Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
February 2, 2025

Remembering Rightly

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

Acts 15:36–40
2 Timothy 4:9–11

Most scholars believe that the Timothy letters were not written by Paul but by a student or friend of Paul’s. Whoever wrote them, these letters give us insight into Paul’s life that we do not find elsewhere. We gain a glimpse into the heart and faith of the apostle in ways that I find both very human as well as spiritually challenging.

But before any of this, we learn Paul’s story in Acts. In Acts we learn that Paul and Mark traveled together bearing witness to the death and particularly the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They shared in the gospel. They were friends. But something happened. Mark was traveling with Paul on a missionary journey, and for reasons that are not mentioned in the text, Mark left Paul in Pamphylia, not completing the work. The departure injured their friendship. We know this because later Paul and Barnabas wanted to go on a missionary journey, and Barnabas wanted to take Mark with them, but Paul refused. The injury from that earlier day was still present, and Paul couldn’t get past it. Paul refused to take Mark along. This moment is one of the early splits in the church. It was painful for everyone.

The Timothy letter tells of a later time in Paul’s life. He is in prison and believes that his time in this world is coming to an end. So Paul writes to people he needs to see. He pleads with Timothy, “Do your best to come to me before winter.” Paul says, “Bring my cloak. It's cold here. And bring my books and my parchments” (perhaps the biblical scrolls). “Do your best to come before winter. I’m not sure I will last another winter, and I need to see you one more time.”

This is not a surprise, because the love between Paul and Timothy is well known. But Paul does surprise us when he then says, “Bring Mark. He is useful in my ministry.”

We don’t know what happened, but somewhere, offstage, Paul chooses to let go of the injury from Mark. Whatever the problem was that kept them apart, Paul chooses to let that go. Paul forgave Mark, and maybe Mark had some forgiving to do as well, but Paul says, “I need to see Mark one more time.”

Sometimes friendship requires forgiveness, because none of us have it all together all the time. When we get to know people, when we befriend people, we will discover they may let us down; they may disappoint us. And the thing about these injuries is not simply that we hold on to them; it is as if they hold on to us. Yesterday’s injury shows up today.

That is why forgiveness, like Paul engaged in, is so hard.

Carol and I attended Ghost Ranch this past weekend, a stunning retreat center in the breathtaking geography of New Mexico. We were in the airport upon our return, getting in that TSA line, and this woman just stepped in front of us in line. It was perfectly obvious that we were in line, but she just stepped in front. And then as if she were suddenly self-aware, she turned and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I step in front of you?” I was about to say, “Yes, ma’am. The line starts back here.” But my wife, because she actually lives like a Christian, she said, “That’s OK. Go ahead. It’s nothing,” she said.

She was right, of course. It was nothing. Why choose to take offense? It was nothing.

Sometimes we speak of forgiveness this way. Someone hurts you, and because you love Jesus, you say, “Forget about it. It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing.”

It’s better to be generous that way, like my wife, than to be like me, who can tell you where the line is.

But that’s not forgiveness.

We don’t forgive because injury happened but now it’s all OK. No, forgiveness is required when injury occurs and it can’t be made right and we choose to hold on to the friendship anyway.

This is important. When some wrong occurs, if it can be made right, we, as people of faith, should do what we can to make it right. But some wrongs can’t be made right, no matter what we do; they can’t be made right, and that is when forgiveness is our way forward.

This is incredibly difficult, because our injuries follow us.

What do we do with the wrongs of our yesterdays that simply cannot be made right?

It makes me think about the hostages being released in the Middle East now. For over a year those who survived have been held captive in circumstances we know little about. What we know is that the injury that happened on October 7, 2023, was not a moment in isolation but an injury that tapped into the long story of Jewish oppression and antisemitic hatred.

I heard the brother of a hostage being interviewed, and he described the Palestinians as the most despicable people on earth. Netanyahu stood before the US Congress and called the Palestinian people barbarians.

