I forget even that from time to time). I get lots of emails, lots and lots of them. In fact, I could spend all day just responding to email. So, sometimes, I forget to respond to a few. It may seem like a matter of integrity, but it’s simply a matter of forgetting.
Now, while I am confessing my faults to you, I may as well come clean and tell you that sometimes, on rare occasion, I intentionally forget. I honestly cannot think of a particular example of that here, but at home I intentionally forget things fairly frequently. “Sure, I’ll clean out the garage,” I say to my wife. Do I really mean it? Yes and no, but probably more no that yes. Before you look at me with your righteous indignation, before you assault me with your righteous wrath, you do the same exact thing, every one of you. Convenient amnesia is a very good condition to have and we all have sometimes. Either way, we humans forget.
The question, though, is does God forget? That’s the million dollar question that Paul addresses in Romans 9-11. Will God forget the promises that He has made? That’s a question that runs through the entire Bible. Some of those promises are with specific people (Israel being foremost among them), and some are general, like in the creation story. God promises all of us that God will be our God, forever, to the end. Some of those covenants, like with Abraham, Moses, & David, are, again, specifically Israel. The question, though, that always seems to pop up is whether God will remember those promises. Sometimes in the Bible when we think that God has forgotten. In fact, that’s largely what the book of Lamentations is all about. God seems to have forgotten his people. Job speaks to that. God seems to forget Job for a little while. Will God forget his promises?
Now there’s no question that we forget our promises to God. Israel forgets her promises often. In fact, much of the prophetic message is that these covenants are two way streets. You can’t keep crying “God this and God that” and “covenant this and covenant that” when you have given God the time of day. That’s not how it works. Israel forgets. We forget. And when we do, we live with hard consequences. But does God forget? Even if we keep ignoring God, will God finally ignore us? Or, is God’s remembering related in any way to our own remembering (or forgetting I should say)? Will God remember only to the extent that we remember? That’s very scary, isn’t it? That question runs throughout the Old Testament.
In a very real way, Jesus is the answer to that question, and that answer is positive for us. God will remember. God will not forget. God has gone to such great lengths to remember that God became one of us. Jesus is God’s primary means of remembering us. Jesus is God’s primary means of remembering Israel. Jesus should settle the matter once and for all. In fact, Israel had looked for Jesus for thousands of year. Case closed, right? But what happens if Israel rejects Jesus? That’s what Paul is concerned with here. For the record, that’s not the way it was supposed to happen. Israel was supposed to be the first to recognize Jesus. The idea is that the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, the “final answer” to the remembering question would first be accepted by Israel. After all, they had been the ones asking it for thousands of years. But they were not accepting it. In fact, Gentiles were accepting the Gospel much faster than Israel was. Paul agonized over that. These are his people. They were his family. So what was going to happen to Paul’s people? Would God forget them, as they, he would say, had forgotten God? That was a huge question for Paul.
And it’s a huge question for us. Where is everybody today? Really? There are many people who are not here, but who should be here. We all have people in our lives whom we love very, very much, who have completely rejected the Church. More and more people are rejecting the Church. That’s just a fact. Maybe it’s our children, or a sibling, or even a parent, who has completely rejected the Church. You raised your children in Church, you loved them, you brought them up to love and serve the Lord. It was always an important part of your life, and they grew up to pretty much reject that. I hate to say it, but it’s just true. By and large, most people are rejecting the Church. They may want to get married in it (the center aisle is nice to have), but to actually come and get active and support the life of the Church? Fat chance. That probably hurts you very much, and it begs the question, what happens? Will God forget? All those promises that God made at their baptisms, many of which happened in this Sanctuary, will God forget?
And, for that matter, what about the people whom we don’t know? What about all these people who have moved here in the last ten or twenty years? One thing you have to say about Paul is that Paul loved them very much. Paul had every reason just to stick to his people. But he looked outside of his people, to all of God’s people. We must do that here. What about them? God has made some promises to them, too. Most of “them” don’t know anything about those promises. Most of “them” view the Christian faith as judgmental and hypocritical. They know nothing, really, about the idea of God who loves them so much that he lived for them, and died for them? They know nothing about any of that because we haven’t told them. We just haven’t. God has made some promises to them. God made promises to the Gentiles, too, and even though Paul was not a Gentile, even though Paul had good reason to hate the Gentiles, Paul cared enough about them to tell them. God has made promises to “them.” Will God remember those promises?
And, for that matter, will God remember the promises that he has made to us? After all, we forget from time to time. Very much like me and my garage cleaning chores, we intentionally forget. For almost all of us, if we were ever put on trial for being Christian, most all of us could get the charges dropped for lack of evidence, especially if we had a good lawyer. God’s promises to us, if we believe them, should evoke a response from us, they should evoke another way of life. The vast majority of us do not take Jesus very seriously. We do not take Jesus’ words very seriously. Most of what Jesus says in the Gospels makes me squirm, and it makes you squirm. Jesus told us to take up our own crosses. I hate to say it, but I’m probably like the rich man in Luke 18, who asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus told him to keep the commandments, which said he had done, and then one more thing, to give everything you have for the poor. And the man said that wasn’t going to happen. It’s just too much, he said. I can identify with them. I know that it comes down to faith and not works, but faith without works is dead, and my works don’t always speak well of my faith.
If there is any hope whatsoever in this world, it’s that God will remember his promises to us. The Good News is that God remembers. God does not forget. The only thing that God forgets is our sin when we confess it. God forgets that. But God remembers the promises that he has made to us. In fact, according to Paul, God can even take our disobedience, God can even take our forgetfulness, and do something good with it. At the end of the day, God made some promises to Israel. You can read about those promises in the Old Testament. They were made a long time ago. God also made some promises to us, some of which were a long time and some were more recent. God has every reason to abandon those promises. We have not held up our end of the bargain. We have forgotten. But have some peace. God has now forgotten us.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
