Lest We Forget...
2021年2月23日Download here: http://gg.gg/of2h7
*Lest We Forget Remembrance Day Quotes
*Lest We Forget Canada
*Lest We Forget 2020
And while visiting “Lest We Forget” may be a time to reflect, Kranson said it also serves as an important reminder. “During this moment of cultural reckoning, this exhibit reminds us that we need to remain vigilant as we combat white supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and other exclusionary and violent ideologies. #LestWeForget #RemembranceFind us on:https://www.face.
An exhibit at the heart of the University of Pittsburgh campus brings people face to face with Holocaust history in an artful display of defiance.
Through a partnership between Pitt and the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, the traveling art installation “Lest We Forget” found its latest temporary home on the lawn of the Cathedral of Learning and will be on display through Nov. 15. The exhibit features 60 larger-than-life portraits of Holocaust survivors — 16 of whom are from the Pittsburgh area.
German-Italian artist Luigi Toscano calls it the most important project of his career — aligning the project’s display in Pittsburgh with the commemoration of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Oct. 27 marks one year since the shooting killed 11 members of three congregations that used Tree of Life as their house of worship.
“We are living in a tense time. I think it is important that people remember the past,” said Toscano, who met and photographed over 400 Holocaust survivors from around the world for his traveling exhibit. “I would like to motivate other people, especially the younger generation, to stand up against hate.”
One such person is Maja Lynn, a second-year Pitt student. She spent her gap year in Germany to connect with her German roots, and gave tours of the Dachau concentration camp. Now, back on the Pitt campus, she’s faced with a new way of absorbing the weight of the Holocaust while walking through “Lest We Forget.”
“You can see the time that’s passed on the survivors’ faces. You see their age. They were young during the Holocaust,” said Lynn. “This is an active form of remembrance that’s really powerful — almost in a spiritual way. I’m not religious, but I still had this profound experience walking through the exhibit, and I think most people will, too.”“Impossible to ignore”
Each of the photographs are headshots of survivors on a mesh canvas about 8 feet tall and 5 feet wide. On a card next to each portrait, Toscano includes a short description of each survivor’s experience and the lives they’ve led since their liberation.
Francine Gelertner and Sam Shear are two of the 16 Pittsburgh-area people featured in the exhibit. Gelertner persevered through the Stutthof concentration camp in what is now Poland and later married another Holocaust survivor after coming to America. Shear endured five years of suffering in concentration camps and moved to Pittsburgh where he met his wife of 70 years. In the 1960s, he met Martin Luther King Jr., and the two discussed Shear’s experiences. Shear is also the grandfather of Margo Shear, a communications manager with Pitt’s Office of University Communications.
The nature of the exhibit’s display — deliberately set outdoors in a public place as opposed to inside a museum — can be considered a powerful message in itself, according to Kirk Savage, chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
“You as a visitor can choose whether or not you enter a museum, and then museum curators can change its interpretations,” said Savage. “With ‘Lest We Forget,’ it’s outdoors on a walkway in front of the Cathedral of Learning. Basically, people are forced to deal with it, just by going about their ordinary, daily routine. It’s thrusting facts — portraits of survivors — in your face.”
Savage also says the large scale of the photographs will almost be “impossible to ignore,” which has the power to strengthen a person’s connection to the Holocaust.
“If we know someone who is affected by an event, we have a much closer connection to it versus if we read about it,” said Savage. “That process of being confronted with the reality of a person’s face who survived it — looking at them — that changes your relationship to that larger historical event.”
Rachel Kranson, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies in the Dietrich School, agrees.
“Holocaust memory projects often focus on abstractions, like scale and numbers,” said Kranson, whose research includes Holocaust memorialization. “Taking the focus away from impossibly large numbers and asking visitors to train their lens on portraits of individual people humanizes the history of genocide.”Through the lens of Oct. 27
According to a 2018 report, 22% of millennials said they either hadn’t heard of the Holocaust or weren’t sure they had heard of it — and anti-Semitism is on the rise.
