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[Silence] [Music] Speaking from the Third Reformed Church of Holland, Michigan, Dr. Bruce W. Thielman brings you a message on "Forgetting to Remember."

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I'd like to read from Genesis chapter 40. I'd like to read the entire chapter, beginning at the verse which is numbered 1. "Sometime after this, the butler of the king of Egypt and his baker offended their lord, the king of Egypt, and Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief butler and the chief baker,

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and he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard in the prison where Joseph was confined. The captain of the guard charged Joseph with them, and he waited on them, and they continued for some time in custody. And one night they both dreamed, the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined in the prison, each his own dream, and each dream with its own meaning.

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When Joseph came to them in the morning and saw them, they were troubled. So he asked Pharaoh's officers who were with him in custody in his master's house, 'Why are your faces downcast today?' They said to him, 'We have had dreams, and there is no one to interpret them.'

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And Joseph said to them, 'Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell them to me, I pray you.' So the chief butler told his dream to Joseph and said to him, 'In my dream there was a vine before me, and on the vine there were three branches.

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As soon as it budded, its blossoms shot forth, and the clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh's cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup and placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand.' Then Joseph said to him, 'This is its interpretation.

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The three branches are three days. Within three days Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your office, and you shall place Pharaoh's cup in his hand as formerly when you were his butler. But remember me when it is well with you,

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and do me the kindness, I pray you, to make mention of me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this place, for I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews. And here also I have done nothing that they should put me into the dungeon.' Now when the chief baker saw that the interpretation was favorable,

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he said to Joseph, 'I also had a dream. There were three cake baskets on my head, and in the uppermost basket there were all sorts of baked food for Pharaoh. But the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.'

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And Joseph answered, 'This is its interpretation. The three baskets are three days. Within three days Pharaoh will lift up your head from you, hanging you on a tree, and the birds will eat the flesh from you.'

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On the third day, which was Pharaoh's birthday, he made a feast for all his servants and lifted up the head of the chief butler and the head of the chief baker among his servants. He restored the chief butler to his butlership, and he placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand. But he hanged the chief baker, just as Joseph had interpreted to them.

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Yet the chief butler did not remember Joseph, but forgot him." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Will you pray with me? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. Last week was homecoming on our campus, and all the old grads were back. And homecoming is, of course, above all other things, a time to remember. Some of them walked down on our beautiful rainbow bridge and reminded themselves

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of the promises they had made together there years before. Some went to Room 116 in Calderwood Hall to find out if their initials were still carved in the tops of the desks. And they are. Some watched Professor Cooper, who has been directing the college choir for 38 years now,

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to see if he has lost any of his grace or power. And he has not. Some of the sorority girls were astonished to see how old their sisters had become, and also astonished to discover that the ties of sisterhood were still very real.

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And some came into the chapel and remembered with tears in their eyes that in that very room they had made decisions which had changed the course of their lives, not only for now, but for all eternity. Homecoming is a beautiful time of remembering.

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But tonight I want to talk to you for a little while about a man who forgot. Joseph is the only character in the Bible who, like the Lord Jesus, was betrayed three times. He was betrayed first of all by his brothers, who sold him into slavery. He was betrayed secondly by the wife of his owner, who first attempted to seduce him,

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and then when that failed, accused him of rape and had him unjustly incarcerated. And he was betrayed a third time by a friend in prison, who came to him one day and told him about a dream which was his. Now this friend was a butler to the Pharaoh,

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had a position of authority and responsibility in Pharaoh's household. And Joseph correctly interpreted the dream of this butler to the butler. And as the butler was released in accordance with Joseph's interpretation, Joseph said to him, "Remember me when it is well with you."

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That is, put in a good word for me with Pharaoh when the opportunity presents itself. Within three days this butler was at the Pharaoh's side. Within three days he was putting the cup into Pharaoh's hand. But the scripture notes he did not remember Joseph.

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He forgot him. Now it's a hard thing to be forgotten. I stand sometimes on campus by the student mailboxes and look at the expressions on the kids' faces as they walk away from those mailboxes.

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It's very easy to tell when they've received no mail, just the administrative clutter that often crowds those boxes. It's very easy to tell when someone's been forgotten. I think at first for Joseph there must have been a flaming hope,

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expecting every time he heard a footstep in the hall that the word was coming, that he had been released and that freedom was now his, and then the days passed by. And the hope began to burn very, very low.

