Eternal Not Everlasting Remembrance
Reflections on Remembrance Sunday
10 November 2019
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
I have a great deal of sympathy for people who learn English as a second language. They have to navigate the deep currents of our Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Norman French heritage which can give us two or three different words for the same person, place, thing or action.
This is hard enough, but we then have to deal with our colonial history and its shameless habit of kidnapping words from other languages and making them at home in English. Just think of tepees, igloos and pow-wows to mention a few of the thousands of ‘borrowed’ words to be found in our dictionaries.
Because of this complex history of the contemporary English language, even native English-speaking people can be excused for sometimes using the wrong word when talking or writing about important ideas. On this Remembrance Sunday two words come to mind that have quite different meanings but are often used as if they describe the same idea.
The two words are ‘eternal’ and ‘everlasting’. ‘Everlasting’ means an unending duration of time. It is a word that describes a ‘quantity’ of time.
‘Eternal’ is not about duration. It is a way of describing a quality of time rather than its quantity. ‘Eternal’ is the adjective we often use to express our experience of timelessness. Past, present and future co-exist in the same moment and time seems to stand still.
‘Everlasting’ describes a painful dental procedure which seems to go on without end and without the numbing benefits of anesthesia. ‘Eternal’, on the other hand, describes the experience of being with a loved one or some other experience that leaves us feeling free from the relentless passage of time.
We who are disciples of Jesus of Nazareth believe that our faith in the God to whom Jesus leads us opens the door to eternal rather than everlasting life. Eternal life is more than our hope in life beyond death, more than our hope in the world to come. Eternal life is our present experience of a living hope in the present, a hope that inspires us to work with God towards the promised future reign of justice and peace --- despite the painful or troubling or disappointing realities of our past.
When we remember those whose lives have been given for the sake of others, we bring them into ‘eternal’ remembrance. Their deeds and choices shaped our present. Their past and our present are the building blocks for the future. The mortar that binds past, present and future together is the eternal life Jesus speaks of in today’s reading from the Gospel according to John.
We sometimes speak and act as if those who came before us are a different species, but they are not. We share more than the biological DNA that unites us as humans. We share a spiritual and an ethical DNA that stirs us to make difficult choices that have the potential to bring us and all creation closer to the future God lays before us.
Today we do not simply ‘remember’ the past and the sacrifices of our forebears as if we are simply reassembling various memories such as the stories told us by members of our families or our own explorations of history, a nostalgic jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing but the picture still recognizable. Today we remember that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who are alive in us and through us and who continue to build God’s future. [1] Today we give thanks that all that has been good in the lives of our forebears is of benefit to the world. [2] Today we pledge that through the gift of eternal life God has given to us through our faith in Jesus of Nazareth our forebears go on living with us and in us, in our hearts and minds, in our courage and our consciences. [3]
Christians know how to remember in this way. Each time we break the bread and share the cup of eternal life we make the power and meaning of the past present in us and through us to bring God’s future one step closer to its fulfillment. After the poppies are no longer worn, after the wreathes have been removed from the cenotaphs and after leaves cover the graves of our veterans and the fallen, Canada will return to its merry pace towards ‘the holiday season’ and it will be easy to forget. But we will not forget, because we have been called by God and sealed by the cross in baptism for eternal life, a life breathed into us by the life and death of Jesus. We’ve known for two thousand years that the past, with all its power to inspire us towards God’s future, is not behind us. It is present, right here and right now.
God is working his purpose out
as year succeeds to year;
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near;
Nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled
with the glory of God
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