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I don't want to sound too melodramatic, but the truth is there was a time when I felt like Psalm 25 was saving my life.

Remember Not, Remember Me, Re-Member Me - Psalm 25; I Corinthians 12 - July 13, 2008 ­Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

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            I don't want to sound too melodramatic, but the truth is there was a time when I felt like Psalm 25 was saving my life. It was at what almost surely was my lowest point - a time that I was filled with regret, despair, and loneliness. I don't recall what drew me to the 25th Psalm, but it was a gift from God. God used those words to begin healing; and for months I turned to them with something like desperation. And the healing took place around three applications of one word: remember. So this morning I'd like to share with you those three applications that are very personal to me, but which I think are critical for all of us. They are: remember not; remember me; and re-member me.

            Let's start with 'remember not.' We all can give thanks this morning that there are critical areas of our lives where God is willing to forget. The writer of the 25th Psalm prays for this. It's verse 7 of Psalm 25, and I offer it in the words of the King James Version I learned as a boy in Sunday School: "Remember not the sins of my youth." We can give thanks this morning that God is willing to forget our sins.

            In fact, often God has the ability to forget them better than we do. In Paul Thomas Anderson's movie Magnolia, there is an elderly man who is under nursing care in the last hours of his life. And he is in anguish - not because of physical pain, but because of the reliving in his mind of the way he treated the people dearest to him - cheating on his wife; neglecting his son. His language is rougher than I can repeat, but he speaks through the haze of his pain-killing drugs over and over again about the awful burden of regret.

Regret is one of the deep, deep crosses we can carry through life. Someone has said that the hardest tears to bear are the ones we caused. And I believe it's true: the 'sins of our youth' can be almost unbearable at times. I've always thought that one of the most poignant characters in the Bible was Lot's wife. You may remember the story in Genesis - Lot and his family lived in Sodom, the most sinful city. And God rained judgment down on Sodom and destroyed it. But thanks to the intercession of Abraham, Lot and his family were given the chance to escape before the city was destroyed. The instructions were that they would escape to safety as long as they didn't turn around and look back. But Lot's wife was unable to do it - she looked back, and was turned into a pillar of salt.

            And part of our undoing is the looking back - the sins of our youth. The tears that we caused.  The regret that haunts us. If that's all there was to it, life would be bad news.

            But praise God, there is good news - in fact, there is wonderful news. At the heart of our faith is the strong, strong assurance of forgiveness. We pray, Remember not the sins of our youth, and God responds to our prayer with the forgiving grace of Jesus. And so we can embrace the reality that through the grace of God our sins are forgiven. But it's even more than that. In the words of the great Methodist hymn-writer Charles Wesley, in his hymn "O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing," God 'breaks the power of cancelled sin.' Our sin is not only forgiven, it no longer has power over us. We don't have to carry it around with us anymore. We don't have to live a 'looking back' kind of life. We can carry the lessons; we can carry the humility and the wisdom, and yes, we still are sorry. But regret doesn't need to be a crippling load - if we are repentant, God is willing to forget the sins of our youth, and that is the first step in helping us to deal with healing and restitution and reconciliation, wherever those things become possible.

            There are people here who quietly carry around regrets and haunting memories. The 25th psalm invites us to give them to God, and Jesus died to break the power of those thoughts over our lives. We can't rewrite the past; but God is willing to co-author a beautiful future. Remember not the sins of my youth.

            But remember me, says Psalm 25. Verse 7 in full reads, "Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions, (but) according to your steadfast love, remember me." That's pretty bold, when you think about it: God, all that sin stuff - just look past that. But while you're doing that, don't throw out the whole person. Remember me. You made me. I haven't lived up to what you had in mind. But don't forget me. If you forget me, then I'm really in trouble.

            Isn't this, too, one of the burdens we carry around sometimes - the fear that we've been forgotten - that our lives don't count - that we are insignificant in the universe? We might think that is a modern problem - now that there are over six billion people, and now that atheism is an open option, it seems more likely to find people who are convinced that their tiny, miniscule lives mean nothing. What is one life among billions?

            But back in the 2nd century, the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote that human beings are a 'pinpoint in infinite time, a knife-edge between two eternities,' 'smoke and nothingness,' and that human achievement is 'a bird flying past, vanished before we can grasp it.' In the 16th century, a character in a Shakespeare play referred to human life as 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' That thinking about the insignificance of human life has been around forever.