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I suppose occasionally it would flare up. There would be a flicker of expectation when the lock was turned in the door, but then it would be some other matter, and finally that feeling must have crept over him,

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which he didn't want to entertain, but which nonetheless was there, a feeling of sickness, a feeling of being forgotten. Why, I wonder, did Joseph's friend forget him? Why did he forget to remember?

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And why do we forget to remember? Well, I would suggest as a first possibility that he forgot to remember Joseph simply because he was careless. Most of us don't spend much time developing the order of our memories.

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It's been about 30 years now since Dr. Wilder Penfield, a noted physician at the Montreal Neurological Institute, was performing a very delicate and exotic operation on a young girl who had serious epileptic problems.

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A local anesthesia had been applied to her head, an opening made in her skull, and electrodes were being placed in her brain in an attempt to locate exactly those fibers in the brain

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which were causing the epileptic disturbances. She was conscious during all of this. They discovered in the course of the operation that when the electrodes touched certain fibers in the brain,

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she would hear voices that actually had come far from the past, voices which she had heard years before, and she would respond as if she'd heard them at that very moment. She would see things which she had seen a long time before

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and that were not at all in the room. In other words, they discovered through that operation and hundreds and thousands of similar experiments conducted afterwards that our brains are very much like tape recorders

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and that quite literally everything we see, everything we taste, everything we smell, everything we touch, everything we hear is recorded here. None of it is forgotten.

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You have heard a person say, perhaps after going through a very traumatic experience, "Why, in that moment, my whole life flashed before my eyes." That might be very true.

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There is the very strong possibility that in moments of great, great crisis, there can be a sudden, perhaps, unwinding of the tape mechanism of the brain and all of the thoughts that have been recorded almost instantaneously flash beyond our consciousness.

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Now, we can't begin to explain this. We can't even control this. We have not learned how to call from this tape recorder every thought, everything we've seen or heard at precisely that moment

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when we want to be able to claim it. Some experts become very good at it. There are those who have developed mnemonic systems by which they can remember an amazing amount of material.

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I recall going to a banquet one night where a gentleman stood at the door and was introduced to 2,000 people. And when the banquet was over, he stood at the door and greeted everybody by name as they left

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and didn't make a single solitary mistake. There are people who have disciplined their memories to a remarkable degree, but most of us haven't recognized yet the goodness there is in a good memory. We minimize the importance of memory, and by doing that,

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we lose part of our dignity as 20th century personalities. Because, you see, physiologically and intellectually, we're really not much different from man thousands of years ago. The man who lived during the period of the last Ice Age

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was not, insofar as his mental and physical equipment was concerned, much different from us. That which distinguishes us principally from him is this. We are able to situate ourselves in space and in time.

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We have a sense of history which he did not have. He had no consciousness of yesterday, and so no expectation for tomorrow. Life for him was just the day that he was living. His life was like a candle flame that came out of the dark

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and was going into the dark, and that sputtering flame, that instant of light, was all there was to it. But we understand ourselves to have had a history, to be, in fact, part of a great procession that is marching throughout history,

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each one carrying our own light. And we can become a part of that procession. We can become an agent in history. And because we can remember what is before,

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we can have hopes and expectations about what is ahead. This is what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls "the enlarging of the personality." We can have within us the wholeness of history,

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right in our own soul. It's part of our dignity as men. And this is one of the reasons why the Bible places such great stress upon remembering. Throughout the Old Testament, the verb "zachar," "to remember,"

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is one of the strongest and most frequently emphasized verbs. "Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth." "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits." We are called again and again and again to remember

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because memory gives to us a sense of continuity. It gives to us a sense of importance. It emphasizes our place in the scheme of things. And God would have us know that.

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Now, I'm ready to admit that memory is a very ambiguous thing. Memory can bring to us all kinds of different feelings and reactions. What is it that testifies to the reality of a well-stored mind? What is it that can bring to you instantly the happiness of yesterday,

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even though you're unhappy today? What is it that can bring your friends to you when you're quite alone, or when you're in the midst of a crowd, can take you to some place of quietness? What is it that can bring back to you your hopes and your dreams,

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even at a time when all challenge and all ambition seems to have left your life? What is it that has in it such a capacity to be affectionate that it can leap time and space and even go beyond death itself, still loving? What is it that moves more quickly than my words can describe it?

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What is it that is the name of the angel with the backward look? Well, it's memory, of course. But also, what is it that can sear your conscience and shame your spirit? What is it that can give you sleepless nights and poison even the brightest day?

