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"To Forget in the Way of Repentance"
Philippians 3:12-14
Sermon preached at Friday Worship
of the 2007 AADVENT Conference
At McCormick Theological Seminary/Augustana Chapel
August 10, 2007
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
What I love about this passage is that it’s personal. Contained in these simple confessions and hopes are memories of his own life. His own shortcomings, sins, triumphs… hidden deep within these words… you’ll find the entirety of Paul’s life.
Now… I want you to take a second and imagine with me the context from which Paul is writing. The book of Philippians is known as a “Prison Letter”. Obviously by this title, he wrote this letter in prison. But many of us already know that Paul spent a lot of time in prison and thus wrote his letters to the church from there. However, what is significant about the time period of this particular letter… is that it was Paul’s FIRST Roman imprisonment.
The sort of personality that Paul exerts in this letter is perhaps even further dramatized by fresh nature of this experience. One can imagine the sort of cell he was in. And how the utter discomfort of this holding provoked a deep sense of introspection.
When I think of this passage… I get this mental picture of him in that prison cell.
I can just imagine him sitting on the stone cold floor. The cold wind blowing in through the window that would brush up against his already worn skin. Perhaps he was on his knees… bent over so he could posture himself in a way to be able to write his letter. His face… perhaps pensive from the memories of his former life flashing through his mind. And perhaps Jesus… once again… invading his thoughts through the memories of that road to Damascus.
The passage seems to indicate a tone of reflection… perhaps even more so because this was his first imprisonment experience. Now, I wonder… what exactly was going through his mind? I wonder what Paul, the former high persecutor of the church, was thinking… now being imprisoned for his love of the church.
Perhaps a sense of irony. This same man who was at once in charge of accusing Christians of crimes against the state… of trying them and imprisoning them… going as far to kill many of them… this very man… he was now the recipient of that fate.
I would imagine that Paul must have had to battle much guilt that night as he wrote this letter. I would imagine that Paul felt, perhaps most profoundly at that time, compassion for those he persecuted. For now, he too was being persecuted. It is a strange yet wondrous thing what Jesus can do to a persony.
…I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on…
These very personal words of Paul written in isolation… lead us to ask a logical question… what was it that he wanted to forget?
The drama of this particular question is something, I believe, we can all relate to. We have to ask ourselves, what do WE forget, and what do we remember? Furthermore, what is the function or purpose of forgetting in a person’s life? And above all, what should we remember and what should we forget?
Life, or the very act of being, is the collection of past, present, and future. The present is really the only thing we continually experience… or in other words, it is the very connecting point from the experiences of our past with the hopes of the future. Thus, life itself could not continue without throwing the past into the past, liberating the present from its burden. This, I believe, is the essence of life. We can observe this in nature, in the ways that trees and plants grow, or even in animals. The earlier stages of life are left behind in order to make space for the future.
Yet, not all things of the past are pushed into the past. Paul Tillich, the great theologian, says this, “…something of the past remains alive in the present, so that there is ground from which to grow into the future. Every growth displays its conquered past, sometimes in the form of scars.”
This is the universal character of life, he says.… whether living beings are aware of it or not.
Now of course, this is the ideal. The balance between remembering what ought to be remembered and forgetting what ought to be forgotten is what enables a person to advance towards the new. BUT, if too much is preserved, and too little forgotten, this path towards the new will be barred. Essentially, the past overpowers the future.
About two years ago, I moved into the Austin neighborhood here on Westside Chicago. It was a majority black, low-income, working-poor neighborhood. The program that I went through was called Mission Year. They provided the housing, roommates, and structure… our objective was to make meaningful relationships with the neighbors within our year commitment.
Now, contrary to what many of my friends and family members would have thought, the toughest part was not living in what suburbanites like to demonize as the “ghetto”. The toughest part was living with my 4 white roommates.