            No wonder human beings have been seen so often as expendable. No wonder a group of Israeli soldiers would take a Palestinian youth and strap him to the windshield of their tank as a human shield; no wonder expectant mothers in Britain would abort children because of a cleft palate, or mothers in America do the same thing because the child was- the unpreferred gender; no wonder Toni Morrison, in one of her novels, could write about an African-American boy who drowned by accident, but then was put into a sack and tossed on the back of a truck and forgotten about for two days. We live in a world where a human life can seem insignificant, so how we treat each human life can begins to feel like no big deal. It is amazing to me that when you see reports about how many Iraqis have died in the current war, the number can be anywhere from 30 thousand to 300 thousand. How can that be? Isn't anybody counting? Doesn't every single one of those thousands who have died have an identity? A significance? A loved one?

            I believe so, every one. "But now thus says the Lord," (this is the beginning of Isaiah 43), "he who created you ... he who formed you ... Do not fear for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine." That's the promise of a God who remembers - remembers everyone he has made. Whatever conspires in this world to persuade us that we are forgotten, that we don't matter, that we are just a pinpoint in infinite time - the one who formed you remembers. Calls you by name. Didn't make no junk. Sends his Son to die so that you might live. Remembers not the sins of your youth - but remembers you with a passion that goes beyond life itself.

            And then one thing more. God also re-members you. For that, we turn to I Corinthians 12, one of the great images in the Bible - the body of Christ. When people are united by a common faith in Christ, says the apostle Paul, they become members of a great Body - the body of Christ. Christ is the head of the Body; the Holy Spirit is like the life-giving, connecting blood that flows through the Body; but we are the members - the hands, the eyes, the voice, the feet - every one of us an essential part. We affirm that in our church mission statement: The Cicero United Methodist Church is a caring Body of Christ, open to all, working together to discover, teach, and carry out God's will.

            But we live in a very individualistic time. People today are taught to figure things out for themselves; to be their own person; to look out for Number One; to be distrustful of institutions (or, as some say, 'organized religion.'). All that may be well and good to a degree; but what we end up eventually, is so disconnected from each other. We forget how to trust each other; how to share truth with love; how to be intimate; how to reconcile our differences; we walk away from each other when the going gets rough instead of hanging in there for the closeness that can only come through rough going.

Psalm 25, I think, hints at this as well, in verse 16: 'Turn to me,' prays the psalmist, 'and be gracious unto me, for I am lonely and afflicted.' And it seems to me that the way God answers that prayer of loneliness is to re-member us. In other words, to re-connect us, and teach us once again how to be members of each other - connected together as part of the body of Christ.

            Jesus was walking by, and there in the crowd was a woman who had had a bleeding disease for years - she was physically and socially outcast. But she thought, 'If I can only touch his garment, I can be healed.' And sure enough, she touched the hem, and the disease left her. But she wasn't healed yet, not there in her private thoughts. Because she wasn't re-connected with others. So Jesus turned around, and said, 'Who touched me?" And he drew that woman out of the crowd, and there in front of the people who had forgotten her, walked by her in the marketplace, seen her as legally unclean - he said to her, 'Your faith has made you whole.' There was the healing, I believe - restoring her dignity, her place in society, re-membering her with others.

            There is no such thing as Lone Ranger faith in the Bible. We need times to ourselves - ­spending solitude with God is a critical part of spiritual renewal. But when all is said and done, faith is lived with other people. Any faith that tries to make it on its own, without connecting with the people of God in the Body of Christ, is not faith as God intended it.

            So, in addition to remembering not our sins, in addition to remembering each and every one of us as his beloved child, God re-members us in his Body, where we can be nurtured and challenged and magnified in our faith. It is a profoundly complete program of healing and salvation - two things God longs for for his children.

            We long for those things, don't we? Don't we carry around too many regrets for tears we have caused? Don't we struggle to believe that our lives matter in the whole scheme of seemingly endless time and universe? And don't we struggle to get along together in meaningful ways, and to hold onto faith together in life's lonely striving? Again and again the faith of the Bible leads us to moments of truth in life. Maybe this is one of them for you. Maybe you have been longing to embrace something real that can guide your life and give it meaning. Maybe your spirit feels a little tired, and your heart feels bruised by life. All of us feel that in some way. Here is a moment of truth. Standing before you is a Savior with open arms - willing to forgive your sinfulness, calling your name and remembering you for the beautiful creation you are, and eager to connect you to the true Church that is working to make disciples and transform this world for peace and justice. How will you respond to this offer of grace and healing and salvation?