With the exhibit coinciding with the commemoration of the Tree of Life shooting, which took place about two miles from Pitt’s campus, the experience of visiting “Lest We Forget” in Pittsburgh takes on a whole new meaning, according to Savage.
“The Tree of Life shooting inevitably changes the way people at Pitt will walk through this exhibit,” said Savage. “We will look at the photographs through the lens of that event.”
Kathy Humphrey, senior vice chancellor for engagement and secretary of the Board of Trustees, said, “During our Year of Creativity at Pitt, the message we learn from ‘Lest We Forget’ is clear and universal. We must always remember what happens when hatred goes unchecked and stand with those who experience oppression, whomever and wherever they are.”
And while visiting “Lest We Forget” may be a time to reflect, Kranson said it also serves as an important reminder.
“During this moment of cultural reckoning, this exhibit reminds us that we need to remain vigilant as we combat white supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and other exclusionary and violent ideologies. The struggle against brutality is ongoing, and no society is immune,” said Kranson.
For Lynn, as a student, she hopes that the exhibit inspires people to ask more questions.
“The history can seem so distant, but it’s really not,” said Lynn. “And I think that’s really powerful for Pittsburgh, because you realize people are still being killed here for being Jewish, even though time has passed — and we’ve had so many opportunities to learn.” #StrongerThanHate: Commemorating the victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue one year later
* Now-Dec. 1
* Who is a Jew? Amiens, France, 1940–1945
* An exhibit that contains artifacts discovered by retired Pitt archivist David Rosenberg while doing research on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in France
* Hillman Library, Ground Floor
* Now-Dec. 6
* “To Those Who Grasp It: Responding to October 27”
* An exhibit that highlights student voices in response to the shooting and its aftermath
* 3702 Wesley W. Posvar Hall
* Oct. 27
* 5-6 p.m.: Pittsburgh Jewish Community Public Memorial Service
* Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum
* Oct. 31
* 5-7 p.m.: “Education after Auschwitz: Levinas, Jewish Education and the Crisis of Humanism,” lecture by Claire Katz, Texas A&M University
* 501 Cathedral of Learning
* Nov. 2
* 7:30-8:30 p.m.: Jewish Studies ProgramMini Course: Memorials & the Future of the Holocaust
* 332 Cathedral of Learning
* Nov. 3
* 9 a.m-5 p.m.: Jewish Studies ProgramMini Course: Memorials & the Future of the Holocaust
* 1500 Wesley W. Posvar Hall
* Nov. 10-11
* Anti-Semitism, Hate and Social Responsibility Conference
* Rodef Shalom Congregation, 4905 Fifth Ave.
* Nov. 15
* The Art of Itinerancy: Yiddish Theater and the Performance of Migration: a talk with Debra Caplan from Baruch College
* 602 Cathedral of Learning
Fourth Sunday of Lent // Laetare Sunday“Lest We Forget” // A Sermon by Fr. Sammy WoodJoshua 4.19-24, 5.9-12Psalm 34II Corinthians 5.17-21Luke 5.11-32
☩ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
As we often do at the start of a sermon, let’s take a moment to get our bearings — Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent, and it’s called “Laetare,” from the first line of our opening prayer on this day, a quotation of Isa 66.10, “rejoice, Jerusalem.” Today is an invitation to joy — more than an invitation, really; rejoice is in the imperative. Laetare Sunday comes mid-Lent, halfway between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and it commands us to rejoice! The rose vestments — in the penitential Lent season we use violet (among other things, it’s the color of a bruise), but feast days are typically white, and “rose” falls kind of in-between on this in-between day. When we leave here today, we are entering “Deep Lent,” the most solemn season of our liturgical year, so Mother Church, in her tradition, puts in this particular odd Sunday as a kind of speed bump, to say to us: “Rejoice” — and slow down, take a breath and relax our Lenten disciplines for a day. Oh, and while you’re doing that, remember.
