Transcribed from the Sermon preached February 6, 2005

My father and his brother and sister got into fights over who knew best how to take care of her. One day my aunt showed up in Ryderwood, Washington where Grandma lived and whisked her off to Bend Oregon where my aunt lived and she my aunt fed my grandmother all kinds of vitamins and organic treatments in an attempt to restore my grandmother to herself - but it didn't work. The last time I saw my grandmother was at a nursing home - in a bed - clutching a baby doll as if it were her own. My Grandmother did not recognize me, but neither did I recognize her. I mean, I knew this person was my grandmother, but I was missing the one who knew me, the one who taught me how to turn Reader's Digest magazines, Styrofoam balls and pipe cleaners into golden Christmas angels.

So was it my Grandmother who I saw that afternoon so many years ago? Or was it simple an empty shell, flesh and bones left, breathing and eating even though nobody is home for some truly God-forsaken reason? If it wasn't my Grandmother, then where did she go? What happened when her heart finally stopped beating? Was she still a person even if she was unrecognizable?

These are not abstract questions for some ethics class in some university. This is real life and real people with real names and real histories who sit among us and walk among us today. People we know and love. And at the heart of all these questions is this: Where is God in this?

Let's go back to talking about my grandmother. Her name is Doris, by the way. She was born in Minnesota, the second to last of some dozen kids to Swedish immigrants around the turn of the last century. Apparently Nellie, my great grandmother, was a no-nonsense, strong willed woman and Augustus, my great grandfather, a drunk. My favorite story about my grandmother is about the day she graduated from high school. Nellie met her at the door with a brand new model-T loaded with the luggage of Nellie, Doris, and my grand-uncle and baby of the family and new driver of the new car, Harry - and the engine running ready to go. Nellie had decided it was time for her and the two youngest children to head out to Montana.  Now this was 1916 when there weren't really any roads between Minnesota and Montana, but that's another day's story.

 The story I like the best comes next: 16 year old Doris says fine and goes in, changes her clothes and comes back out in blue jeans and a man's shirt. Nellie hits the ceiling - Doris digs in - and a fierce argument breaks out until a compromise is reached. Doris wears her blue jeans underneath her dress. I come from a family of stubborn Swedes.

One of the reasons why I like this story is the way it places me, one of her grand-daughters who can also be very stubborn and also prefers blue jeans to dresses, the way it places me in the context of a larger story of my family. Because I can remember this story, I can say, "This is a part of who I am." That's one of the problems of Altzheimers, and other diseases of memory. People lose their context. My grandmother lost track of the knowledge that one day she went toe to toe with her mother and won, mostly. On the trip she took, there was no road so they followed fence lines. Once they were in the middle of buffaloes. Once a group of Native Americans rode up to them on horses, surrounded them, and then allowed their car to pass. All of this and more told my grandmother that she was a survivor, and she lost that self-knowledge when she became ill.

It would be nice if we could just reload the memory when it starts to fail - like booting up a computer. Every time the wetware starts to get a little scrambled we could hit the reset button and regain clarity. I think that's part of the reason we invented writing;  that's a form of memory. Our Bible is hard copy memory, it’s the recorded human memory of God at work in human lives and it’s there for generation to generation to read and refresh our memory of how God is at work in our lives. When I read scripture I have context for the idea that God is calling me to preach - it lets me sit in the story and find a part of myself there as well as here. I can read Mark or Romans and say, "This is a part of who I am."

But memory doesn't always hold, no matter how many times we read the Bible or are told that we were just served dinner twenty minutes ago. It's a strange world every day for people dealing with memory loss. They know something isn't right, but they don't know what it is. They still have feelings, but they don't have the history that helps them temper these emotions. There is a woman I met at Novato Hospital when I was doing my chaplaincy. She knew her daughter was coming, but she didn't know when. Any minute now, late even. She wanted me to call her daughter and ask, "Where are you? Why aren't you here yet?" For her, every moment of that day was lost to the anxiety one feels when one approaches an event filled with strangers - like that moment when you're on the way to summer camp, or moving into the dorms your freshman year and you don’t know anyone yet.

When we lose a foot or an eye, there are ways to function with compensation. There are prosthetics and equipment, things we can use to help us continue to live independently in our new body, but there are no such tools to support independent living for those who suffer memory loss. These people are forced to enter a phase of life perhaps the most dreaded in this intensely individualistic culture, not just dependence on others for even the most basic self-care such as bathing and toilet, but dependence even for identity.

My grandmother scared me. I didn't know how to talk to her, and what she said to me didn't make sense. I was embarrassed, uncertain, and awkward. I was also in my late teens with little explanation of what to expect when being in her presence. I very quickly wanted to be someplace else. It no longer seemed to matter if I was in her presence or not, the relationship we had, which - like most human to human relationships - was built upon both of us being able to recognize each other  - the relationship we had was gone. She lived for another ten years but I did not visit her again. Not only was she two and half hours and a mountain range away, it seemed better to preserve the memory of who she was rather than deal with the person she had become. This was an attitude shared by my family, including my father - her first born son. I had no idea of how much she needed me and the rest of my family nor do I know how much I could have received from a relationship of presence even in the face of absence.

Fortunately, God doesn't have any problems with being recognized or not. God doesn’t stay away in order to preserve a memory of our dignity. God is intensely interested in us right now, no matter what our shape or condition. God loves truly unconditionally and without fear. God's desire to be in relationship with us is not dependent on our being able to respond.  