Now don’t get me wrong, living in an inner-city neighborhood is not the easiest thing. In places of poverty, the needs tend to overwhelm you. I remember how I would sit in the library many afternoons and tutor kids who would drop in. These kids would ask for help on their math homework. But within 5 minutes, I realized that I couldn’t teach them math when they weren’t even able to read the directions. 7th graders mind you…
There are other things like minimum wage jobs. It is economically proven that a single mother working two full-time positions at minimum wage won’t provide enough to feed and clothe her family. I remember the heartache I felt as I heard a mother explain to me that she had to choose between purchasing food… or diapers for her child. Things like these are hard to swallow on a daily basis. And you begin to wonder who is at fault.
Yet… the harder thing, for me, was ironically living with my white roommates. I was unprepared for the sorts of racial tensions that would arise in our house. The feeling of alienation. The sense of isolation in only being able to bring a part of me into that house. The uninformed questions of my own culture. The stereotypes. Yet, the ignorance I felt being directed at me on a daily basis… was a minor problem in comparison to the deep seated anger that I held against my roommates.
Like many of you, I am the victim of years of racial slurs, dehumanization, emasculation, and effacement.
For example, growing up in a culturally Korean household, my vision and understanding of masculinity, that my dad demonstrated, seemed to conflict with the idea of masculinity in the dominant culture. My father is a product of the Confucian model of masculinity… which is that of the scholar, the philosopher. This can be seen by the importance placed on education in many families. Yet, this pursuit or posture of being was often mitigated in the sorts of social groups I was involved in. This meant that our respect for silence and posture of reflection is often translated into passivity.
I remember the sorts of feelings I had constantly being bombarded by these media images of passive, which meant incompetent, Asian males on television. Or the images of exotic Asian women who were to be swept up by more masculine white men. I remember deeply the sense of alienation I felt growing up in an elementary school where I was one of 5 Asian students. In fact, they kept me in English-language development till I was in 7th grade… even though, since the third grade, I scored in the top 95th percentile in English.
Put bluntly, I had to be white to fit in. This meant leaving behind a huge chunk of my identity within the four walls of my house. This meant walking 5 steps ahead of my parents in public. This meant feeling the sweat of embarrassment listening to my parents try to communicate with customers in English. On a deeper level, this meant trying to rid myself of the very lifeline that embedded me into my parent’s history. My self-worth, in many ways, was now being dictated by how well I could fit in seamlessly into the dominant white culture of America.
It’s a shame that I felt like I had to do that… and it’s a shame that many of you had to do that. I can’t even begin to tell you how many insecurities I have because of those years of self-hatred.
And in that living room with my white roommates… they were the culprits of my insecurities. They dramatized for me all those years of racial hierarchy.
Now I confess that much of my anger directed at my roommates were unfair. It’s unrealistic to hold one person responsible for years of oppression. More often than not, that one person is also the product of the system. They unintentionally inherit that history as well. Thus, I must not only be freed of the wounds that I hold… but in the broader scheme of things… I must be freed and forget the things that I do or have done as a result of my own wounds.
So what, in this case, does it mean to forget? How do you forget that which is behind… in order to press on towards what is ahead? How do you cultivate the soil of the past… so that life may grow?
It is through Repentance. We are in dire need of repentance.
Repentance is not the half-painful emotional concentration on one’s guilt… but a liberating forgiveness.
It means pushing the consciousness and pain of guilt, or in this case… being wronged against, into the past, not by repressing it, but by acknowledging it… and receiving the word of acceptance in spite of it. If we are able to repent, we are able to forget, not because the forgotten act was unimportant, and not because we repress what we cannot endure, but because we have acknowledged our guilt and can now live with it. In this sense, it is eternally forgotten. THIS, I believe, is how Paul forgot what lay behind him, although it always remained with him. That his past life of persecuting others was repented of and redeemed. That through grace… he is still accepted. And that this still pushes him forward.
Repentance is a way of life. It is a posture where we seek to be freed from those past pains. Not literally forgetting it… but finding acceptance in the midst of it. Our past memories often imprison us. They hold us down by feeding our insecurities. If we do not find acceptance in the midst of these things that hold us down… we will be stagnant.
For me, this acceptance came from my black brothers and sisters. It’s strange to think that the self-realizing process of my Korean-American identity began in the streets of Chicago. I felt that I had to be white in my apartment… but with my neighbors… they would not accept that of me. They pushed me to come as something more akin to my experiences growing up. I’ve been given many gifts through my friends in the Austin neighborhood… but perhaps the greatest gift of all was them forcing me to be introspective.