Remember. God, it seems, has always known that ours is a forgetful race. The locus classicus for our forgetfulness is Deut. 8, where Moses warns the Israelites of the danger that, when they come into the promised land, they will forget who got them there. “Beware,” Moses says, “lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth . . . remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth . . . and if you forget the Lord your God . . . you will surely die.” (Deut. 8.17-19) We’re prone to forgetfulness. So we’ve always reached for all sorts of tactile things as reminders. Here at the Advent we make crosses from our palms on Palm Sunday, then their ashes remind us that we’re mortal. We wash feet so we don’t forget Jesus taught us to be servants. We write on our doorposts, we cross ourselves, we kneel when we pray — all because we’re so quick to forget who we are and all God’s done for us. That’s why God built into the life of his people all the cycles in the bible in the first place — a 7-day cycle and a monthly one; annual cycles of feasts and fasts; a cycle of Sabbath years; and even a 50-year cycle of Jubilee years. All “lest we forget.”
I confess — I steal rocks. My kids know this — they’ve watched me do it for years. Rocks are all over our house. Rocks from family vacations to Maine and even day trips to Walden Pond. I was a little paranoid flying back from our trip to Israel two years ago because I had a whole bag of rocks — afraid I would get stopped at the airport in Tel Aviv for looting national treasures. One is from a monastery carved into the side of the mountain where tradition says Jesus was tempted by the devil.
Another I pinched from the little village of Bethany where Mary and Martha lived, and where Jesus raised their brother Lazarus from the dead. I have rocks from Mt. Carmel, Masada, the Temple Mount. I wanted to remember those places. God gave the Jews eat the Passover meal, and we have feasts, and fasts, and cycles, and — one more thing — we build monuments of stone, lest we forget.
So on this Sunday of slowing down, breathing deep, and remembering — we read about stones in Joshua, and I want to look at that reading together and to come at it in three moves.(1) The setup(2) The sign(3) The savior
First — the setup: We have to go all the way back to Exodus to set up this story. Because it all started when Moses led Israel out of Egypt, out of slavery, through the Red Sea, toward the promised land of Canaan. He sent 12 men to spy out the land, but ten of them were terrified of the people who lived there — “giants,” they called them — so they wrote up a bad report about the land, and all the people of Israel complained, they “grumbled” against Moses and against God: Why didn’t we just die in Egypt? Or even out here in the wilderness! We want a recall election — let’s just pick another leader and go back to Egypt! (Num. 14) So God made them wander 40 years, until every man who had grumbled against him died — not a single adult male in Israel would see Canaan except Joshua and Caleb, who hadn’t been afraid and had trusted God from the beginning.
Now to our story today. It’s 40 years on — Moses is dead, all the grumblers are dead, and Joshua, the very same Joshua, is set to lead Israel through the Jordan River, the last remaining obstacle between them and the promised land. And here are God’s marching orders: Take twelve men from the tribes of Israel, from each tribe a man. And when the soles of the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the Lord . . . rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters . . . shall be cut off from flowing, and the waters coming down from above shall stand in one heap. (Josh. 3.12-13) Oh, and one more thing — God says take 12 stones from the riverbed and lay them down where you sleep your first night in the promised land. That’s the set-up.
Point two is The sign – Why? Why did Go tell them to commit the sort of petty larceny I commit when I visit a national park? So they would remember. God said, “When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord . . . . [T]hese stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.” (Josh. 4.6-7) The stones were a sign, a memorial to what God did in bringing them through the water.
Bringing them through the water . . .Lest We Forget Remembrance Day Quotes
That had to strike a chord, forgetful though they were. God had brought them through the water. Not once, but twice! Remember the Red Sea — Israel followed Moses through on dry ground, before the waters closed back over Pharaoh and his pursuing army. And now God brings them through the Jordan into the land he had promised to give them.
