Think of the word "remember." It doesn't mean in English what it means in Hebrew. What "remember" means in Hebrew we shall grasp more readily if we think first of the difference between Hebrew and English meanings of the word "forget." To forget, in English, is simply to have an idea or notion slip out of the mind. To forget a person is simply no longer to have the idea of that person in one's consciousness. But in the Hebrew bible to forget someone is to annihilate that person, obliterate him, destroy him. When the Israelites cried to God not to forget them they didn't mean, "Be sure to think of us once in a while." They meant, "Don't destroy us, don't annihilate us, don't blot us out!" It's obvious that to forget, in Hebrew, has to do not with ideas but with living realities.

In the same manner to remember has to do not with recollecting notions but with living realities. In a word, to remember, Hebraically, is to bring a past event up into the present so that what happened in the past is the operative reality of the present. To say the same thing differently: to remember is to bring a past event up into the present so that what happened then continues to happen now. What unfolded back then, altering forever those whom it touched, is to be operative now, altering forever those who "remember" it now. When the Israelites are urged to remember the deliverance from slavery of their foreparents centuries earlier they aren't being urged chiefly to recollect a historical fact; they are being urged to live the same reality themselves hundreds of years later. Just as their foreparents knew most intimately a great deliverance at God's hand, together with the gratitude and the obedience which that deliverance quickened, so they are now to know most intimately a similar deliverance at God's hand, together with a similar gratitude and a similar obedience.

Think of the words found chiselled into the communion tables of most churches: "This do in remembrance of me." Jesus uttered these words at the last supper. When he spoke them he didn't mean, "Think of me every now and then. Specifically, whenever you celebrate the Lord's Supper with bread and wine, pause for a kindly thought about me." What good is merely thinking about our Lord? When he spoke these words he meant (he is Jewish, after all), "My sin-bearing death is your salvation. As often as you eat and drink at the Lord's Supper make my sin-bearing death the operative reality of your life now so that my forgiveness of you characterizes your life."

This is very different from the way we speak of remembering today. When we remember we merely bring to mind the idea or notion of an event. But when our Hebrew foreparents spoke of remembering they meant something far stronger; they meant that what had happened in the past continued to be a present, operative, life-altering reality.

I: -- Over and over the Hebrew bible insists that God remembers. God remembers his covenant; God remembers his holy promise; God remembers his steadfast love; God remembers his mercy. All of these items ultimately amount to the same thing. God's covenant is his bond with us. Of his own grace and truth God has bound himself to his people. He will never quit on us out of weariness or give up on us out of frustration or spurn us out of disgust. He has pledged himself to us. To be sure, his gracious pledge to us aims at forging in us our grateful pledge to him; as he binds himself to us we are to bind ourselves to him. Nevertheless, even though we break our covenant with him he never breaks his covenant with us. Our gratitude to him may be -- it is -- as fitful as our moods; nonetheless, his graciousness towards us is unvarying.

The psalmist tells us too that God remembers his holy promise. His covenant is his promise, and because he "remembers" it his promise remains operative no matter what.

And since the God whose promise is forever operative is the God whose nature is a fountain of effervescing love, the psalmist maintains that God remembers his steadfast love.

And when God's love meets our sin, his love takes the form of mercy. For this reason we are told that God remembers his mercy. In a word, the operative reality permeating the entire universe at this moment -- whether it is known or not, believed or not -- is God's remembered covenant, promise, steadfast love and mercy.

Since God is God his memory must be exceedingly good; in fact, is there anything God doesn't remember? Does God have a photographic memory, remembering everything forever? The truth is, God is supremely good at forgetting; he loves to forget, literally "loves" to forget. A minute ago I said that to forget, in Hebrew, doesn't mean to let something slip out of one's mind accidentally; to forget is to annihilate deliberately, blot out, obliterate. To God's people who humble themselves penitently before him, says the prophet Isaiah, God declares, "I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my sake, and I will not remember your sins." The prophet doesn't mean that God has absentmindedly lost track of his people's sin. He means that God has forgotten their sins in the Hebrew sense of forgetting. God has blotted out the sins of repentant people; their sin is no longer the operative reality of their existence before him; it no longer determines their standing before God; it no longer precludes their intimacy with him. God is marvellously forgetful whenever he beholds repentant people.

