HOW WILL YOU BE REMEMBERED? John M. Buchanan
Numbers 13:25-14:5 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
October 29, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

In 1888 a wealthy industrialist sat down to his breakfast one morning, opened
the newspaper and was stunned to read his own obituary, Unknown to him his brother
had died suddenly in the night and the paper had made a mistake and printed his
obituary which it had on file, When he recovered from the shock he read carefully -
with dismay and growing discomfort, ‘The obituary reported that he was the inventor
of dynamite: that he had amassed a great fortune manufacturing armaments and that
he was clelebrated for his innovations in the industrial production of the weapons
of war, And that is all the newspaper said about him. That morning he made an
important decision, Alfred Bernhard Nobel would be remembered for something other
than being "The Dynamite King”. And so he took his money and established five
prizes for contribution to the good of humanity, one for peace making, Nobel re-
ceived something few of us will ever get - an opportunity to see clearly the way in
which he would be remembered and a second chance to determine that memory, He lived,
by the way, aight more years to enjoy his new identity,

Now that is an old and favorite pulpit story. You may have heard it before,
Ever since IT heard it, it has stuck in my mind like a burr. Interestingly, the day
after I wrote this sermon the memory of Alfred Nobel surfaced again - with the
awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin, You
and ¥ don't ordinarily think in terms of the personal memory We are creating every
day of our lives, Some of us, the Lincolns, the Churchills, and Douglas MacArthurs
and Kennedys have a finely tuned sense of history, But frankly, most of us don't
play in that league. If anyone remembers us it will hardly be for some heroic
gesture made at a critical juncture of human history with cameras grinding and flash-
bulbs popping. Our memory, such as it is, will be celebrated by a rather smailer
and far more intimate audience: our children and grandchildren, our friends and
business associates, And yet I confess that the thought cresses my mind: how will I
be remembered? How do you recall the people who have been significant in your life?

i am haunted by the suspicion, I confess, that many of us miss the significant
moments, the potcntial~filled opportunities for doing something significant - some-
thing worth remembering, for lack of heart, tack of courage, or simply for Lack of
awareness that our small lives, our modest efforts can count for something, I confess
that I sense in the spirit of the times something of the Opposita - a cynicism about
the individual so deep that many of us, unconsciously, have thrown in the towel and
decided to live as quietly and unobtrusively and comfortably as possible and let it
go at that, The picture tubes of the nation hadn't cooled off, after all, until the
American people started telling the President that voluntary sacrifices for the
common good were fine so long as someone else makes them,

IT confess to being haunted by some of the most powerful and lonely and poignant
words ever uttercd by an American, Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1862, the second
Annual Message tu Congress: ‘Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history, We.,.,
will be remembered in spite of ourselves, No personal significance or insignificance
can spare one or another of us, The fiery trial through which we pass will light us
down, in honor or dishonor, to the last seneration.,,"

All of that, I think, is caught up in one of the most fascinating passages in «.
the Bible, The people of Israel had been wandering around in the wilderness of
Sinaiaftcr the Exodus and now they were approaching their destination and destiny,
the promised land, Trouble was, there were people already jiving in it, cities

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and towns and farms, So Moses dispatched a scouting party to survey the situation,
made up of a ranvesentative from each tribe. They followed their assignment, ex-
Plored the territory, looked around a bit, cut a bunch of prapes and returned to
report to the anxiously waiting Israelite encampment, Being good Jews there was a
difference of opinion, a majority report and a minority report, The minority spoke
first: "We saw the land; it's good - Flewing with milk and honey, its people are
strong and its cities well fortified, But we can take it," Caleb, Tribe of Judah,
said it: "Let's go get it," But then came the majority report: “We can't attack
those people: they're stronger than we are, Those are big people living over there!
Giants, even, They made us feel like grasshoppers," And with one voice the
assembled people groaned and wished they were back in Egypt which while hard work
was at least safe, And a few of them started to Look around for a likely leader to
take them back,

