I am so delighted to see Walter and Paulette Schiff sitting here, present with us again. But knowing that Mother Paulette would be here changed my sermon mightily. Today, a much-beloved priest and pastor who tended this little vineyard here so well has returned. She can see first-hand how I am doing, following her. I decided I just did not have the courage to preach on a Gospel parable that describes how someone goes away from the vineyard for a long time and finally returns with the sole intention of putting the current wretched tenant to a miserable death. I decided that St. Paul's Epistle would do very nicely as a text for this sermon. "Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on for the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:13,14) When my email blinks frantically: "Congratulations, Rev. Rhodes, you've won the grand prize!", I think, I got the Prize! Me! How about that! But you see, I was expecting a Cadillac or a cruise to Istanbul, not the prize of "the upward call of God". That's my prize? And St. Paul admits it is a strain, this ain't easy. You got to strain--"strain forward to what lies ahead", not just quietly, faithfully, languidly drift in that general direction, You have to strain forward. Straining forward to what lies ahead is not easy. But for many of us, it is less difficult than "forgetting what lies behind." Now that's an effort, that's a strain. "Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead." Memory, our memory is a marvelous gift, it gives us joy and security, grounds us in our beloved heritage and history, it is comforting and encouraging, it is indispensable. Even when painful or sad, memory is essential to our well-being. Without it, we are amnesiacs, with no genuine identity, no way of knowing who we are. We do not know whence we have come, to whom we belong, who we love and who we are loved by. To forget what lies behind seems to me to compromise and endanger the ability to move forward toward anything, makes us less able to strain forward to what lies ahead. Yet St. Paul intends just that--to forget what lies behind and instead to strain forward to what lies ahead. To press on, not glance back over our shoulders. Hard though, hard to forget what lies behind. A simple comment, a lingering scent, an inflection, a face, a Madeleine cookie for heavens sake, can bring back memories in a flood. Seemingly impossible I say to forget fully what lies behind. To forget the hurts given and received, forget the love betrayed, the hopes given up, the intentions never followed. Some remembrance of some past thing can make us angry all over again, even years later, or can hurt us or grieve once again. And if we are the guilty one rather than the victim, the memory of "hurt given" causes us a renewed sense of shame and sorrow, regret, remorse, embarrassment, years after we made some dreadful mistake, said some cruel thing, hurt someone we loved, trashed someone we actually deeply revered. When that spiral sets in, it may well seem nearly impossible to forget what lies behind, forget what we did that we ought not to have done, forget what happened to us that should never have. Forgive and forget. Two words, much like kith and kin, that are so recurrently linked together that we may forget that they refer to two very different things. Not synonyms at all. Different things. Different actions. Straining forward to what lies ahead - difficult. Forgetting what lies behind--more difficult still. Forgiving --difficult, forgetting --more difficult still. And the most difficult of all? Forgetting that for which we ourselves have been forgiven. Forgetting all the shame, embarrassment, humiliation, forgetting all the sin, that has been taken away, forgiven. We are to forget it all, for it lies in the past, we are to forget what lies behind after we have been forgiven by God, But there is that ambivalent memory thing lurking that traps us, tricks us, trips us up more than anything else. We remember what we did. We may, though this is by no means easy or certain, we may realize and accept that we are forgiven, by the one we offended and by our God as well. But it is hard to forget, forget what we have done and how sorry we are. When we forgive we all agree we should then forget, at least as best we can. But when we have been at fault, when we are the ones who have been forgiven, it is much harder to see and agree that we should forget that too, forget our foolishness, cruelty, and sin. Now Paul was a saint, not a sociopath. His injunction to forget what lies behind does not mean that he insists, or even suggests we blithely shrug off responsibility, slither out of any sense of our own culpability, divest ourselves of any lingering guilt. St. Paul himself, so many years after the fact, did not forget his own much earlier murderous intentions toward the infant Christian community while he was still a mean-minded, fanatical Pharisee, persecuting Christians and hounding them from town to village to countryside. He remembered that, wrote it down, admitted to it in his own immortal epistles, admitted that he had so persecuted the early Church that he was Christian Enemy Number One. He did remember that, recall it, admit it. He just did not let it undo him, paralyze him, cripple him as a Christian. No, we do not shed remorse the way we do a winter coat now that the weather is getting so much warmer. We do not shrug off, slip out of the guilt. It is taken away, by another, by our God. Years go this Sunday, this Fifth Sunday in Lent, used to introduce a two-week countdown called Passiontide. We have forgone that now, left that behind, and simply have the one Holy Week. But Passiontide was useful, and I miss it. It started us toward the full admission of our guilt on Good Friday, and the final vindication and glorious reconciliation of Easter morning. This Sunday used to be the two week warning bell, and can still be that unofficially. We need now to forget what lies behind and press on toward what lies ahead --the goal, the prize, the upward call of God in Christ. We do not cavalierly forget the things that lie behind, rather, we spend the next two weeks gathering them up, bundling them together--all the sadness and sorrow, the hurt, the shame, the guilt, the regret and the remorse, gather it all, sweep it together and bring it here to church, to the foot of the cross, to the loving arms of Jesus stretched out on that cross on our behalf, for our sake, to take away our sin, to offer himself to redeem the sin of the world. Those arms stretched out will take what you have gathered of the sad, shame-filled past and all its sorry memories, those arms of his will take it and never return it or remind us of it again. He will let it be past. And we will be free to forget what lies behind and now press on toward what lies ahead, press on toward the goal, the prize, the call. In these weeks ahead of us bring it all here to him. Do not try to fix it all yourself, it will not work, never has, no matter how we have tried. Stop telling yourself to forgive and forget, or to move on, or to get over it. You cannot. You tried, and never could--not fully, not perfectly, maybe like me, not even well, not even partially. We cannot do it, let him do it --he can and does and will. We, like Paul, admit we have not yet reached this level, we, like Paul, are not perfect, but we hope and pray and intend that we will become like Paul, as you and I and he press on to make it our own, as Christ Jesus has made us his own.