They forced me to think deeply about myself and who I was. That my particular upbringing gave me a unique set of experiences. But that those experiences gave me a sense of commonality with my friends there. As I dove deeper into how I am a heterogeneous mix of identities… I realized all the more how human I really was.
I began to take ownership and responsibility of my history. That I am the child of immigrant parents who struggled self-sacrificially so that I would have a chance at a good life. That I have inherited years of struggle and hardship that act as the foundation upon which I grow.
And in a way that only God knows how to do… he connected that history intensely and with emotion with that of my neighbors. I realized that the immigration struggle faced by my parents became a beautiful place where my neighbor’s struggles interwove with my family history.
The woman who poured out her sorrow of having to choose between diapers or food aroused in me the memories of my own mother… of how she, too, had to choose between the two. Even with the endless hours of work… my parents often could not make ends meet.
The sort of emasculation faced by my black brothers who are only able to work minimum wage jobs… reminded me of my father’s struggles and his deep sense of inferiority in not being able to provide enough.
The agony of constantly being reminded that black was ugly and suspect in America… reminded me of my own feelings towards myself… of never fully feeling accepted.
As hard and sorrowful these moments were… they were actually liberating. Liberating because I found commonality. I realized that at the end of the day… we are human. Brokenness, by nature, doesn’t play favorites. Yet, we find acceptance in the midst of each other. In common brokenness, you can assert your freedom and make a choice to let it empower you.
Our scars become our power to love. They become the very glue that interconnects us to everyone. We recognize that we must forgive all. For my roommates did not choose to be born where they were… they did not choose to inherit the sort of history tied to their race. Their identity, like mine, is contingent. We must all recognize that about each other… and learn to love each other in the midst of that. Not over-looking injustice… No… we must prophetically call people to take responsibility for that which has been done. We must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, fight alongside the oppressed in solidarity… we must do what Jesus calls us to do. But it also means moving beyond that towards a place of reconciliation.
I believe this kind of redefinition of “forgetting” is crucial for personal relationships. It is crucial for self-love. We realize that we love only because we forgive and are forgiven.
To forget in the way of repentance… is that we must acknowledge our past, we must find acceptance within that, and we must forgive.
What I love about aadvent is that they are about that very process. They are about trying to forge the connections between our experiences, our thoughts of ourselves, and our thoughts about God. All this in order to help us pursue a life of freedom… where we also freely choose to help liberate others.
Hopefully, you will remember much during your time here with aadvent. And that you will not shy away from those memories. Rather… that you will forget what is behind… and press on towards what is ahead. Like Paul, that you will find the things that provide space to grow in the future… and the things that ought to be forgotten… you will find acceptance in the midst of it.
I’d like to conclude with a reflection about my mother. Her hands in particular. When she was a young girl… she used play around train tracks. She grew up on the country side in Korea… so trains didn’t come around all that often… which made them seemingly safe areas to play. Though, one day… in a freak accident… she did not get out of the way fast enough as a train passed. Her hand was knicked by a small pole sticking out of the side of the train. This caused an intense gash into her hand.
She went home with this bleeding hand… but because my mother’s family didn’t have the money to go see a doctor… my grandfather had to try and treat the wound himself. Unfortunately, the skin healed itself abnormally.
Till this day, she cannot fully open her hand because the wound healed itself tighter than before because of the chunk of skin that was torn off.
When I think of her hands… and the scar that’s been left… I see a visual representation of her own past hurts. Her own sorrows made manifest in a scar. Yet, I realize that these are the same hands that held me and nurtured me. They are the hands that fed me. At church, they are the hands that are laid on the faces of broken women during prayer. They are the hands that comfort those in distress.
They are broken hands… but they are still hands that heal.
We are all wounded… but we are also still called to heal.
Would you bow your heads with me?
Would you take some time with me in silent reflection?
Would you allow the Spirit to arouse memories in you? The joyful and sorrowful ones. And if the Spirit does so… would you not shy away. Would you hear in the commotion of your memories the soft whisper of acceptance…