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What is it that you cannot bribe or buy or force in any way to keep quiet? What is it that, like a ghost, can put a chilling hand on you in a moment when you'd like to know some warm satisfaction? What is it that you can't guard against or build a barrier to prevent?

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What is it that can rob you of the happiness of the moment? What's the name of the angel with the flaming sword? The name of that angel, too, is memory. Our memories can comfort us or chill us.

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They can warm us or warn us, but whatever they do, they constitute for us blessing. They are a gift of God. They are that which gives to us our sense of place in history. And they give us, because of that sense of place, an ability to see things as they are.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn says in Volume I of the Gulag Archipelago, "We too readily forget, and to forget makes us easy prey for liars." That's true. When you forget the lessons of history, the lessons of your own experience,

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the lessons of the experience of other people, you can easily be deluded by those who will offer you promises of the moment that will not stand up against the test of the indisputable evidence of what has already been. And that evidence is presented by memory.

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I remember 35 years ago, going to the movies on Saturday afternoons to watch Henry Fonda play Frank James, the brother of Jesse James. You remember, they were the famous bank robbers from out West. And the stories were always presented in such a way that the James brothers turned out to be

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a kind of a 1940 version of Robin Hood and his merry men. They were always taking from the rich in order to give to the poor. There was a lesson there, a lesson which we've carried down in our society ever since the Robin Hood legends and before.

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Those legends are over 900 years old. The lesson is that sometimes you have to go outside the law to protect justice. I learned that at that time. That's become part of my memory.

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That's been built into me. It's still there. It's still very much a part of me. Now, five years ago, Henry Fonda's son, Peter Fonda, made a movie called Easy Rider.

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And in that movie, he and another fellow get on their bicycles, and they ride off their motorcycles, and they ride off down the road, and they cut all their ties with the past. They go easy riding.

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They forget about all of their yesterdays. They cut all of their connections. They want no memory. Fonda is known in the movie as Captain America,

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and the climax of the movie comes when Captain America, high on drugs, climbs up into the arms of a great stone female statue meant to represent Columbia, America. And there he begins weeping as he stretched out in her arms. And as you see the picture, suddenly the camera moves over

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and shows you a parochial school next door, and you hear the voices of little children reciting the Hail Mary. And then the picture jumps back to the man in the arms of the stone figure, and so there's brought to your consciousness immediately Michelangelo's Pietà,

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Mary holding Christ in her arms. So here is America holding Captain America. Here is the church holding the believer. And all the while, this sobbing creature, this one who has been easy riding,

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this one who's cut himself off from everything that is in the past and has opted for a world which is without relationship to what has been, he lies there crying out, "I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you."

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Lost, confused, no roots in his country, no anchors in his faith. The road opened, but the road opened to nothing. He says, "I love you. I hate you." And he doesn't know the meaning of either,

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because he said goodbye to his memory. Well, it was very hard on Joseph to be forgotten. But I would suggest to you that it was harder on Joseph's friend, on the man who did the forgetting.

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Because when we say goodbye to our history, we say goodbye in part to our dignity, but we stand alone, and we are prey for liars. But let's look at a second possibility.

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It may very well be that the butler forgot Joseph, not because he was careless, but because he was selfish. Joseph's request was, "Remember me when things are well with you." And the butler's response, as it is recorded in Scripture, is,

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"And he forgot Joseph and did not remember him." That may not have been an act of mnemonic sloppiness. It may have been that the butler became so involved in the affairs of Pharaoh's court, so excited by all the glamour of that place,

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feeling once again all the power and the prestige of his office, so caught up in that, so looking at the world through eyeglasses, that he forgot altogether about his friend. The psychologists tell us, you see, that we remember best by a process of association.

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And they tell us further that the most effective associations are personal ones. When you can associate things with things that relate to you personally, you will remember them more effectively. That's the reason you remember your own birthday better than you remember the birthdays of other people.

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And it may very well be that this man was caught up so much in his own life, so much in personal associations, that he forgot his responsibility toward Joseph. This speaks to me very much in terms of our time. Let me illustrate it this way.

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We're all very conscious of the fact that we're living in the midst of a tremendous knowledge explosion. The fact has been over-illustrated. We know that our levels of knowledge are advancing so rapidly that it's almost impossible for even the most sophisticated computers to keep up with them.

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We know more than any people have ever known before. The tragedy is that we have become so fascinated with our own knowledge, so caught up in associating that with which we have discovered and which we have labeled, that we've tended to forget all of the knowledge that existed before we ever appeared on the scene.