Well, they didn't go back, They mustered their courage and invaded the land
and eventually took it. But that story has a terribly familiar ving to it, Those
Biants in the land across the river scowling menacingly. in our direction: that Eeeling
of pathetic personal insignificance: that propensity toward the gafety and comfort
of Egyptian slavery are not, I would submit, unfamiliar to any of us, If we have not
done much worth remembering it is because we've stood in those particular shoes and
hightailed it for the Egyptian border,

History is full of illustrations, We remember this Sunday, the Protestant
Reformation and the fizure of Martin Luther towering over it, Luther, as you may
know, was an Augustinian Monk who spent his early years frantically seeking some
sense of peace and wholeness and salvation, He prayed, fasted, worked, sot awake
in the middle of the night to flog himself with a leather strap - to no avail, And
then one day, in the midst of his study he discovered St. Paul on the subject of law,
grace and salvation, Salvation was free: he was saved, he discovered, not by the
law; that is not by praying, fasting, tlagellating himself, but by the gracious Love
of God in Jesus Christ, When a Papal representative set up shop in Wittenburg to
sell Indulgences, which Luther regarded as the very epitome of the old, legalistic
religion, he wrote out 95 Theses, nailed them to the door of the Church and waited
for an opportunity to discuss the issue publicly, Luther didn't vant to start a
new church, or to be the key figure in one of the major eruptions in history, He
wanted to talk a little theology. Ordered to recant, then excommunicated, finally
branded an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emporer, Luther could have resolved the issue
at a hundred critical moments by buckling under, by backing away, Certainly this
lone German monk felt like a grasshopper on more than one occasion, But From the
Castie of Wartbure, where he was hiding after his brave "Here I Stand" statement
at the Diet of ‘iorms, he wrote the great hymn now shared by Protestants and Catholics
alike; "A Might: Fortress is our God", The second stanza is autobiographical:

"Did we in our own stronsth confide,
Our striving would be losin:;
Vere not the right man on our side,
The man of God's own choosins:
Bost ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus, it is he,,,*

Luther is remembered, not because he sat around thinking of vays to insure his
immortality, But because, at critical moments, he pushed ahead, into the strange

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and dangerous new land of the future, The hymn he wrote suggests how he did it,
Personal courage vas a part of it: good old German stubborness was no small factor
either, But ultimately Luther could say that the "right man was on his side, che
man of God's oun choosing, Christ Jesus is his name", That is, God calls His people
into the future, God is alwavs on the side of the unfolding future, God is always
-n and beside the person who reaches down inside for courase and walks ahead, God
is out front = not in the rear guard, offering safety and comfort in Egypt or

Rome or wherever,

Now, we are not perched on the precipice of our destiny quite as dramatically
as the Israelites: we do not have the resources of an Alfred Nobel nor the political
opportunity of an Abraham Lincoln and the Protestant Reformation happened four
centuries ato, But we Americans, by anyone's estimation are living in the midst of
very precarious years, William Sloane Coffin says that it is not the promised land
for us, but the promised time, Our ¢cchnology and scientific pxoavess have brousht
us through the wilderness and up to the borders of a "promised time", We have now
the capacity and the opportunity to climinate hunger, to establish peace, to create
a just and truly human society. But we're malingering at the border, nervously
Looking inte the fucure and nostaleically over our shoulders to the safer and simpler
past, University of California sociologist and historian, Robert Bellah, describes
our story in terms of three great revolutions, The first included the War for
Independence and the founding of the Republic, The second was the War Between the
States and the preservation of the Union, Both of those revolutions are stamped
indelibly on the American character, Both made us what we are. The third g@reat
revolution does not yet have a name because it is still happening, It began with
three assassination s and the Civil Rights Movement, it was punctuated by a demonic
Asian tragedy and illustrated at Mai Lai, If continued through the agony of Water-
gate and it is still not over as this nation struggles with those menacing giants
now occupying the promised land: the polluted environment, the end of cheap energy,
emerging nationalism in Africa which will no longer bend to the will of the West,
and a life style based on unnecessary consumption which has long since been unable
simply to pay for itself,

