All of us have a powerful need to be remembered and will do almost anything to make sure we are remembered. We want to be remembered; we want somebody to remember those significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, and we will drop hints and leave calendars lying around and do everything we can to help them remember. We want to be remembered.
Last week I finally remembered someone. I try not to miss the birthdays of our church staff, but I missed one by a few days. And although she is far too gracious to admit it, I would not be at all surprised to learn that Mrs. Bishop felt just a tiny bit better when she got that card that said, "Better late than never." Sorry about that! You are remembered. All of us want to be remembered.
In order to be remembered, we will erect tombstones and engrave our names in marble off there in a cemetery, where few will come to see it, but at least it feels timeless. It feels as though we are being remembered.
But even that is not really enough, you know. This city is full of monuments and memorials, and a good many of them are designed for us to remember people we would otherwise know nothing about.
Who knows who Taraschenko was? I certainly don I t. I think you have to be Czechoslovakian to appreciate Taraschenko, and not many of you look like Czechs! But somebody wanted Taraschenko to be remembered and put up quite a monument for him at 23rd and Q Streets.
Probably nobody in this congregation except Walter Carolin knows much about the contributions of Samuel Ganpers, but he has a statue just off of Massachusetts Avenue. Organized labor wanted us to remember him.
And if anybody but Drs. Haynes and Nyanjom can tell me about a man named Hahnemann and about something called "homeopathic medicine", I will sit at your feet and learn. All I really know is that somebody threw up a monument to him down in Scott Circle, so that he would be remembered.
All of us would like to be remembered. The builder Nehemiah was no different. His humanity comes out in the memoirs he has written for us. His favorite and frequent prayer is, "Remember me, 0 God". A half dozen times this prayer escapes his lips, "Remember me, 0 God". In the middle of doing good things … in the midst of getting the wall of Jerusalem rebuilt ... Nehemiah is not much different from the rest of us. "Remember me, 0 God, for good".
That raises an interesting question. That makes us wonder what Nehemiah’s real motives were in getting the walls of Jerusalem rebuilt. Why would he go to the trouble of organizing this massive effort, when he could have stayed back in Persia, very comfortable? Was this wall just going to be a useless, expensive monument to Nehemiah’s overblown ego? Was this going to be something like William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon castle? Would this be like King Tut’ s pyramid? Why build this wall -- just to gain a monument?
Who profits from the building of this wall?
The story reported in Chapter 5, which leads Nehemiah to voice his prayer, "Remember me", will give us some insight.
I often find myself saying at funeral services that in the grand economy of God, no good thing is ever finally lost. In working with grieving people, one of the hopes that I hold out is that God remembers; God holds their loved one in His great heart; and God will use what each person was to build for the future. God remembers. Nehemiah’s prayer is answerable. God remembers.
But what must I do to create the kind of memory that I want God to have? Who must I be to be remembered of God? Nehemiah’s experience at the wall will tell us.
I
First, if I want to be remembered, I must leave behind a legacy of putting people and their needs first. I must leave behind a record of priorities for people, especially when I see people who are exploited, people who are injured, people who cannot help themselves.
If I want to be remembered, I must see to it that my legacy is a legacy of power to people and not profit for the powerful.
The people interrupted the building of the wall one day and exploded in pain. They had taken it up to here, and they just vomited it all out for Nehemiah. "We can’t keep on like this. We can’t keep working on the wall when we are starving. And, Nehemiah, the reason we are starving is that sane of the nobles and officials here in Jerusalem are foreclosing on the collateral we gave them for loans. We have no money, no bread, no homes, nothing."
"And more than that, Nehemiah, they are enslaving our sons and our daughters. We pledged our children’s labor in return for the loans, and now they are about to work our children to death. We can’t take it any more, Nehemiah. We are hurting and we are hungry, and we can’t build the wall with this going on."
Nehemiah heard all of that and took action. He did not waste a minute. For him the wall was not as important as these wounded people. He might have said, "Let’s get the wall built and then I’ll help". He might have reminded them that they had promised their labor and that they had to keep that promise. But he did not. Nehemiah saw that people take precedence over projects, that hurting humanity is more important than bricks and mortar.
