"I know that my Redeemer Liveth"

My kinsmen have gone away; my friends have forgotten me. My guests and my maidservants count me a stranger; they look upon me as an alien. I summon my servant, but he does not answer, though I beg him with my own mouth. My breath is offensive to my wife; I am loathsome to my own brothers. Even the little boys scorn me; when I appear, they ridicule me. All my intimate friends detest me; those I love have turned against me.

Job is in a bad way.

They close up their callous hearts, and their mouths speak with arrogance. They have tracked me down, they now surround me, with eyes alert, to throw me to the ground. They are like a lion hungry for prey, like a great lion crouching in cover.

David is in a bad way.

Job and David were both culturally very different to you and I.  In those days, and in their setting if your life was a mess, there was an accepted way of saying so - the lament - a passionate expression of grief, loss and pain.  20th Century Britain is so different isn't it?  We can be aware of somebody going through the most nightmarish pain or grief or loss, yet when we ask them how they are coping we do not expect a lament, a passionate outpouring of distress.  In fact, we would consider it to be bad form.  We would be very embarrassed, there would be an awkward moment or two.

Instead we expect something more gentle don't we - words of resigned acceptance perhaps, words that express loss in a restrained manner but concentrate more on the future and putting it all behind us.  It's the famous British Reserve, the brave face, the understated emotion

For David and Job there was never any question of stiff-upper-lip, they let it all out, and it wasn't pretty.  But those words of despair and anguish, pain and tears provide the backdrop of something quite startling.  Against the startling and uncompromising reality of how bad life can be, Job can say this: "I know that my redeemer lives."  

David is obviously pouring out his heart to God before he goes to bed, for at the end of all his distressing words he says this: "When I awake, your presence will fill me with joy!"

"I know that my redeemer lives." ... "When I awake, your presence will fill me with joy!"

Those are startling words when they are heard against the backdrop of a lament.  They are words that are being clung to, words that are being depended on, words that are the only source of hope there is to be had.

What I want us to ask this morning is how come Job and David could say those words with such faith and hope in the midst of their darkest periods of grief and pain.  And I want to suggest that part of the reason is that they lived their lives with a habit of remembrance.

Now there are two aspects of their remembrance that I want to highlight today.  The first is easy, in theory, the second is hard in theory and in practise!

The first is this:  Both David and Job lived in a culture which gave a high value to the experiences of their forefathers in faith.  They kept a huge safe deposit box of all the experiences they and their fathers' and their fathers' fathers and some of their mothers and mothers' mothers had ever had. when they looked in this box of experiences, some of them recent, some of them lost in the mists of time, they didn't see a string of events that had happened to other people long ago, they saw a record of God's action towards themselves, through the lives of the whole community.

So, hundreds of years after Moses had led the people from Egypt, you don't hear Jews saying, "When God led them through the Red Sea" rather you would hear the story of how god led us through the Red Sea.

In this way, they were able to begin to look at the big picture, the large canvass on which God's picture of life was being painted.  Because they did not see them,selves in the same individualistic terms that we see ourselves today, they were able to see much more easily that they were a part of something much bigger and much grander, they were able to lose themselves for a moment in the life of a whole community of God's People.  There, they found huge comfort and huge support.

When Jean and I went into Eldon Grove School over the summer, we were helping the kids to paint some murals of children at play.  The style we were using was of hundreds of little dots of paint on big pieces of board.  As the kids began to spot the paint in the pencil lines, it soon became obvious that most of them hadn't got the faintest idea what we were doing.  It wasn't until we physically took them across the courtyard to show them the big picture that they understood what their little dots were about and we began to make some progress.

When life is close-up and you are on your own, it rapidly begins to lose all sense and balance and meaning.  Part of your calling as the People of God is to exercise Remembrance by seeing your lives as part of something bigger.  For as you share with one another your experiences of God at work in your lives, you will begin to see God at work not only in the past and not only in other people, but here and now and into the future for sure.  That's part of the reason why Job and David had the faith and the hope to say, "I know that my redeemer lives." ... "When I awake, your presence will fill me with joy!"

But I said there were two, and that the first was easy in theory and the second hard in theory and in practise...

The second aspect of remembrance is this.  Both Job and David built and shaped their lives around their confident words of hope, "I know that my redeemer lives." ... "When I awake, your presence will fill me with joy!"

This week saw real excitement in the Manse.  We enter competitions every now and then, but we never win anything.  Well this week was different!  Long ago I entered Hywel in a competition to win one of the new Insectoid Lego sets.  This week a huge box arrived addressed to Hywel (Lythan and I could hardly contain ourselves as we waited for him to get back from school) - and inside was a runners-up prize of a huge Insectoids model.  

Hywel and I set about making it, and we had been going for quite some time we we found that the instructions didn't seem to be right.  On closer inspection, we realised that we had left a piece out several stages before.  The only way to proceed was to take it to bits, put the piece in and then build it back up again around the new piece.

That is precisely what remembrance is about.  Our calling is to build our lives around the faith and hope that our Redeemer liveth.  For you and me that means we are called to build our lives around the living Redeemer - Jesus Christ.  Quite often that means that we will have to rearrange things, pull bits off, change things around as we learn more and more what it is God is making us to be.  None of us is finished yet.  None of us knows the full glory of what God has in mind for us. Each of us must keep re-membering our lives, building them ever new around the living Redeemer - Jesus Christ our Lord.

And as we build our lives around him, we find that we are built together into His People, and we find that we can see Christ re-membered among us.  Our meeting around God's table is merely a symbol of that lifelong action of re-membering, "Do this in remembrance of me."

"I know that my redeemer lives." ... "When I awake, your presence will fill me with joy!"  As we re-member our lives around Christ, and find Christ re-membered in the midst of the People of God, may those words be real for us.

Amen