Remember That Thou Art Dust

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

“What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

 “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Remember. That’s how Lent begins. Remember. Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. Remember – to call to mind once again. Not to forget. At the end of the day, all of religion and all religions, and in many ways all of life itself, depends on remembering. This is especially true of Biblical religion, and yet, a look at the history of the Church reveals that most often we forget.

Placing all other interesting and sometimes helpful interpretations of what we call The Temptation of Jesus in the Wilderness aside [Luke 4:1-13], the necessity to remember is at the heart of it. It often goes unnoticed that the devil - who in Biblical terms is an adversary, or a false accuser – challenges Jesus three times. And three times Jesus responds with words from the last book of Torah, Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy depicts Moses sitting everyone down after the long sojourn in the wilderness, where a diverse group of former slaves had become a people, God’s people Israel, to make sure that everyone remembers who they are and whose they are before crossing the river into the land of promise and new beginnings. Deuteronomy itself can be said to be a Book of Remembering.

It is no wonder, then, that when the devil challenges, “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.” Remember, Jesus has not eaten for a long time, what the Bible calls forty days, which means longer than a lunar cycle, longer than a month. Like his ancestors in the wilderness for forty years, he is hungry. Yet, he remembers, “It is written, “One does not live on bread alone.” Recalling Deuteronomy 8:3 as Moses reminds the people of the gift of manna, and says, ‘One does not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.’” That is, one’s need for bread is secondary to one’s need for every word of God, among which are words that one does not make a miracle of turning stones to bread for oneself, but one is to share the bread one has with others so that others also might live.

Again, the devil’s second temptation is of political power over the whole world if only he will worship him. Jesus remembers Deuteronomy 6:13, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" No doubt he also remembers the sad times in his people’s past when idolatry of other nations gods, and having a king like other nations did, became just so much idolatry and resulted in the people being sent into Exile and a return to slavery.

Finally, Satan plays mimics Jesus’ scripture game and quotes Psalm 91:11-12 daring Jesus to leap off the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus remembers Deuteronomy 6:16, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" At which point the devil “…departed from him until an opportune time.” That being, the time of the Passion and Crucifixion. Jesus has remembered that God alone is God, and that the word of the Lord, when remembered, is what shapes the community of God’s people to be a light to the world – the whole world. Jesus knows, as Moses knew all the way back in Deuteronomy, that once a people forgets its past, it loses both its present and future. Returning us to the aphorisms of George Santayana, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: the idea that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.

If we dare to think that Santayana and the rest are wrong, we just need to look around. We cannot even get 435 people in one room to unanimously renounce hate speech of all kinds. Twenty-three US representatives voted No. And Representative King, disciplined by Congress for years of hate speech, simply voted present. Present. He did not even have the guts to vote up or down on hatred. Or, why there is even one elected representative in Congress who does not want to approve of measures to assure that every citizen who wants to vote will have that right to do so unfettered? We see more neo-Nazis marching around and harassing people. There are more anti-Semites, more KK Klan members, more uber-Nationalists throughout Europe and around the globe than ever. We are told 22% of American millennials have never heard of the Holocaust, and two-thirds do not know what Auschwitz is. There is an elected President in Russia who can order people to be murdered other sovereign nations any time he wants it. A crown prince in Saudi Arabia does the same. Our fetish with American boundaries and border protection has deep roots in the kind of White Supremacy and dreams of Manifest Destiny that sustained slavery, stole one-third of Mexico in a ginned-up war, stole Spanish territories around the world on a faked sabotage allegation, and the breaking every known treaty with the native peoples of the Americas to confiscate all their religious and hunting grounds.

All because we refuse to remember. And we refuse to heed the warnings of modern-day prophets of God’s word like William Sloane Coffin who opined, “The world is too dangerous for anything but Truth, and too small for anything but Love.” To which one might add, and too complicated to ignore and forget our shared history with the rest of the world’s countries and religions. We must remember. And then like Moses and Jesus, we need to remember who we are and whose we are.

As one commentary warns, however, “Yet a caveat is in order. A people’s memory is a beneficial force in their lives and in the lives of others only to the extent that it reminds the owners of the memory that there are other stories and other memories. One of the challenges facing the twenty-first century is how humankind’s many-splendored ethnic and religious memories may be used in the service of the whole human family. If the ancient hatreds are ever to be laid to rest, some selective forgetfulness must take place, or humans will continue to fight the old battles over and over. So, George Santayana was only partly right. It may be true, as he wrote, that those who ‘cannot remember their past are doomed to repeat it,’ but it is also true that those who remember history too vividly are doomed to be enslaved by it.”   [Texts For Preaching, Brueggemann, etc Year C, p.192]

There is a consummate and important humility in the way in which Lent calls us to remember: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” All people, all cultures, all religions share the same stardust, DNA, resources and destiny to thrive in this world. We must remember all this, or be doomed to be enslaved by the very worst our history reveals. We must remember.