And so with energy and with anger, with fervor and with faith, Nehemiah confronted the wealthy landowners and made them back down. He demanded that they give back the land; he insisted that they free the indentured children of their brothers and sisters. He set people ahead of his pet project and thus earned a legacy worth remembering.
Just as an aside, I know I’m not supposed to make political statements from this pulpit, but I do rather wish we had a Nehemiah in the White House standing up to the oil companies right now, don’t you1? Profits so often come before people. But not in the grand economy of God.
We have been talking a little about our own building project, as you know. We’ve been thinking, some of us, about what needs to be done with these properties we have here. It would be terribly easy to get involved in creating something that would, in the end, exploit people instead of help them. But if we want to be remembered by our God, we need to be sure that we put people as our preference, persons as our priority.
It would be terribly easy just to take money out of this community without putting anything back. It would be terribly easy to look at our properties and say, "How can we make the most money from these? How can we earn big rents, how can we reap rich revenues?" But that would, you see, exploit the people. That would be taking from the people rather than giving to them.
We don’t want to do that if we are going to be remembered for good by our God. We want to stand with Nehemiah, who cared more for what happened to the people than for what happened to his wall. And that’s why we have begun to talk about taking these houses and using these properties for ministries of compassion. Whether we repair the houses or whether we replace them with a new structure -- and repair is looking more and more unlikely -- the walls be build must profit the needy and the defenseless.
Some of us are talking about a facility for the elderly. Some of us are thinking about the mentally ill. Still others are investigating young people just out of foster care. One or two of us have thought about hospitality for the families of the chronically ill. I have mentioned the prospect of a children’s center. And there is the missionary residence we have been working toward for so long. These things would create a memory for us in this community. These things put a priority on people.
As we, like Nehemiah, build some walls, "Who profits from these walls?" One answer can be, "Needy people profit; defenseless people profit; persons profit from these walls we build." If we want to be remembered, we will create a legacy of priority for the needs of people.
II
Second, if we want to be remembered by our God, we will create a legacy of unselfishness, a legacy of caring no matter what the personal cost to ourselves may be. If we want to be remembered by our God, we will work out of a personal discipline of sacrificial, consistent giving.
After Nehemiah finished dealing with the nobles and their loan-gouging, Nehemiah decided to deal with the temptation he felt in his own heart. Nehemiah felt he wanted to set an example of unselfishness. He needed for people to see that he was not on the take. And so he tells us that he would not accept the food allowance that was due him as governor. For twelve years he persisted in this discipline -- even though this money, this allowance was his due, he knew that it meant a tax burden on the people, he knew that it set him apart from the people, and he would not accept it.
Oh, God give us today more persons like Nehemiah, who will serve rather than be served, who will prefer to share rather than to shear the sheep! God give us persons more concerned about what they can give away than what they can keep! Nehemiah carved out a legacy of unselfishness and sacrifice, and for this God will remember him.
This thing about being remembered -- I find it curious that so many people think that they will be remembered if they take and take and keep and keep. Just a whole lot of us think that if we can store up money and buy up property and consume conspicuously, we’ll be somebody, and we’ll be remembered and appreciated.
But I’ll tell you that the cemeteries are populated with a host of folks who piled up estates that other people inherited. But those who inherited the money fought about it and then forgot all about where it came from!
And I’ll tell you that the courts are filled with greedy men who ran savings and loans and banks into the ground in order to take all they could, often perfectly legal, but who will now be remembered not for their financial prestige but for their awesome greed.
For God to remember us for good, we need to come at life in the way Nehemiah did .. for twelve years I did not eat the food allowance of the governor .. I did not keep or take what was legally mine .. but I gave. I gave.
For whom shall we remodel this building? For whom shall we reshape these properties? We could just do it for ourselves. After all, it’s our church, isn’t it? Why not fix it up for our own comfort? Why not make it a nice fortress for ourselves?
