It must be awful to have amnesia. It has to be a completely disorienting and frightening experience. If suddenly you were to wake up not knowing who you are or where you came from, and that you have no roots, no history and no past, no memories, how then could you know where your life is headed? If you don’t’ know where you’ve been, it is very hard to know where you are or where you should be going. Other than trying to get your memory back, how do you know what you should be striving to achieve? Without a past and thus without an identity, how can you plan your life, set your priorities or your goals? Our history is not only our anchor and the foundation that provides a context for our lives, tells us who we are and gives contour to our identities, but it also gives us the raw material we need to plot out and determine, as best we can, who we will be.

But it would be just as awful the other way round, if we were completely hopeless, aimless and adrift, resigned to the fates, without a future or even caring about one; for if you have no hope and you think that you have no future, then your history would be irrelevant and your present existence meaningless and purposeless.
Just as we cannot live without a past, so we cannot live without a future.

Our readings today make us look in these two directions at once. In the one direction we look to the basic context and source of our faith that is rooted in the life, teachings, example, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, and thus to him who is our anchor and our rock; and in the other direction we look to his promise of the coming kingdom of God, and therefore to the aim and the goal of our witness to him who comes to open up a new future for us and who promises to make all things new. We are asked today to look back at where we came from, to Israel and the foundation of the church; and we are also asked to look forward to where we are going, to the new heaven and the new earth, to new creation we shall be when we are formed anew into the very likeness of Christ by the mercy and grace of God.

With respect to whence the church came, we need to consider Peter’s speech to the Israelites in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Peter aims to show how God’s promises to Israel have been fulfilled in Christ. Peter is pointing out that Jesus Christ is precisely Israel’s longed for Messiah, and no other, that he is her long-awaited King, her Deliverer, her Savior and her Lord. Jesus is Israel’s Messiah. Separate Jesus from his people and their history of suffering and hope, separate him from their law and from the words of their prophets, separate him from the specific content of Israel’s hope, then Jesus would be but an idol that anyone would be at liberty to fashion with their own hands in order to mold him into their own image and likeness. It is not only impossible, but dangerous to separate Christ and all he represents from his people and their history, for then Christ would lack all context, definition and meaning. Then one could not possibly understand his teaching or his preaching nor appreciate his sacrifice. To separate Christ from his people, to put it simply, would be either to make him into an idol or quite simply to deny him.

Biblical scholars in the late 19th century began to apply scientific techniques to the task of trying to discover the real “historical” Jesus, the Jesus behind the biblical text. Critics observed that the picture of the Jesus they came up with looked very much like themselves. The British scholar George Tyrell, summed up the situation this way: “The Christ [these scholars see] looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.”

A better, and more accurate, picture of Jesus is depicted for us today by Peter, who says, speaking as a Jew: “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus”; and while Peter admits that Jesus was rejected by this people, he nevertheless says also to them, “I know you acted in ignorance, as did your rulers—[but]--in this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer.” Jesus can never be separated from his people neither before nor after his resurrection. Thus as Jesus says to the disciples in our gospel reading, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” This Israel from among whom Christ came, is specifically the harassed and oppressed people of Israel, which, powerless in itself, has lost all its rights, and is delivered into the superior force of its enemies; and within Israel it is especially to the poor, the widows, the dispossessed, the sick, the demon-possessed, the orphans, the weak and the defenseless to whom Jesus came as helper and Savior. It is for this Israel and to this Israel that is as good as dead, and who in the eyes of the world is better left in the dead-and-gone past that Jesus was raised to life and who thereby opens up a new and glorious future for them and for the whole world.

Thus even when we focus on Jesus’ context, his history as it were with his people, we see already that we cannot speak about the church’s origin in partnership with this people without at the same time speaking also about its future; for it is the future, the church’s and thus the world’s destiny in Christ that interprets and gives final and definitive shape to the church’s origin. Just as we cannot understand who we are or where we are going without grasping where we came from, so we cannot fully appreciate our past until we have some idea where that past is pointing us, and thus what that past really means. We cannot begin to understand or appreciate the creation of the world, for example, until we have some idea why and for what purpose, for what end, it was created in the first place. So we cannot fully understand or appreciate God’s calling of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and thus of a special people to be his own, apart from their key and crucial role in the working out of the world’s salvation through the suffering, death, and resurrection of its Messiah, the crucified King of the Jews, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all things in heaven and on earth.
Knowing our historical context in Israel’s election to be God’s beloved people, and grasping the promise of a new and glorious future in Israel’s Christ, we are set free to live, work and hope as his witnesses. “Thus it is written,” Jesus says, “that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

But how exactly are we to be his witnesses? This is not always clear to us. I’m convinced that too many Christians have amnesia. Having no clue whence they came and thus unclear about who they are (or better, whose they are), they are uncertain where they are going. We need to set aside and leave behind our prejudices, presuppositions, assumptions, and fears, to leave behind who we once were apart from Christ, and be willing to be re-formed, reborn, into his likeness, to discover ourselves anew in the gospel story and realize that our story and our identity is comprehended in the story of Israel and the church. Then we shall be not only comforted but also challenged by Scripture, then we shall dare to reorient and re-center our lives around word and sacrament, around Jesus as the living Lord and King he really is; for one thing Jesus is not, Jesus is not the dead champion of our pet causes. To know him is to identify ourselves with dispossessed and forsaken Israel for whom nothing is left but her reliance and hope in the word and promise of her God.

-Amen-