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We've made the mistake of believing that because we have learned a lot, everything that was learned before we came along may now be unlearned. We suffer from a disease we might call "neolatry," the worship and adoration of the new. You remember when Paul went to Athens, he talked about it, he said they were always seeking after some new thing.

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We suffer from the Athenian syndrome. And that might have been what happened to the butler. Caught up in all the newness of the experience of Pharaoh's court, he forgets his old friend, Joseph.

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[ding] Please turn your cassette to the other side. [silence] The fact of the matter is, of course, that truth never dies of old age.

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Truth never dies of old age. I'm on a college campus, so I talk about sex about seven days a week. And you know, when I seek to suggest to the students some of those things which I think are true about sex, and when I go to the Bible and to other sources from yesterday,

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they are very prone to say to me that I am somehow Victorian. That's the suggestion, you see. We've got new modern ideas about sex now. We don't have to be concerned about the rules and regulations and suggestions of yesterday.

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We're smarter than that. That's all Victorian. And every time I hear them say that, I remember that passage in 1 Corinthians 5. You remember the Corinthians wrote to Paul, and they told him they had a problem of incest in the church. And Paul responds with some counsel.

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And he doesn't give any rules and regulations about sex in that fifth chapter of 1 Corinthians. What he says is this. "You are arrogant. You are boastful. You are so caught up in the conceit of your own ideas

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that you think you can cast aside the law of God which was laid down before you were. Any person who lives that way should be cast out from the midst of you." There's nothing different about sex today than there was in the days of the Greeks, to the Persians, to the Babylonians, to the Romans.

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They all thought they had new approaches to the subject which made all prior responsibilities and requirements no longer necessary. And every one of those civilizations has died, and their perversions of the truth and the beauty of sex contributed to their deaths.

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And I know they're dead because I've walked through their ruins. And today we read Masters and Johnson and Kinsey, and all they do is essentially give us reports of the way most people behave. And we somehow accept this as new truth, as if moral law is decided by majority vote.

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And what the Apostle Paul says to that kind of thinking is, "Get rid of it. It's arrogant and boastful." The two most sophisticated civilizations on the face of the earth today are undoubtedly the Jewish and the Chinese.

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They've lived longer than any other civilizations. Our little civilization here is as nothing when measured against the length of the Jewish or the Chinese civilization. And basic to both of those civilizations has been a strong moral law

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rigorously and vigorously defended. And part of that moral law has been sexual purity. So I say to our college kids when they tell me I'm Victorian that I'm really Jewish or Chinese.

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They come periodically and say, "We ought to change our visitation rules on campus." Now, we're rather rigid on that subject. We don't have coeducational dormitories. As a matter of fact, we only have a few hours a week

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when we allow the girls to go into the boys' dorms, and only a few hours a year when we allow the boys to go into the girls' dorms. Why? Because we understand that a young man today is the same as a young man 2,000 years ago,

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and a young woman today is the same as a young woman of 2,000 years ago. And when you put a young man and a young woman in a room, and you lock the door, and you turn down the lights, and you turn up the music, and the principal article of furniture in the room is a bed,

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they are not going to sit there and discuss philosophy. They're not even going to talk about the World Series. They're going to do those things which-- it always surprises me when people say, "She got pregnant."

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Or, tragically, "She had to have an abortion." Why are they surprised by that? That's almost inevitable under circumstances of that kind. When we cast aside all the moral injunctions,

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all the law which has been handed down to us in Scripture, all that which has been discovered by the generations that have lived before us, and just throw it out the window because it is of yesterday, so utterly fascinated by our ideas of today.

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When kids come to us with their new learning about sex, and lay it out in some way that we're supposed to bow down and adore it, and reject all that has come before, well, I want to remind them of what Aristotle said.

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Aristotle said that old people have a very short future and a very long past. As a result, they don't have much hope, but they have a great deal of memory. On the other hand, he said young people have a very long future and a very short past, so they have a great deal of hope, but they don't have much remembrance.

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Wisdom, he says, comes when you combine the two. When youth are able to give to age hope for whatever time they have left, and age is able to give to youth the gift of that which they have already seen. That's what we need to say to these kids,

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when they become so fascinated with their knowledge, so self-focused, that they forget to remember. I was in Palm Springs, California. I had a throat infection. I wasn't allowed to talk.

