A Room Called Remember

This has been a topsy turvy week, just like the weather which goes from cold to hot to cold again as showers pass through. Yesterday, I felt happy as I finally completed several pending items and loose ends got tied up. There were even a few nice surprises. Today was one of those days that started out with pouring rain, the newspaper not delivered, a problem with a credit card bill, several not-on-the agenda tasks awaiting in the retirement library and so on. However, I reminded myself of Frederick Buechner’s sermon titled A Room Called Remember.

 

Buechner has a dream that he is looking for the same room in a hotel that he loved when he was there before, but he couldn’t recall the name or location of the room. He had felt so comfortable in that room that he wanted to repeat the experience. The hotel clerk tells him the name of the room is Remember. At this, Buechner was startled awake.

 

He goes on to say that this remembering is beyond spontaneous memories popping into our minds. This is purposeful meditative remembering. This is realizing that though most of the time we failed to see it, we were not alone. David in the Psalms exclaims “Remember the wonderful works that God has done.” David had many failings in his past, but he knew to remember God was with him and brought him through them. That is a wonderful work.

 

Buechner says : “There has never been a time past when God wasn’t with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom …; To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift. Remember those moments in our lives when Christ came to us in countless disguises through people who one way or another strengthened us, comforted us, healed us, judged us by the power of Christ alive within them.”

 

By entering the Room of Remember we receive hope that what God has done in the past, He will continue to do. Hope for the future. Hope to get beyond a bad day and a bad attitude and rest in His peace. Excuse me. Time for me to do some more remembering.

 

 

Proof or Presence

I have started reading Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark which is a collection of his sermons. My niece’s husband has often spoken of Buechner with great respect and admiration. Every time I visit Half-Price Books in Fort Wayne, I scour the shelves for one of his books. So far, this is the only one I have found, but it is a good starting point.

In “Message in the Stars”, Buechner postulates that even if God were to arrange the stars above us to blatantly spell out GOD IS, it would not be enough for us. We would say, so what? So God exists, what difference does that make to me? He is not part of my life. According to Buechner, what we really need is not proof of God, but the presence of God.

Of course we need both. The good news is that in Jesus we have both. In the incarnation and miracles of Jesus, in his crucifixion and resurrection, in the sending of the Holy Spirit, we have the evidence that God exists and that He wants a personal relationship with us.

Buechner and Ann Voskamp have a lot in common. They both want us to open our eyes to God’s presence in the mundane aspects of our lives; to see His goodness, to feel His presence.  God has been hammering me with this message in the past few years through writers like this. Why is it that churches design worship services to be loud and emotionally charged when really what we need is to  pause in silence throughout the ordinariness of our days and see and sense that God is with us.