Now, when God does something not once, but twice, pay attention. Over time, the story of God bringing his people through water became more than a story. For one thing, it was a synecdoche — a literary device where a part represents the whole. Joshua wasn’t just telling them to remember this one day, this one great miracle God did when he dried up the river for them to cross. He wanted them to remember all that God had done for them — the slavery, the Exodus, the wilderness, the manna, the water, the Jordan, and home. And a second thing this story did was to become a “type” — a prefigurement or foreshadowing, something that happened once but the meaning kept unfolding over centuries. Over time this story, like the Red Sea, came to foreshadow baptism — God saved Israel by bringing them safely through the water, just as he saved you through the waters of baptism.
Last point: The Savior – The whole point is to get us to this: All these themes are swirling around us — water, baptism, the Jordan — you may remember we read just a few Sundays ago about Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan. We went there on our pilgrimage (I’ve got the rock to prove it). All these themes, all these stories, they are crying out to us: Remember! God knows we are forgetful — he doesn’t beat us up about it, he just builds in reminders lest we forget.
These are our monuments, reminders of the “historical watershed” events that brought humanity salvation — and Jesus, like Joshua, left us something to remember him by. On the night before he died for us, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to his friends. “This is my body,” he said. “Whenever you eat this, remember me.”
On Rose Sunday, we have a moment — a moment to take a breath and to remember. Remember God doesn’t love us because we’re so good at Lent. God doesn’t love us because we’re good at all. Remember we were slaves, not just in Egypt but to the brokenness of our world and the inevitability of death, but he carried us out. We were lost, wandering in the wilderness, but he found us — and he carried us up the mountain of his temptation, into the Garden of Gethsemane, up the hill to the temple for trial, and to Calvary under the weight of his cross. He brought us through water. And he calls us to this altar. To take his body on our tongues. To carry those memories, like stones in our pockets, lest we forget all he’s done for us.
☩ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Lest We Forget Canada
Source: Robert L. Hubbard, Jr., Joshua (TNIVAC) (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2009): 169-70.Lest We Forget 2020
Audio for this sermon is available at http://bit.ly/24KrWJE
Download here: http://gg.gg/of2h7
https://diarynote.indered.space
*Lest We Forget Remembrance Day Quotes
*Lest We Forget Canada
*Lest We Forget 2020
And while visiting “Lest We Forget” may be a time to reflect, Kranson said it also serves as an important reminder. “During this moment of cultural reckoning, this exhibit reminds us that we need to remain vigilant as we combat white supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and other exclusionary and violent ideologies. #LestWeForget #RemembranceFind us on:https://www.face.
An exhibit at the heart of the University of Pittsburgh campus brings people face to face with Holocaust history in an artful display of defiance.
Through a partnership between Pitt and the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, the traveling art installation “Lest We Forget” found its latest temporary home on the lawn of the Cathedral of Learning and will be on display through Nov. 15. The exhibit features 60 larger-than-life portraits of Holocaust survivors — 16 of whom are from the Pittsburgh area.
German-Italian artist Luigi Toscano calls it the most important project of his career — aligning the project’s display in Pittsburgh with the commemoration of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Oct. 27 marks one year since the shooting killed 11 members of three congregations that used Tree of Life as their house of worship.
“We are living in a tense time. I think it is important that people remember the past,” said Toscano, who met and photographed over 400 Holocaust survivors from around the world for his traveling exhibit. “I would like to motivate other people, especially the younger generation, to stand up against hate.”
One such person is Maja Lynn, a second-year Pitt student. She spent her gap year in Germany to connect with her German roots, and gave tours of the Dachau concentration camp. Now, back on the Pitt campus, she’s faced with a new way of absorbing the weight of the Holocaust while walking through “Lest We Forget.”
“You can see the time that’s passed on the survivors’ faces. You see their age. They were young during the Holocaust,” said Lynn. “This is an active form of remembrance that’s really powerful — almost in a spiritual way. I’m not religious, but I still had this profound experience walking through the exhibit, and I think most people will, too.”“Impossible to ignore”
Each of the photographs are headshots of survivors on a mesh canvas about 8 feet tall and 5 feet wide. On a card next to each portrait, Toscano includes a short description of each survivor’s experience and the lives they’ve led since their liberation.