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So I was going to a lot of movies. And I went one night to see the Franco Zepparelli production of Romeo and Juliet. I think it was one of the greatest films I've ever seen. It was the play Romeo and Juliet, just as Shakespeare wrote it.

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I mean, there was no change in the script. It was in his dialogue exactly as he wrote it. It was magnificently done. I noticed when I got into the theater that the row in front of me was filled with junior high girls.

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And I thought to myself, uh-oh, this is not going to be a good experience. Well, I was wrong. They got totally engrossed in the movie. There wasn't a sound out of them.

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Then the film was over and the lights went up too quickly because I was still drying my eyes. You know, reader, I would have thee know, there is no sadder tale of woe than that of Juliet and her Romeo. And I stood at the head of the aisle and I held the people behind me back

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so these junior high girls could pass in front. And as they passed in front, one of them turned and looked at me. And then she turned to the little girl next to her and she said, "Why is it that all of these old people come to see our movie?"

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And Shakespeare was written 375 years ago. But you see, what Shakespeare had to say about love and what he had to say about the attraction of a young boy and a young girl and what he had to say about generational conflict was true.

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And so it hasn't died. What dies is the disease of topicality. What dies is to live so much in your foreground that you forget your background. How insufferably arrogant for them to suggest,

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even in that simple sentence from a little girl who probably didn't realize what she was saying, that it was her movie. Sure it was her movie, but it's my movie and your movie and it belongs to all of us because truth belongs to all of us.

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But that truth is lost when we become so caught up in our own ideas, so focused on ourselves selfishly, eyeglasses, that we forget the wisdom that has gone before. I think it's interesting to notice that the most famous person

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that Pharaoh's butler ever knew was Joseph, and he forgot him. He became fascinated instead with Pharaoh, and today nobody knows that Pharaoh's name. He lost himself in the service of that Pharaoh.

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I say lost himself because you see nobody knows Joseph's friend's name either. Let me make one last suggestion and then I'm done. It may also be that the reason that the butler forgot Joseph was that he was afraid to remember him.

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Sigmund Freud has taught us that there are some memories we have which are so ugly and unpleasant that we deliberately repress or bury them. There are some things we don't want to recall, and it may be that this butler, thinking back on his one experience in jail,

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found that such an unpleasant and such a traumatic remembrance that he deliberately pushed it down into his unconscious, and when it got pushed down, Joseph was pushed down with it. If that is what happened, well, we can understand it,

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but it's still very sad, for the fact of the matter is that we oft times learn our greatest lessons from our most painful experiences. It has always been an amazement and a wonder to me

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that the Church doesn't focus more on the horrible blunders it made in the Crusades when it spilt gallons of blood and profited not at all. I don't know why we in the Church don't talk more about how we have at times stood in the way of truth,

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rejected and repudiated men like Galileo Galilei who were at the very forefront of the developing consciousness of man. The Church sometimes has stood against them. I think we need to remember that.

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I think the Church ought to call to its own attention and the attention of the world periodically that we not only approved of slavery for a long time, we actually used religion to help to enslave the minds of black people.

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And I think we need also to call to our attention that there has been generation after generation in the history of the Church that has been careful not to say anything against the wishes of the affluent lest the collection plates be somehow emptied.

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Now, we are all conscious of the sin of the Church. We all understand that you can't belong to the Church until you acknowledge that you are a sinner and therefore the Church must be of necessity full of sin.

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I find that not at all surprising. What surprises me is that we seek to repress the fact that we do not acknowledge as openly as we should that which is part of the ugliness of our past.

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I will confess to you, I am amazed how any person could read the words of Jesus, "They that take the sword will perish by the sword and then go off on a crusade."

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I don't understand how someone can read the word of Jesus that we shall know the truth and it's the truth that will set us free and then drive Galileo to his knees. I don't understand how you can read

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"God created man in his image and then put men in chains." I don't understand how we can read the scriptures and say "Woe to you who lie on beds of ivory and pander to all the wishes of the rich."

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I don't understand these things unless, unless, it's because, it's because we refuse to acknowledge these things have happened in our past and so stumble again and again and again into them in our present.

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See, I believe that 200 years from now, if our Lord has not yet come, that the Christians alive then are going to look back at this century and they're going to say,

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"How in the world could those Christians have lived then in the abundance and the affluence which was theirs, while 3 billion people were living in absolute poverty, in serious malnutrition,

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not only people outside of Christ but brothers in Christ." I think people are going to say 200 years from now, they read the Song of Mary when he was born, that he came to free the poor.