I’m going to say that again, for it’s really hard for people like us to truly hear this message:  There is nothing we can do or not do that will separate us from God's loving grace and presence. It’s one of the reasons why we are okay with infant baptism: we do not require that an infant or an adult be able to cognitively recognize and verbalize their response to God, in order for us to accept that child or adult into God's beloved community. God loves us in all our conditions of existence and I believe that God was with my Grandmother even when she could no longer sense God's presence with her.

One of the mistakes we made was that we stopped valuing the person my Grandmother had become. My grandmother had not gone away, she was still there, sitting right there in front of me. She was still fully human, with feelings and senses even if those feelings and the information her senses gathered didn't present a comprehendible story any longer.

We are not ethereal souls leasing space in a temporary body; we are made and we are shaped by how we experience the world in our skin, our flesh, our hands, our eyes, our mouth, our smell and our ears. This is how God made us, and this is how we will continue after death. I believe there is a bodily resurrection yet ahead of us, a restoration to wholeness for all of God's beloved creation - but a wholeness that incorporates and makes use of our wounds. Jesus walked among the disciples and showed them his hands, his feet, even the slice in his side. Thomas touched that place and found out that while it existed, it did not matter to Jesus' ability to be present with him and the rest of the disciples.

This woman was still Doris Larsen Kitts Holmes, she was still the young girl who wore blue jeans underneath her long skirts on her way out to Montana - she was still the woman who took care of three children during a difficult marriage and times of separation, who taught school, who played the drums and rode a three wheeled bicycle in her daily errands around town. None of these facts changed even if she could not remember them for herself. She was still the woman who made these incredible cookies, even if her fingers no longer remembered how to shape the dough. There will yet come a time, if it has not yet happened in some way unrecognizable to us, when my grandmother will return to making those cookies, to riding that bike, to playing those drums.  There will yet be a time, if it has not come already, when my grandmother will share in the physical resurrection of God's good and whole creation.

And in that time in between, my Grandmother remains a person, a child of God, someone of value to God and to us, her family. My father remained committed to her care. He might have even gone to see her; to tell you the truth I can’t remember. I know I didn’t. Somewhere, we made a decision that was supposed to protect me and my brother, and I kept to that decision not knowing what I was missing. I buried her prematurely.

I know that in a post-enlightenment society and theology, we are supposed to let go of what seems impossible and call it metaphor - for I used to stand there in that ambiguous place that tried not to promise "false" hope, but I have come to believe that this is not a lie, but it is God's promised truth. Who we are is as irrevocably tied to our physical self as our spiritual self, and we become something entirely different if we go on without seeing and feeling sunlight on an early spring afternoon, or tasting salmon hot off a summer barbeque. My grandmother is restored. I will be restored. You will be restored. Whom you love will be restored. This is how God made us. This is how God will reclaim us. I tell you this is true. This is God's promise.

I can not tell you why my grandmother walked through Alzheimer's. I don't believe that it was God's will that Doris should lose so much of herself. We are in the in between time, the time between the arrival of the Good News, Jesus Christ; and the consummation of God's created order as God would have it be. In this middle there is chaos, and free will which allows all of God's creation to choose against what God would have happen.  There is this broken place we see over and over again as great tsunami waves of water, and in drivers of cars, good people, who look away for just a moment. My grandmother got caught in one of those broken places, just as we all get caught sooner or later in one broken place or another.

I do know this - God sends us angels and messengers, signs of God's love for us and God's never ending concern for each one of us.

We say community is more important than individualism. We say it is more important to worship together than separately - for it is in community that we experience God's gift of Holy Spirit. It is not enough to worship God during a nice walk through Muir Woods, as wonderful and as true as that experience of God is. It is necessary to come together and to place at the center of our worship the collective memory of over 3000 years worth of human experience of God and this Bible, and it is necessary that we teach it to ourselves and our children and our grandchildren, so that we can experience God's promised presence in the community's reading and the community's hearing of words that become - with the presence of Holy Spirit - The Word among us.

In community we build memories of each other that help us to know who we are, to ourselves to each other and to God. We hold each other's faith journey, for we have been each other's companions. And when one of us starts to slip away from knowing these things, we can hold their memories for them. Because we live in community, we are called to go to the ones who do not remember us and say to them; every day, every hour, we need to say, "I remember you. You are safe here. You are loved here. We hold your life in our own lives."

God has sent us to each other. We cannot quit our connection with each other just because it is not met with mutual recognition or because we are afraid. This is how God works; this is how God is present with us in flesh and bone. We are the angels, the messengers God sends to each of us. And fear of death or loss of self or grief is not a good enough reason to turn from God's call. God only needs our "yes, I will go" and God will equip us for our call.

My Grandmother is dead and buried for sixteen years now. What is done is done and what wasn't done is forgiven and made whole and belongs to God. But women and men, people known to us and beloved by us walk among us today, this morning, and we can see the fog of Alzheimer’s and other forms of memory loss thickening around them.

My brothers and sisters of St. Johns, we are called to remember them and their loved ones. We are called not to turn our face away in fear or embarrassment or grief but to come alongside them and hold their memories for them. We are called to greet them by name and tell them, every day, that they are known to us and we love them. As time passes, their ability to hear us will fade into that fog but our call remains, our call to be faithful to one another just as God is faithful with us.

God will grant us what we need for this task as God grants in all that God asks of us. God's promise in all things is this: Do not be afraid, for I am with you and you are mine.

Listen, hear the good news!  God never forgets.