Months ago, I watched a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, pulled from the rubble of his bomb-leveled home. It was reported that he was the sole survivor of his family. His parents, grandparents, and siblings all died.

I don’t think this hostility is over.

Ten years from now that twelve-year-old will throw a rock or shoot a gun or set off a bomb, and we will call him antisemitic because we have made complex things simple. It always easier for us to elevate the injury of some over the injury of others.

There are those in power on both sides who have decided that my injuries will be healed through your bloodshed, but this cycle of violence is simply planting the seeds for more violence.

What we see there is a testimony to the power of yesterday’s injury to shape today’s choices. Our pain follows us, and it seldom makes us our best selves.

When it comes to yesterday’s injuries, Wendell Berry once wrote, “It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them. … If we can’t do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies’ children, who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause (Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers, p. 9).

I don’t know why it was that Mark decided to leave Paul. Maybe they had a disagreement. Maybe Mark wasn’t as committed as Paul thought he should be. I don’t know. But the injury was deep enough that Paul refused to share in ministry with Mark.

But somehow that changed. These verses in Timothy make it clear that Paul chooses to let some things go. Bring Mark. He is good for my ministry. Bring Mark. He’s good for me.

Dr. Miroslav Volf teaches at Yale Divinity School, but he grew up in Croatia, when it was still Yugoslavia. For a variety of reasons, but for no real cause, he was viewed as a national security threat. When leaders are afraid, it is not hard for anyone to be a national security threat. Volf was interrogated by an officer he calls Capt. G. He writes:

“My interrogations might be categorized as a mid-level form of abuse — greater than an insult or a blow, but mild compared to the torture and suffering many others have undergone at the hands of tormentors, especially those schooled in Red Army methods. … Yet, even afterward, my mind was enslaved by the abuse I had suffered. It was as though Captain G. had moved into the very household of my mind, ensconced himself right in the middle of its living room, and I had to live with him (Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, pp. 6–7).

Some say this is actually a good thing. If you have been injured, be sure you never forget, to ensure it never happens again. We must rehearse the wrongs done to us in our yesterdays so that they won’t happen again. Such counsel trusts the wisdom of Santayana, who says, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

But Volf finds his way to a different place.

He states that if we are going to stay in relationship, there are some hurts, some disappointments, some injuries we are going to have to simply let go. We have to choose to forget them. It’s what he calls “remembering rightly.” Volf says that as long as those injuries dwell in the living room of our minds, we will have to live around them, and if that trauma shapes our present, it is less likely that such memory prevents future harm; Volf claims it will likely ensure that injury happens again. Payback.

Maybe that’s the reason our story of Paul’s forgiveness is lacking detail. We aren’t told all of the details of what drove Paul and Mark from one another, because they have chosen not to remember them.

I have a friend, Sam, who grew up with a mother who faced her own demons. She was, on the one hand, gracious, winsome, and charismatic. But because of the mysteries of brain chemistry, she could also be harsh, unpredictable, even violent. He remembers being afraid, for he never knew whom he would meet at the breakfast table.

As life has it, children sometimes end up parenting their parents. Because of the mysteries of the brain, his mother journeyed into dementia. Sam, in the last seasons of his mother’s life, was visiting her at a retirement home. They were outside under some trees, Sam pushing her along in her wheelchair. Out of the blue she asked, “Son, did I … did I ever strike you?”

Yes, yes, you were brutal. You have left me with pain that I have yet to shake. Your anger stalks me in my dreams. Yes, Mother, you struck me, and it still haunts me.

That is what he could have said. But instead, he said, “Did you strike me? Mother, I have no memory of that.”

It may be impossible to forget the injuries of days gone by, but maybe, by the grace of God, it is possible to remember rightly. I don’t know.

But I know this. When we gather in this sanctuary, I am grateful we are met by a God who has promised, “I will remember your sin no more” (Isaiah 43:25).

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church