I say no. I say no. I say that if we build only what we want, we will deserve to die and be forgotten. But if we build unselfishly, if we give sacrificially, if we build for the glory of God and for the sake of the people of God, then He will remember us. Then He will bless us.
In the west end of Louisville, Kentucky, there was a neighborhood, once heavily German, where Fenner Memorial Lutheran Church was built. It was a massive place, with rich mahogany paneling and a magnificent pipe organ. But all of that was built in the 20’s, and by the 60’s the Germans had left and others had taken their place, others who seemed not to be impressed with mahogany paneling and a magnificent organ and scattered souls singing the Lutheran liturgy. The trustees got worried about the property, because vandals were beginning to attack -- a window here, some grafitti there. And they responded by locking up the place as tight as a drum.
Well, the community reacted badly. For every lock put on the fence, there was someone who could pick it and get in. For every bar attached to a precious stained glass window, there was someone who could saw it off. The building was a shambles.
A young man I had grown up with was called as the Pastor. And the first thing he did was to persuade the trustees to throw away the padlocks and the bars and to throw open the building to the public. Every day, every night – come on in, it’s for you out there. Guess what? The vandalism stopped. The destruction went away. Once the community found that the church could be unselfish and sacrificial, all the anger went away.
Who profits from this wall? We ourselves will profit spiritually, if we can be unselfish. We ourselves will profit as a people of God, if we can be self-giving. We will be remembered by our God, if we create a legacy of care for people and if we operate from a legacy of unselfishness.
III
But I believe, finally, that most of all we will be remembered by our God if we spend our energies working to create something that will continue for good after we are gone. I believe that the prayer, "Remember me, O God" is best answered when we take the long look and create something that will benefit generations yet to come rather than getting bogged down in the here and now.
I’m afraid that if I had been Nehemiah, I would have gotten so caught up in the needs of the people right then and there that I would have postponed any more work on the wall. I’m afraid that if I had been in Nehemiah’s shoes, I would have lost sight of the forest for having to tend the trees.
But not so Nehemiah. Not God’s master builder. For he tells us that after he had disposed of the loan-gouging problem, and after he had set the example of sacrificial giving himself, he tells us, "I held to the work on this wall." He “held to the work on this wall". He did not lose sight of what he was about. He kept his vision alive. He chose to labor for the future rather than to get bogged down in the present. He elected to do something that would benefit tomorrow rather than just take care of today.
To my mind, there is nothing finer and nothing more inspiring than the thought that we might build here for a future many of us will never see. Two generations ago, about 70 years, some far-sighted men and women built this building; one generation ago, about 40 years ago, others build our education space. It is time for our generation to build for the next generation. But if we want to be remembered by our God as His kind of people, then we will be dedicated to building for those whose names we may never know. We will create a future for persons we may never see this side of heaven. But we will be remembered.
One of our oldest members – and I am quite sure he does not want me to mention his name -- but I can assure you that he has seen several more years than all of us here – one of our oldest members sent me a check this spring and asked that it be placed in our scholarship fund. It was an exceptionally generous check -- and I could not help but think, "How wonderful!" This man will likely not live long enough to see many of the rewards in our young people. He will probably not even know the young people who are being assisted. But he will be remembered by our God; he will be remembered by God’s people, because he is investing in the future.
We as the church of the living God are not here for ourselves. We are here for the world around us. We are not here to make ourselves comfortable or to entertain ourselves or to create a mutual admiration society. We are here to redeem a lost world, we are to heal hurting people, we are here, most of all, simply to be available for whatever our God wants to do with our future. And as we build, if we will build so that something continues here for the Kingdom, something solid, something with a witness, something that serves, then our God will remember us.
Who profits from these walls? The future does. A coming generation does. Young people do. Parents do and children do. The city profits, the community profits. And yes, the Kingdom profits if we build toward the future and do not lose sight of what we are all about.
Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar declaims, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. I say no to that! I say no to that! I say no, God’s builder Nehemiah says no -- "Remember" "Remember for my good, O my God, all that I have done for this people."