Francine Gelertner and Sam Shear are two of the 16 Pittsburgh-area people featured in the exhibit. Gelertner persevered through the Stutthof concentration camp in what is now Poland and later married another Holocaust survivor after coming to America. Shear endured five years of suffering in concentration camps and moved to Pittsburgh where he met his wife of 70 years. In the 1960s, he met Martin Luther King Jr., and the two discussed Shear’s experiences. Shear is also the grandfather of Margo Shear, a communications manager with Pitt’s Office of University Communications.
The nature of the exhibit’s display — deliberately set outdoors in a public place as opposed to inside a museum — can be considered a powerful message in itself, according to Kirk Savage, chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
“You as a visitor can choose whether or not you enter a museum, and then museum curators can change its interpretations,” said Savage. “With ‘Lest We Forget,’ it’s outdoors on a walkway in front of the Cathedral of Learning. Basically, people are forced to deal with it, just by going about their ordinary, daily routine. It’s thrusting facts — portraits of survivors — in your face.”
Savage also says the large scale of the photographs will almost be “impossible to ignore,” which has the power to strengthen a person’s connection to the Holocaust.
“If we know someone who is affected by an event, we have a much closer connection to it versus if we read about it,” said Savage. “That process of being confronted with the reality of a person’s face who survived it — looking at them — that changes your relationship to that larger historical event.”
Rachel Kranson, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies in the Dietrich School, agrees.
“Holocaust memory projects often focus on abstractions, like scale and numbers,” said Kranson, whose research includes Holocaust memorialization. “Taking the focus away from impossibly large numbers and asking visitors to train their lens on portraits of individual people humanizes the history of genocide.”Through the lens of Oct. 27
According to a 2018 report, 22% of millennials said they either hadn’t heard of the Holocaust or weren’t sure they had heard of it — and anti-Semitism is on the rise.
With the exhibit coinciding with the commemoration of the Tree of Life shooting, which took place about two miles from Pitt’s campus, the experience of visiting “Lest We Forget” in Pittsburgh takes on a whole new meaning, according to Savage.
“The Tree of Life shooting inevitably changes the way people at Pitt will walk through this exhibit,” said Savage. “We will look at the photographs through the lens of that event.”
Kathy Humphrey, senior vice chancellor for engagement and secretary of the Board of Trustees, said, “During our Year of Creativity at Pitt, the message we learn from ‘Lest We Forget’ is clear and universal. We must always remember what happens when hatred goes unchecked and stand with those who experience oppression, whomever and wherever they are.”
And while visiting “Lest We Forget” may be a time to reflect, Kranson said it also serves as an important reminder.
“During this moment of cultural reckoning, this exhibit reminds us that we need to remain vigilant as we combat white supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and other exclusionary and violent ideologies. The struggle against brutality is ongoing, and no society is immune,” said Kranson.
For Lynn, as a student, she hopes that the exhibit inspires people to ask more questions.
“The history can seem so distant, but it’s really not,” said Lynn. “And I think that’s really powerful for Pittsburgh, because you realize people are still being killed here for being Jewish, even though time has passed — and we’ve had so many opportunities to learn.” #StrongerThanHate: Commemorating the victims of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue one year later
* Now-Dec. 1
* Who is a Jew? Amiens, France, 1940–1945
* An exhibit that contains artifacts discovered by retired Pitt archivist David Rosenberg while doing research on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in France
* Hillman Library, Ground Floor
* Now-Dec. 6
* “To Those Who Grasp It: Responding to October 27”
* An exhibit that highlights student voices in response to the shooting and its aftermath
* 3702 Wesley W. Posvar Hall
* Oct. 27
* 5-6 p.m.: Pittsburgh Jewish Community Public Memorial Service
* Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum
* Oct. 31
* 5-7 p.m.: “Education after Auschwitz: Levinas, Jewish Education and the Crisis of Humanism,” lecture by Claire Katz, Texas A&M University
* 501 Cathedral of Learning
* Nov. 2
* 7:30-8:30 p.m.: Jewish Studies ProgramMini Course: Memorials & the Future of the Holocaust
* 332 Cathedral of Learning
* Nov. 3
* 9 a.m-5 p.m.: Jewish Studies ProgramMini Course: Memorials & the Future of the Holocaust
* 1500 Wesley W. Posvar Hall
* Nov. 10-11
* Anti-Semitism, Hate and Social Responsibility Conference
* Rodef Shalom Congregation, 4905 Fifth Ave.