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They knew his claiming parables in which he said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of my brethren, ye have done it to me." They were fully conscious of these things and yet still,

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they lived in abundance, while their brothers in Christ and others whom they claimed to want to win to Christ, were allowed to go to bed every night if they had a bed, starving.

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They'll wonder about it. Just like I wonder about yesterday. I'll answer their question at the same time that I answer my own. You can do it only if you repress the ugly reality of your own sin

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and the situation of which you are a part. You can do it only if you decide that it's easier to forget Joseph than to deal with him. That might have been what the butler did.

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Just what we so often do. If the psychologists are right, that the best way to remember is by association, and if the best associations are personal ones,

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and let's try just for a moment to make some personal associations with these people in the world who we so readily forget. Let's take your house, for example. What would we have to do to your house

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to make it like their houses so you would remember them? The first thing we have to do is remove all of the furniture, all of it, television, tables, beds, chairs, blankets, curtains, drapes, everything, gone. We would leave you with one table, one chair, and one blanket.

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The blanket would have a hole in it. The second thing we'd have to do is go to your cupboards and take away all the clothing, everything. Every member of the family may keep one outfit,

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provided it's the poorest outfit that they have. They may not keep shoes, however. There may be only one pair of shoes, and it belongs to the father. Now we'll go to the kitchen.

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All the appliances and things are already gone, so we go to the cupboards and we remove all of the food, every bit of it. All that is left is perhaps a bowl of dried beans, a little bit of sugar, a little bit of flour.

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No meat, no fresh vegetables, no canned goods, no candy. There's some moldy potatoes in the garbage can. We don't throw those out. We'll have those for dinner tonight. Now we cut off all water into the house,

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and we cut off all electricity into the house. And then having done that, we knock the house down altogether, because you wouldn't be living in a house like that. You'd be living like a tool shed out in the backyard.

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So we'll shift the scene to the tool shed. Now we have no magazines, and we have no newspapers. It doesn't make any difference because most of us are illiterate. We have no mail service, and we have no fire department.

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The nearest clinic, not hospital, but clinic, is ten miles away, and you don't have a car. You're lucky if somebody in your neighborhood has a bicycle. The nearest school is three miles away, and it has two rooms.

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And the total savings of your family amount to slightly less in terms of hard cash than $5. Two billion people in the world are living exactly like that. And we find it very easy to forget to remember them.

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I was struck with something earlier this week. I was reading again Jesus' parable of Divies and Lazarus. You remember the parable. Divies is the rich man, Lazarus is the poor man at his gate.

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Lazarus dies, and he goes to heaven. Divies dies, and he goes to hell. And in hell, he turns and he addresses heaven, and he asks to be released from his torment.

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I'm sure you're all familiar with that story. You've read it over dozens of times, and you could complete the story, I'm sure. But something struck me in that story this week that had never struck me before.

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I can't get it out of my mind. Do you remember the first words that are addressed to Divies there in hell, this rich man who was there? Do you remember the first words that are addressed to him from heaven?

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The first words are these. "My son, remember." Remember! There's no reference to fire and brimstone because you can't burn a soul.

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But there is reference to memory because memory can sear, and memory can burn to the very center of a soul. And what is being said here is that our memories can be the agents that will call us to the place where we will confront those things

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we must confront for Jesus' sake, that we must not refuse to remember. There's a whole world lying at our gate, and heaven cries to us, "Remember!"

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I was on a safari a couple of years ago, and we were pretty far out in the bush, and our bearers one day refused to go any farther. It wasn't a strike, it was just a kind of a gentle protest.

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And when we asked them why, they said, "Well, we've gone so fast the last few days, we have to rest a few hours to give our souls time to catch up with us." Not a bad idea, is it?

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Maybe we need to give ourselves time for our souls to catch up with us, to get beyond our careless indifference to others, to get beyond our ignoring the truth of yesterday as we get caught up in the fad truth of today,

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to give ourselves in service to a world that so desperately needs that service. Maybe we all need to go to the cross. Did you ever think about the fact that on the cross there was a thief who turned to Jesus and said,

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"Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom"? That's not much different from what Joseph said, is it? "Remember me when things are well with you." "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom."

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And Jesus, who never forgot, said, "This day thou shalt be with me in paradise." He can cleanse our memories. He can make them whole.

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He can sanctify them. He, by his grace, can so change us that we will never forget to remember again. So let it be.

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