But of course there is always that throbbing mercy of God which we want God to remember, for we want such mercy to remain the operative truth, the final truth, the ultimate reality of our lives. For this reason the dying criminal, crucified alongside our Lord, gasped with his last gasp, "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom." The dying criminal, profoundly repentant, had just rebuked the unrepentant criminal strung up on the other side of Jesus, "Don't you fear God? You and I are under the same sentence of condemnation, and we deserve it!" It's a wise person who knows that her sentence of condemnation is precisely what she deserves, wiser still when her plea which pushes aside all frivolous requests is simply, " Jesus, remember me".

A minute ago I said that when we remember Jesus (especially at the Lord's Supper) we render his sin-bearing mercy the operative reality of our lives. What happens when he remembers us, as the dying criminal wanted him to do? When Jesus remembers us he makes our need, our desperate need of pardon and new life, the operative reality of his life. When he remembers us he renders our predicament his preoccupation so that our most urgent need becomes his all-consuming concern for us. "Jesus, remember me." The dying criminal didn't mean, "Think of me once in a while, if you don't mind." That would have been useless. He meant, "Make my desperate need the entire focus and force of your life now."

II: -- Those men and women whom our Lord remembers in this way; a special kind of remembering is required of them as well. Paul tells the Christians in Galatia that they must remember the poor. To remember the poor, everyone knows by now, isn't to recall them to mind, or even to think charitably about them. To remember the poor is to make the reality of their poverty an operative ingredient in our discipleship.

Next question: who are the poor? I don't dispute that there are economically disadvantaged people in our midst. At the same time, virtually no one in Canada is economically destitute. The social welfare system in Canada virtually guarantees that no one is destitute; no one is economically resourceless utterly. In Canada there are two ways whereby we contribute to the financial needs of the needy: one way is voluntary, the other involuntary. The voluntary way is to make a donation when someone knocks at our door. The involuntary way is income tax. The income tax which we pay supports those who cannot maintain themselves financially. When Maureen's father was accommodated in a nursing home for the last few years of his life (he died at 94) Maureen became aware of the very large government subsidy required to keep her father there. Maureen also figured out that what it cost the taxpayer to accommodate her dad in the nursing home was precisely the income tax deducted from her teacher's pay cheque. When other schoolteachers complained in the staff room about having to pay income tax, Maureen gently told them she was glad to "remember" her father.

In ancient Israel the poor were commonly gathered up in the expression, "widows and orphans and sojourners". The sojourner was a resident alien. As an alien he wasn't protected in the way a citizen was. He was vulnerable. Widows were bereft of income (in a society where wage-earners were exclusively male). Orphans were bereft of everything. They were vulnerable too. In other words, the meaning of "poor" in Israel was "uncommonly vulnerable"; the poor were those who were especially defenceless.

When Paul urges us to "remember the poor" he means that the plight of those people who are especially vulnerable; the plight of these people is to be an operative reality in our lives. These people may not be financially poor at all. Nonetheless, we are surrounded on all sides with people who are extraordinarily vulnerable, unusually defenceless, even though they may be wealthier than we. It's not difficult to find people who are financially adequate yet who are emotionally vulnerable, psychiatrically vulnerable, racially vulnerable, ethnically vulnerable, physically vulnerable, intellectually vulnerable. And of course those who are spiritually vulnerable are legion -- everyone, in fact. Then what exactly are we to do as we "remember" such people? There is no pre-packaged formula; there is no sure-fire, step-by-step program of remembering the poor. One thing we must do, however, is simply welcome and cherish those who are vulnerable, defenceless, in any respect.

For years now I have found that chronically mentally ill people are attracted to me. Since they have been brought to my doorstep it's plain that I must remember them, and I try to do so. At the same time I have found my life intersecting with people who are as sane as you and I yet who are unusually vulnerable (at least for now) because they have been unusually wounded and their haemorrhaging hasn't yet stopped. There is no disgrace in being wounded; no disgrace in being unemployed or bereaved or betrayed or abandoned or disillusioned or shattered in any way for any reason. There's no disgrace here, and yet I find that people who are unemployed or abandoned or shattered look upon themselves as a disgrace and therefore they try to hide their wounds. But of course someone who's bleeding, haemorrhaging, in fact, can't hide it for long. At this point we may and we must "remember" them.