* Nov. 15
* The Art of Itinerancy: Yiddish Theater and the Performance of Migration: a talk with Debra Caplan from Baruch College
* 602 Cathedral of Learning
Fourth Sunday of Lent // Laetare Sunday“Lest We Forget” // A Sermon by Fr. Sammy WoodJoshua 4.19-24, 5.9-12Psalm 34II Corinthians 5.17-21Luke 5.11-32
☩ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
As we often do at the start of a sermon, let’s take a moment to get our bearings — Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent, and it’s called “Laetare,” from the first line of our opening prayer on this day, a quotation of Isa 66.10, “rejoice, Jerusalem.” Today is an invitation to joy — more than an invitation, really; rejoice is in the imperative. Laetare Sunday comes mid-Lent, halfway between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and it commands us to rejoice! The rose vestments — in the penitential Lent season we use violet (among other things, it’s the color of a bruise), but feast days are typically white, and “rose” falls kind of in-between on this in-between day. When we leave here today, we are entering “Deep Lent,” the most solemn season of our liturgical year, so Mother Church, in her tradition, puts in this particular odd Sunday as a kind of speed bump, to say to us: “Rejoice” — and slow down, take a breath and relax our Lenten disciplines for a day. Oh, and while you’re doing that, remember.
Remember. God, it seems, has always known that ours is a forgetful race. The locus classicus for our forgetfulness is Deut. 8, where Moses warns the Israelites of the danger that, when they come into the promised land, they will forget who got them there. “Beware,” Moses says, “lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth . . . remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth . . . and if you forget the Lord your God . . . you will surely die.” (Deut. 8.17-19) We’re prone to forgetfulness. So we’ve always reached for all sorts of tactile things as reminders. Here at the Advent we make crosses from our palms on Palm Sunday, then their ashes remind us that we’re mortal. We wash feet so we don’t forget Jesus taught us to be servants. We write on our doorposts, we cross ourselves, we kneel when we pray — all because we’re so quick to forget who we are and all God’s done for us. That’s why God built into the life of his people all the cycles in the bible in the first place — a 7-day cycle and a monthly one; annual cycles of feasts and fasts; a cycle of Sabbath years; and even a 50-year cycle of Jubilee years. All “lest we forget.”
I confess — I steal rocks. My kids know this — they’ve watched me do it for years. Rocks are all over our house. Rocks from family vacations to Maine and even day trips to Walden Pond. I was a little paranoid flying back from our trip to Israel two years ago because I had a whole bag of rocks — afraid I would get stopped at the airport in Tel Aviv for looting national treasures. One is from a monastery carved into the side of the mountain where tradition says Jesus was tempted by the devil.
Another I pinched from the little village of Bethany where Mary and Martha lived, and where Jesus raised their brother Lazarus from the dead. I have rocks from Mt. Carmel, Masada, the Temple Mount. I wanted to remember those places. God gave the Jews eat the Passover meal, and we have feasts, and fasts, and cycles, and — one more thing — we build monuments of stone, lest we forget.