Bellah suggests that we are ill-equipped to face that future, To change
metaphors, we keep sounding like the majority report in the Israelite camp: the past
looks better and better and we kcep looking for Leaders who will take us back to it,
As everybody knows by now, the issue in this election year is none of the urgent
concerns of the nation, not to mention the world, but very simply - taxes, What is
necessary for our survival in some kind of meaningful future, according to this
scholar, is a rebirth of something so simple it almost eludes us; namely, a commit
ment to the common good, Somewhere along the way of our pilprimace we traded in the
common good for scif interest, The political philosophers decorated it with fancy
rhetoric and we cawe up believing that enlightened self interest is synonymous vith
public interest, Only it isn't often very enlightened, In fact, the result is
unbridled, unapologetic selfishness which cur forebearers were courageous enough to
cail sin, Somehow we have to recover the sense that there will be no future apart
from a future Americans can walk into together, Somehow we have to find the tradition-
al decency to stop laughing up our sleeve at a President who asks for a very modest
restraint in the aumber of toys ve buy mext year, Somehow we have to find the old
virtue of not boiling every great public issue, like the education of our children,
down into the thin gruel of my tax bill next year, We will be remembered - in spite
of ourselves, We cannot escape history,

~ foe

What is corporate and national and communal comes to rest inevitably in your
lap and mine, And in our laps, along with our world and national and community
citizenship, is a lot of other material for which we will be remenbered, There is
no one here who doesn't know about the grasshopper syndrome, For each of us there
is a future out there full of peril, For the young it is a series of choices so
important that it seems sometimes casier to Let someone else make them, For some
of us it is a matter of choosinr, or changing a vocation: or deciding to be married,
or to stay macried or to begin afresh, For some of us it is a future of incapacity,
illness and old ase, For some it is the creeping apathy of unfulfilled hopes and
receding dreams, [For some it is so intensely personal no one but God and we Imow
about it - something in us we can no longer live with - something ve must change,
And the word of the Lord, as old as Moses and Aaron and as contemporary as today's
paper is the came. God will be in that future, God will stand with you and for
you. The right man is on your side,

Jesus Christ, on a Sunday, tons azo, decided for the future instead of the
past, His fviends were terrified, They stood in awe as they vatched him turn His
face to Jerusalem, They folloved at a distance as He walked the road up from
Jericho and they saw with their own eyes God's man playing out the eternal drama
of salvation,

That same Jesus Christ, now risen and triumphant over the worst the world
could do to Him, calls each one of us into the future. And more, that same Lord
Christ, promises to walk into that future with us,

How will you be remembered? Perhaps not for very much or by very many, But
it can be a memory of someone who cared and was committed and didn't shrink from
fhe issues that characterized your day, You can, and will be, remembered for the
integrity and passion and love with which you Lived your life. You can, and will be
remembered for the company you kept. I am reminded of that every time I preside
at the funeral of one of the great saints of this congregation, And as I did a
little autobiographical ruminating last week, this emerged as the most important
thing of all for me = the company of Jesus Christ: the company of the faithful
who lived in this world fully, but trying always to stumble behind and keep up with
the living Lord of the future, My sphere of influence, my potential for a great
memory, is limited, But I can, here, add my commitment and faith and love to that
of a lot of others: Moses, Peter, Martin Luther, Jchn Calvin, and the great
saints of this particular church: a Communion of Saints, which has felt the call
of God and moved bravely into the future,

Robert Frost thought a lot abouc those moments when we make important
decisions ~ and wrote beloved words which lend themselves, I believe, to the
Gospel of Jesus Christ:

Tvo roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry ET could not travel both

And tbc one traveller, leng I staod
And Locked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undercrowth;

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Then took the other, ag juat as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and vanted wear;
Thouch as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that worning equally Lay

In leaves no step had trodden black,
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I douvted if IE should ever come back,

I shatl be telling this with a sigh
Somevheare ages and aces hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made ail the difference,

"The Road

Not Taken"

Twentieth Century American Poetry
p.&6

In times past Your Spirit has picked up weary and frightened people and

sent them inte the future with confidence,

Gur Father, we pray for that

renewing, recrealLing, life-givine and saving Spirit,

Amer,