Who are the poor for us? The single mother whose husband has gone to jail? The child who is intellectually challenged and is tormented by other children? The elderly man who gets flustered and confused every time he goes to the bank and cannot pay a bill without unravelling? The unmarried person who finds living in an exclusively couple-oriented society almost a form of solitary confinement? The spiritual groper who doesn't know whether to try the New Age Movement or Jesus Christ or Kung Fu -- and who wonders if there is even any difference? Whom do you and I know to be especially vulnerable, defenceless? These are the people whom our lives must intersect, for only as their vulnerability becomes an aspect of our lives are the poor remembered.

III: -- And then there is another aspect of remembering that pertains to our service today: we are remembering foreparents and friends in faith. When I was ordained in 1970 and began the work of the ministry, the outgoing clergyman in the congregation I was coming to serve took me aside and told me about the "cemetery service" that the congregation (all the congregations together in the village, as a matter of fact) held once per year. My clergyman friend told me how thoroughly opposed he was to this service since, he fumed, it was nothing more than ancestor worship.

Is what we are about today ancestor worship? It is if we make it this, but I doubt that anyone here regards this service as ancestor worship. It is, admittedly, a service in which we remember our foreparents and friends in faith. We aren't here to worship them; yet surely it's appropriate to remember them. By now, of course, everyone knows what is meant by "remember": to remember our foreparents in faith is have that faith in Jesus Christ which possessed them become the operative reality of our lives.

Some of the graves in the Victoria Square cemetery are very old. This is to be expected, since the church building was erected in 1880. Do you know what life was like in this part of Canada in 1880? Do you know how much work people had to do simply to stay warm in winter and eat throughout the year, before they made so much as one cent for themselves? Can you imagine how much they suffered, at least how much they suffered physically compared to us today? And yet their hardship didn't find them cursing him. They knew that seedtime and harvest came around, as he had promised. They knew that anyone who came to our Lord Jesus Christ in faith was never turned away, as he had promised. They knew that as often as they prayed they were heard and helped, as he had promised. And their confidence in all this remained resolute just because they knew that God remembers his promises.

Because I am a clergyman I think of the clergymen who served congregations in those days. Earlier still, in the 1820s, Egerton Ryerson, the Methodist minister who developed public education in Ontario; Ryerson's circuit went from Pickering to Weston to Aurora. He travelled around the circuit on horseback once each month. How many times was he drenched? half frozen to death? exhausted to the point of delirium? flu-ridden on a lame horse? But he didn't quit, and neither did the people he served. Because he and they didn't quit there came to be a congregation here whose successors we could be. When we remember all such people this morning we want the fire that possessed them to be the operative reality in our lives now. Simply put, we want the fire that possessed them to possess us.

At a memorial service we customarily remember the departed; strictly speaking we don't remember those who are still alive. Yet today Maureen and I want to "remember" people from this pastoral charge, some of whom are alive and some of whom are not. In 1974 Maureen, Catherine and I returned from Scotland where I had been studying for one year. I had gone to Scotland expecting to remain there for several years while I earned a doctorate, only to find that my money didn't go nearly far enough, and the professor under whom I'd gone to study had left for the USA. The bottom fell out of my program. We returned to Canada. In a few weeks I was interviewed (downstairs in the Victoria Square church) for the position of part-time minister. Mr. Fraser Gee chaired the meeting, and Fraser Gee ensured that even though I was serving the pastoral charge only part-time, Maureen and I should have enough to live on. The result was that the Shepherd family could live intact; I could travel to the university as often as I needed to; and I had the opportunity to preach every Sunday while I completed my doctoral work. The gift that the people of Victoria Square and Headford made to the Shepherd family was a gift so huge and so significant that I can't tell you how important it was. When Maureen and I say we want to remember you this morning, we mean that we want the Spirit of Christ that possessed Fraser Gee and others like him then to be the same Spirit that possesses us now.

In inviting us to Victoria Square this morning you have indicated that you want to remember us. Which is to say, you want whatever Maureen and I reflected of the gospel then (and still do, it's hoped) to be the operative reality of your lives now. In inviting us to Victoria Square this morning you have indicated that all of us are to remember each other as we gather for worship; we are to remember our departed foreparents and friends in faith.

In it all we are to remember our Lord Jesus Christ, for like the needy man on Good Friday all that any of us can do ultimately is to cry, "Lord, remember me", and know for certain that our Lord Jesus Christ will ever do precisely this.