Twenty years ago, I was part of a defense study trip to Central Europe. In Warsaw, we got to meet a member of Polish Parliament who later became President of Poland. In the 1980s, he’d been a contemporary of Lech Walesa and was part of the Solidarity movement that threw off communism. 

I asked him what was easier—to lead a revolution or to build a new democracy. He stopped and smiled. He said he’d been put in jail many times by the communists and thought he would die in prison. He never imagined that he would one day be leading a new government. 

One of his biggest challenges was meeting the expectations of young people who wanted the lifestyle of the west, but who had no real memory of socialism. He said his teenage daughter asked him, “What was socialism like?” His family had been on vacation in Ukraine, which was then still run by the socialists. His daughter noticed people standing in various lines, so he told her to stand in one of the lines and find out what it was for. When she got to the front of the line, a person put a piece of cheese in her hand. She came back to her dad holding the piece of cheese.

He told her, “Now you know what socialism was like.”

His point was this: If you don’t remember where you came from, how can you possibly know where you’re going? The lack of a shared memory—of the shared sense having overcome together—was causing the younger generation to be impatient.    

On the anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, it’s important to remember the event that shaped us a nation. We don’t just remember the terror of that day or the heroism it inspired.

We pause to remember the faithfulness of God. Because it’s the faithfulness of God that gives us hope. 

Over and over in the Bible, God called his people to remember.

In Genesis 9, after the great flood, God put a rainbow in the sky and told Noah that it would be a reminder to God of the everlasting covenant between God and all creation.  God didn’t need to be reminded. The rainbow was a reminder to humanity of God’s mercy and faithfulness. 

In Joshua 3, after the people of Israel had safely crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land, Joshua commanded that one man from each tribe take a stone from the riverbed and erect a memorial so future generations would remember how God had stopped the flow of water and got them safely across.

Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, gave his disciples the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, telling them that whenever they ate the bread and drank the wine they were to do so in remembrance of him.

When we baptize an infant, we’re to remember the vows of our own baptism, and how God is faithful, even when we’re helpless to help ourselves. 

In this church, we remember that we were once a frontier church. We remember how the men who founded this church first met in 1758 in the smoldering ruins of Fort Duquesne. 

We remember God’s faithfulness to us.

We remember the character of the God we worship. 

The God who weeps with us.

The God who suffers for us.