So on this Sunday of slowing down, breathing deep, and remembering — we read about stones in Joshua, and I want to look at that reading together and to come at it in three moves.(1) The setup(2) The sign(3) The savior
First — the setup: We have to go all the way back to Exodus to set up this story. Because it all started when Moses led Israel out of Egypt, out of slavery, through the Red Sea, toward the promised land of Canaan. He sent 12 men to spy out the land, but ten of them were terrified of the people who lived there — “giants,” they called them — so they wrote up a bad report about the land, and all the people of Israel complained, they “grumbled” against Moses and against God: Why didn’t we just die in Egypt? Or even out here in the wilderness! We want a recall election — let’s just pick another leader and go back to Egypt! (Num. 14) So God made them wander 40 years, until every man who had grumbled against him died — not a single adult male in Israel would see Canaan except Joshua and Caleb, who hadn’t been afraid and had trusted God from the beginning.
Now to our story today. It’s 40 years on — Moses is dead, all the grumblers are dead, and Joshua, the very same Joshua, is set to lead Israel through the Jordan River, the last remaining obstacle between them and the promised land. And here are God’s marching orders: Take twelve men from the tribes of Israel, from each tribe a man. And when the soles of the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the Lord . . . rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters . . . shall be cut off from flowing, and the waters coming down from above shall stand in one heap. (Josh. 3.12-13) Oh, and one more thing — God says take 12 stones from the riverbed and lay them down where you sleep your first night in the promised land. That’s the set-up.
Point two is The sign – Why? Why did Go tell them to commit the sort of petty larceny I commit when I visit a national park? So they would remember. God said, “When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord . . . . [T]hese stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.” (Josh. 4.6-7) The stones were a sign, a memorial to what God did in bringing them through the water.
Bringing them through the water . . .Lest We Forget Remembrance Day Quotes
That had to strike a chord, forgetful though they were. God had brought them through the water. Not once, but twice! Remember the Red Sea — Israel followed Moses through on dry ground, before the waters closed back over Pharaoh and his pursuing army. And now God brings them through the Jordan into the land he had promised to give them.
Now, when God does something not once, but twice, pay attention. Over time, the story of God bringing his people through water became more than a story. For one thing, it was a synecdoche — a literary device where a part represents the whole. Joshua wasn’t just telling them to remember this one day, this one great miracle God did when he dried up the river for them to cross. He wanted them to remember all that God had done for them — the slavery, the Exodus, the wilderness, the manna, the water, the Jordan, and home. And a second thing this story did was to become a “type” — a prefigurement or foreshadowing, something that happened once but the meaning kept unfolding over centuries. Over time this story, like the Red Sea, came to foreshadow baptism — God saved Israel by bringing them safely through the water, just as he saved you through the waters of baptism.
Last point: The Savior – The whole point is to get us to this: All these themes are swirling around us — water, baptism, the Jordan — you may remember we read just a few Sundays ago about Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan. We went there on our pilgrimage (I’ve got the rock to prove it). All these themes, all these stories, they are crying out to us: Remember! God knows we are forgetful — he doesn’t beat us up about it, he just builds in reminders lest we forget.
These are our monuments, reminders of the “historical watershed” events that brought humanity salvation — and Jesus, like Joshua, left us something to remember him by. On the night before he died for us, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to his friends. “This is my body,” he said. “Whenever you eat this, remember me.”
On Rose Sunday, we have a moment — a moment to take a breath and to remember. Remember God doesn’t love us because we’re so good at Lent. God doesn’t love us because we’re good at all. Remember we were slaves, not just in Egypt but to the brokenness of our world and the inevitability of death, but he carried us out. We were lost, wandering in the wilderness, but he found us — and he carried us up the mountain of his temptation, into the Garden of Gethsemane, up the hill to the temple for trial, and to Calvary under the weight of his cross. He brought us through water. And he calls us to this altar. To take his body on our tongues. To carry those memories, like stones in our pockets, lest we forget all he’s done for us.
☩ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.Lest We Forget Canada
Source: Robert L. Hubbard, Jr., Joshua (TNIVAC) (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2009): 169-70.Lest We Forget 2020
Audio for this sermon is available at http://bit.ly/24KrWJE
Download here: http://gg.gg/of2h7
https://diarynote.indered.space
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